Teacher 1: The Common Core highlights that every teacher is a reading and writing teacher in their discipline. I think this idea is important in combination with the best practices for content area learning. My main interest in this is based on helping students who struggle to learn to read in early grade levels, and, as a result, can quickly get behind when "reading to learn" in the secondary grades.

Teacher 2: What is the place of disciplinary literacy in elementary school? I am also aware of the work of Nell Duke and the importance of informational text with young children as well as the significance of teaching academic vocabulary and scaffolding its use by the children.

 Teacher 3: I very much like your explanation of Content Literacy vs. Disciplinary Literacy. With this in mind, how would you best support kindergarten-first grade  teachers in the area of Disciplinary Literacy? Non-fiction informational texts, read alouds, inquiries, academic vocabulary, learning to read charts, photos etc. ...The ways to scaffold Disciplinary Literacy are much more clear to me as the children move up the grades.

 Teacher 4: What would you say are some current best practices for secondary content area literacy?

Shanahan responds:

One hears the term disciplinary literacy a lot these days. That’s because the Common Core standards (CCSS) address the teaching of disciplinary literacy (as do non-CCSS states like Texas and Indiana).

Of course, the term is often misused. Disciplinary literacy is based upon the idea that literacy and text are specialized, and even unique, across the disciplines. Historians engage in very different approaches to reading than mathematicians do, for instance. Similarly, even those who know little about math or literature can easily distinguish as science text from a literary one.

Fundamentally, because each field of study has its own purposes, its own kinds of evidence, and its own style of critique, each will produce different texts, and reading those different kinds of texts are going to require some different reading strategies. Scientists spend a lot of time comparing data presentation devices with each other and with prose, while literary types strive to make sense of theme, characterization, and style.

The idea of teaching disciplinary literacy is quite different from the long promoted content area literacy teaching. The latter has often championed the disciplinary literacy notion, but the result has been an emphasis on general comprehension skills and study skills, rather than apprenticing young readers into reading like disciplinary experts. K-W-L, three-level guides, Frayer model, 4-squares, etc. are all great teaching tools—they can enhance kids learning from text, but you are unlikely to find chemists or historians who use those approaches in their work. Thus, content area reading aims to build better students, while disciplinary literacy tries to get them to grasp the ways literacy is used to create, disseminate, and critique information in the various disciplines.

This can get pretty confusing. Educators have a tendency to latch onto new terms without developing much of an understanding of them. These days many teachers think disciplinary literacy is just the cool new term for content area reading. Even some “scholars” are playing this game; grabbing onto family resemblances and seeing identical twins.

For example, Cyndie Shanahan and I studied chemists and learned the key information that they looked for when reading chemistry text and some of the techniques they used for making sense of that information. They even provided us with cogent explanations of why their approaches were beneficial, given the purposes of their inquiry and the nature of their texts.

We turned that into a method that chemistry students could use to summarize information in a chemistry-centric way. Some “scholars” decided such charting made disciplinary literacy the same as content area reading (since it often recommends charts, too), ignoring that the categories of disciplinary-specific information were the essential element, and not the piece of paper on which the kids were recording the information (Dunkerly-Bean & Bean, 2017).

Not surprisingly, since disciplinary literacy is a relatively new thing for schools, there is a flood of questions about it. And, because the research is lagging classroom demand, there is only a trickle of research-based answers to provide. Much of what O will write here will be based on my own personal experiences (teaching and co-teaching middle school and high school classes in various disciplines).

So what are the big issues in implementing disciplinary literacy?

First, reading has to be a big part of students’ disciplinary classes. I can’t think of anything more fundamental. If there are not real reasons to read in these classrooms, then there is no reason to teach disciplinary literacy or for kids to try to learn it. I do not believe that teachers of biology, algebra, American History, British Literature, economics, or any other subject in the curriculum should be deterred from teaching their subject matter. But part of that teaching should come through text.

What too many teachers do is to seek ways to avoid text. A biology textbook is hard to read, 15-year-olds struggle with it, so teachers present the pertinent information some other way: Powerpoint lectures, dumbed-down study sheets, etc. Those teachers often tell me that students have the option of reading—though why they would, given that all the test answers are provided fully digested, I can’t imagine.

Even math classes should include reading. I don’t mean story problems, though they have their place. I mean that kids should be reading theorems, problem explanations, formulas, proofs, and whatever mathematical information is appropriate. “But my students aren’t good readers?” I get it… and, yet, it is hard to see how avoiding math reading could possibly improve that situation.

In the elementary grades, making sure that kids are reading about geography, economics, history, culture, biography, environmental science, life science, physical science, music, art, and current events is really important. Building kids’ stores of knowledge in those areas and giving them practice dealing with that kind of language and content is imperative. Stories are great, but a narrow diet of stories alone can make you sick.

Second, if students are to read, there needs to be text… disciplinary appropriate text. That means in a history class it is essential students be given opportunities to pore over conflicting evidence and alternative points of view. That doesn’t mean that history textbooks have no place, only that students need chances to evaluate primary and secondary texts, too.

Science reading is less about alternative perspectives and more about accurate information carefully grounded in the observations and experiments that identified it. Accordingly, science information tends to be expressed in a multiplicity of forms (e.g., prose, tables, charts, formulae, photos), often within the same account—in part this is done because of the inadequacy of language to precisely summarize findings.

Students need opportunities to work with these alternative forms and to see more than science textbooks (not for alternative information, but to see how scientists report their findings). I taught a group of high-schoolers to read Watson & Crick’s landmark report of their discovery of the structure of DNA. Man it was tough slogging—for them and for me, but we got there, and the kids were enthusiastic about results (they asked their real teacher if they could do more of that).

A counter-example. Last year, I was co-teaching some math classes. The math textbook had been written purposely to place as little reading demand on students as possible. The math book was largely a collection of math problems, without explanation (the teachers capably provided that). That book not only failed to provide kids with opportunities to read math, but the parents hated it because if their children didn’t understand the math, they couldn’t help them to figure it out.  

Elementary textbooks and tradebooks often report content information, but they rarely do so from a disciplinary perspective. Historical accounts tend to tell stories rather than revealing controversies, disagreements, or the use of evidence. Science accounts often provide terrific explanations of scientific phenomena, but without much revelation of how this information came into being. And, how often are younger children exposed to literary criticism as opposed to literature.

My point isn’t necessarily that such texts should be included in the elementary curriculum, but if they aren’t then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to engage them in disciplinary approaches. Those only make sense when one is reading works that have a definite disciplinary cast or when one is engaged in disciplinary inquiry that includes reading. Until such texts become available—and that could be earlier, but often isn’t until middle school—satisfy yourself with exposing students to lots of informational texts and the knowledge they represent.

Third, disciplinary classes should have a deep dedication to imparting the content of the subjects to students, including information about the nature of inquiry in those fields. What does it mean to work as a historian, scientist, geographer, mathematician, or literary critic? What do they read and why? How do they report their results? What constitutes evidence in their field of study? What does criticism look like?

 Some curriculum experts believe that means students have to be engaged in inquiry themselves in the various fields. I like that idea, and it often makes sense. Labs are common in high school sciences, though the lab reporting too often seems distant from how scientists report their findings. In history classes, it has become much more common to see students reading text sets that expose them to conflicting accounts (e.g., History Scene Investigations), so kids can weigh in on contested issues in history.

But inquiry is not without problems (I’ve yet to see a text set that shows students how historians take into account the economic or geographic antecedents of historical events).

Inquiry can be cumbersome and time consuming; it always requires a wise balance of content coverage and the appreciations to be derived from hands-on investigation. And, there are disciplines that simply aren’t amenable to inquiry—math is particularly knotty in this regard (making me wonder if math isn’t different than the other disciplines in that having students acting like nascent mathematicians might not have the same payoffs as trying to read like scientists or literary critics).

In the elementary school, it makes great sense to emphasize learning as well, and there will be times when inquiry is the way to go. (There might be wonderful benefits for writing reports of various types, but such reports tend not to be disciplinary by nature—a report on photosynthesis written by a fourth-grader is going to be more about finding facts in various sources than about reporting scientific information in the way a scientist would).         

However, again, that doesn’t mean there is no place for such work in an elementary classroom. Engaging students in trying to solve various kinds of quantitative problems and writing about these explorations makes a lot of sense. Having kids observing some natural phenomenon or conducting an experiment and reading about the phenomenon understudy to combine this information coherently could be very powerful.

The point is that content and inquiry are the point—and that disciplinary literacy should emanate from the demands of that content and inquiry. There will definitely be more opportunities at some levels than at others.

One of the questions asked specifically about my colleague Dick Allington, since he has published articles and chapters saying that teaching kids with challenging text is a dumb idea. And, a couple of others queries referred to the advertising copy from Teachers College Press (TCP) about their programs. Both Dick and TCP threw the R-word (research) around quite a bit, but neither actually managed to marshal research support for their claims, which means that the instructional level, after 71 years, still remains unsubstantiated.

           What I’m referring to is the long-held belief that kids learn more when they are matched to texts in particular ways. Texts can be neither too hard, nor too easy, or learning is kaput. At least that has been the claim. It sounded good to me as a teacher, and I spent a lot of time testing kids to find out which books they could learn from, and trying to prevent their contact with others.

           According to proponents of the instructional level, if a text is too easy, there will be nothing to learn. Let’s face it, if a reader already knows all the words in a text, and can answer all of the questions already with no teacher support, it wouldn’t seem to provide much learning opportunity. Surprisingly, however, early investigations found just the opposite—the less there was to learn from a book, the greater progress the students seem to make. This was so obviously wrong, that the researchers just made up the criteria separating the independent and instructional levels.

           Likewise, the theory holds out the possibility that some texts can be too hard. In other words, the more there would be to learn in a text, the less the students would be able to learn from it.

           But what is too easy and what is too hard?

           Back in the 1940s, Emmett Betts, reading authority extraordinaire, reported on a research study completed by one of his students. He claimed that the study showed that if you matched kids to text using the criteria he proposed (95-98% word reading accuracy and 75-89% reading comprehension), kids learned more.

           Unfortunately, no such a study was done. Betts sort of just made up the numbers and teachers and professors have rapturously clung to them ever since. Generation after generation of teachers has been told teaching kids at these levels improves learning.  (Though, due to Common Core, at least some programs have been advancing—arbitrarily—new criteria, perhaps in hopes of matching more students to books at the required levels.)

           Over the past decade or so, several researchers have realized that this widely recommended practice is the educational equivalent of fake news, and have started reporting studies on its effectiveness. And, the instructional level has not done well; it either has made no difference—that is the kids taught from grade level materials do as well as those at an instructional level—or the instructional level placements have led to less learning. Instructional level placements have the tendency to limit kids’ exposure to the linguistic and textual features that they don’t yet know how to negotiate; the practice reduces their opportunity to learn. The kids not so protected, often do better.

           It still makes sense to start kids out with relatively easy texts when they are in K-1, since they have to learn to decode. Beginning reading texts should have enough repetition and should provide kids lots of exposure to the most frequent and straightforward spelling patterns in our language. But, once that hurdle is overcome, it makes no sense to teach everybody as if they were 5-years-old. The studies are pretty clear that from a second-grade reading level on, kids can learn plenty when taught with more challenging texts.

           Here are some related questions that have been asked of me over the past 2-3 weeks:

But my kids are learning to read and they have for years. Why change now?

           Because of the opportunity cost; your students could do even better. Students often tell me that they hate reading specifically because they always get placed in what they call the “stupid kid books.” If kids can learn as much or more from the grade level texts—and they can—we should be giving them opportunities to read the texts that are more at their intellectual levels and that match their age-level interests.

Isn’t it true that the studies in which the kids did better varied not just the book levels, but how the students were taught?

           Yes, that is true, and instructional level proponents have raised that as a complaint about these studies. However, no one is claiming that students will just learn more from harder books. As students, confront greater amounts of challenge the teaching demands go up. One suspects that part of the popularity of the instructional level idea is that the teacher doesn't have to do as much (since the kids start out knowing almost all the words and can read the texts with high comprehension with no teacher support).

What about older kids who are still “beginning readers?”

           Anyone—at whatever age level—who is just starting to learn to read, is still going to need to master decoding. Teaching such older students with more demanding texts will just make it harder to master the relations between spelling and pronunciation. Definitely stay with relatively easy books with older readers who are reading at a kindergarten or first-grade level.

Are you saying no more small group teaching?

           No, small group teaching is fine, unless the purpose of that grouping is to teach students with different levels of books. In fact, I think providing small group teaching to students when they are in the harder materials makes greater sense than how we tend to do it now (which is to put kids in easier materials when they work closely with the teacher—I’d do the opposite).

So you don’t believe in differentiation?

           I believe in differentiation, but I don’t believe that means placing kids in different levels of books. There is a large and growing body of research that suggests that we could more profitably vary the amount and type of scaffolding for the needs of different students.  

Dick Allington has admitted that some studies do show that kids can learn more from more challenging texts, but that the scaffolding in these studies is simply too demanding for the average teacher. What do you think?

           Dick was referring to studies done by Alyssa Morgan and Melanie Kuhn (and their colleagues). In both, the frustration level placements led to more learning than the instructional level ones. In the Morgan study, she used paired reading, and the scaffolding was provided by untrained 7-year-olds (though they were the relatively better readers). I suspect most teachers can scaffold as well as a second-grader, and don’t find paired reading interventions to be beyond most teachers’ skills levels. I asked Melanie Kuhn directly about this criticism. She was surprised. Teachers in the original study had so easily used their teaching routines that Kuhn and company decided to collect data for an additional year. I reject the idea that only the most elite teachers can provide this kind of teaching.

So you totally reject the instructional level idea for anyone but beginners?

           No, I’ve come to believe that the instructional level would be a great goal to aim at for at the completion of a lesson. If, when you are finishing up with a text, the kids know 75% or more of the ideas and can read 95% or more of the words, then you have done a terrific job. One of Linnea Ehri’s studies found that the kids who did best ended up with 98% accuracy, for instance. Of course, if you keep starting with texts at those levels, then you would have little to teach. Start kids out with complex texts that they cannot read successfully; then teach them to read those texts well.

Should all the texts that we teach from be at the levels that Common Core set?

           No, I would argue (based on very little direct evidence—so I’m stretching a bit here) that students should read several texts across their school days and school years. This reading should vary greatly in difficulty, from relatively easy texts that would afford students extensive reads with little teacher support, to very demanding texts that could only be accomplished successfully with a great deal of rereading and teacher scaffolding. I believe that much is learned from that kind of varied practice.

         My take on this controversy is this: it is respectful, responsible, and wise to try to get back to “the author’s intended meaning.” That means we need not only to think about what a text says, but what we thought the author intended to mean. For example, the word “plastic” has a very clear meaning these days. In my dictionary, the number one definition is “a synthetic material made from organic polymers.” However, if I’m reading a text from the 1800s, and the author uses the word plastic, I’d better try to provide a different interpretation—one more in line with the author’s intended meaning. It is polite to try to honor the author’s meaning—rather than insensitively imposing our own interpretation on a text.

         But it is equally wise to recognize that once a text is out in the world, it must stand on its own. We need to be able to interpret texts based on nothing more than the words in the text. No, we are not going to call Mark Twain to find out why Huck throws the snake in the shed. (I don’t even have his phone number). No, we are not going to read a biography of Daniel Webster to make sense of his “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable” speech (I don’t have that kind of time). And, no, we are not going to review the reporter’s notes to grasp the meaning of her latest New York Times article (it might be nice to have all of an author’s work product, but author’s are loathe to provide that).

         So how do we teach students to be ethical readers—readers who try to respect what a text leads them to assume to be the author’s meaning? Initially, young children don’t even know that books have authors, just like they don’t know that somebody built their house, crafted their furniture, or sewed their teddy bears. The world is just there… your mother brings it home or you get it at a store.

         Later, usually by kindergarten or first-grade, kids know there are authors—but they don’t grasp that these authors have communicative intentions. They believe authors to be a rather egocentric lot, writing only to satisfy their own interests or to get money. However, the authors that they imagine neither try to entertain us or to instigate us. (Young children’s writing often has this same feature; they make text objects to gift someone, much like their drawings and picked dandelions—the gifting of the object is the meaningful part).

         By middle school, even the worst of readers seems to be aware of authors’ ulterior motives; that they try to affect us through their words on the page. Sadly, this insight appears to result mainly from children’s social development rather than from literacy teaching—since the concept of author and the role authors play in the interpretation of text is rarely the focus of K-12 teaching.

         Why should we care about this aspect of reading, since it has rarely been taught or tested? I have long believed that, at least for entire classes of texts, our ability to read critically is closely connected to an awareness of the fallibility of human beings and the idea that authors try to influence us. (Remember Moses bringing the tablets down off the mountain. The first question he was asked was, “Who wrote those?” Think about it. It matters.)

         Furthermore, writers often try to convey a persona through their texts, and interpreting this projected personality is an important part of the reading experience.

Some things that can help children to develop a sense of author

(1) Expose children to multiple books by the same author. Research shows that 5-year-olds can recognize a Dr. Seuss at 20 yards. As children grow up, expose them to more subtle exemplars. I love “author study” by second or third grade. Having groups of children reading multiple books by the same author, and trying to find continuities (e.g., content, style, diction, structure) across the texts.

(2) My research had children trying to re-create a persona based only on a text. Children would try to compose biographies of the authors they imagined from the authors’ texts. I hid the names, so they had to decide if a writer was man or woman, black or white, young or old, and they had to use text information—including the author’s style—as evidence for their suppositions. It is a great assignment.

(3) Students need to be authors. Have them write and have the other children respond to these writings. Readers benefit from having been writers. They start to understand the limits and the power of writing. Writing, reading the writing of close up authors, responding to the writing of others, having others respond to your own writing—those all help build the concept.

(4)  Make authors visible. Tell kids who wrote a text. Make that a question during reading lessons. Include author in your inferential questions. “The author doesn’t tell you what Red Riding Hood was thinking when she met the wolf, but what does the author want you to think she was thinking? How do you know?"

(5) When your curriculum starts to include text sets in social studies (e.g., multiple primary and secondary documents), focus student attention on author intentions—why would an author say this? Why would another author tell something different? What were their goals? Why would the author write something else later? As Sam Wineburg has written, source/author-centered reading is essential to historical thinking.

           But as important as author-centered readings can be, they can get in the way of a reader giving a text a “close read”—that is, a read that depends upon the interpretation of the information on the page. If you believe Hemingway was a male chauvinist, then everything you read by Hemingway, including perhaps his grocery list, will scream chauvinism. Those readers who believe they already know what a text says, often impose their own bias and miss the actual message. It is a very different thing to identify an author’s ideology through a close analysis of what he or she has written, than to start with that conclusion.

           Of course, not all authors are as famous as Hemingway. What if the author isn’t a celebrity writer, then what? We might not start out knowing specific things about Patricia Smith or Joe Johnson, but we do start out knowing, in this case, which is a man and which is a woman. Many readers—even children—have biases around that. If I’ve decided that women don’t write about things that interest me, then I’ve already started to miss Ms. Smith's message. Other texts raise questions of authenticity… if I think this writer is white and he/she is writing about some event in the black community (or vice-versa), my guard may go up, shutting off a chance to understand.

           But what if you can’t be sure who wrote a text? Then you have no choice but to focus your attention on the words and punctuation and formatting—there is nowhere else to go. That happens sometimes, of course, but a more common experience is the one that we observed in scientists and mathematicians, who intentionally try to set the author aside to focus all of their critical judgment on the text itself. Again, I’d argue that we want our kids to be able to do that, too.

Setting the Author Aside

(1) To teach students to set aside the author, it is important to provide them with one-off reading experiences—focusing on texts that are not part of a series or that students can bring specific author knowledge to the text.

(2) Keep your questions and discussion focused on the text itself. Don’t worry about what you think the author meant, but focus on the key ideas and details in the text, the word choices and structures that provide clues to meaning, and the value and quality of what is on the page—without regard for other information.

(3) Give kids lots of experiences reading scientific and mathematical texts—texts not likely to be ideologically based or persona-focused.

(4) Focus on rereading as an interpretive process—reading one text over and over to figure it out, rather than trying to guess what the author may have intended (in close readings, there is no author, the author has no intentions, and even if there were an author with intentions, you can never know what they may be, so focus only on the texts).

(5) Minimize the amount of external information provided to kids--don't tell them what it is going to be about, don't reveal the author, don't review background knowledge.

(6) When students write do not provide generous readings. If something doesn't make sense, reveal to them the lack of logic or sense that you are confronting and then give them opportunities to revise.

-->

         If you believe that readers have an ethical or moral responsibility to try to understand other human beings, then author-centered reading is your plate. If you believe that children have to learn to be independent readers, able to grasp the meaning of a text without reliance on external information, then close reading is needed.

         I think readers need to know both how to satisfy this ethical imperative, and how to be powerful and independent. Meaning belongs neither to authors or readers--it is a constantly changing balance.

I’m often asked if the questions I publish here are “real.” That is, do teachers, really ask me these things? The questions definitely are real. Though they come to me in a variety of ways.

           Not long ago a colleague contacted me for my advice on a question she’d been asked. She was surprised to see that one show up on my blog. Other times, I might be giving a talk and a question comes from the audience. I remember it later and answer it again for you.

           This week’s “question” is less a query than a confluence of two recent experiences.

           First event: The Washington Post told the story of Sara Holbrook, an author, whose poetry is included in Texas’s state reading test. Ms. Holbrook was chagrined to find that she couldn’t answer all the questions about her own poems. Part of the problem was that one question was about the implications of the poem’s structure, but in printing the poem the publisher screwed up the formatting. One shouldn’t need the original author to fix that kind of mistake.

           The more interesting concern was with another question that asked about the meaning of a particular simile Ms. Holbrook had used. She thought there were multiple answers that could be acceptable and chided the test makers.

           I came across all this from a tweet from my good buddy, Kylene Beers (please don’t judge her for that). She posted it and various educators weighed in about the futility of testing. Despite my recent rant about how we misuse testing, I picked a fight, pointing out that in various interpretive communities, once a text is “published” the author has no more say in what it means than anyone else. Kylene’s followers evidently were not amused.

           Second event: I was working on a curriculum project, and I had to compose some stories to use in the lessons. My wife, Cyndie, was helping me and at some point we got in an argument over the meaning of one of the stories. She believed that it carried one theme and I thought another.

           After we had banged at each other for a while, she started laughing. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

           Her response: “I’m arguing with the author about what his story is suppose to mean.” Once she stopped laughing, she suggested that I write about this on my blog.

           The issue is this: who owns meaning and what does it matter who owns it if we are trying to teach kids to read and interpret texts?

           Many years ago, I studied kids’ conceptions of authors and their role in reading comprehension and text interpretation. In doing that work, I read a great deal of literary criticism, and was surprised to find not everyone was as excited as me about having readers think about authors. In fact, many literary critics thought it was a singularly foolish idea.

           The New Critics, the Post-Structuralists, the Communities of Meaning groups all rejected the author’s primacy. While some authorities (e.g., Louise Rosenblatt) seemed not so much aimed at banishing the author as treating him/her as a minor irrelevancy, others, like Michel Foucault, went so far as declaring the author to be dead (a position Foucault recanted later).

           My point isn’t that since many experts reject the importance of author in interpretation that we should too. I’m only pointing out that it is contested ground.

           In contrast to the anti-author group are those who champion the idea that readers must construct author persona from a text, or those, like E.D. Hirsch who have made the argument that readers are ethically responsible for trying to honor the author’s meaning—rather than simply constructing any meaning they might choose.

           There are at least a couple of ways of considering these arguments about meaning within reading instruction. One simple thing to do would be to pooh-pooh it all as trivial; we are talking about the interpretation of literature right. Does it really matter, in the whole mix of things, whether we think about authors or not?

           I can’t do that because we aren’t just (that is an ironic italicization) talking about literature. The world may not be disrupted much whether I grasp the true meaning that Robert Frost crafted into “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” but there are text interpretations that do matter materially. I remember Stanley Fish providing a seminar to Supreme Court Justices concerning the futility of trying to grasp the “original intent” of the Founders. Do laws mean what the words say or what the authors might have meant when they wrote those words?

           You might not care whether I think Frost’s poem is about death or Santa Claus, but you might care a lot about Justice Robert’s take on what the U. S. Constitution has to say about reproductive rights or gun control. Those issues turn on where the meaning resides—in the text, in the reader, or in the original author.

           I tend to fall on the conservative side of such arguments… that is, I tend to believe that authors try to communicate with readers, and that our job as readers is to try to figure out what the author meant to communicate. Like Hirsch, I see it as a matter of ethics. To turn someone’s words to your own purposes is very similar to using other people for your own purposes.

           Not only do I think thoughtful reading considers what an author was trying to convey, I believe that much of our ability to argue back with a text is bound up in our perception that the words represent another person; another fallible person with a point of view that may be wrong.

           I’m one of those readers who luxuriate in an author’s voice (when I read E. B. White, I slow to “hear” his flat, unemotional accent—a bit of New York, a bit of Maine).

           However, those things do not render me ignorant of the ultimate impossibility of ever grasping another person’s meaning with full certainty. Language is too imperfect for that.

           Doesn’t that argue for simply asking an author what she meant? Perhaps, but as Fish has pointed out, authors err; they change their minds; they forget; they have a subconscious; they have ulterior motives for nurturing or dispelling ambiguity. Maybe Ms. Holbrook doesn’t like tests and was willing to twist her original meaning to make a political point. Or, perhaps she had second thoughts about getting paid by a test company. Ultimately, you just can’t trust authors.

           I buy the ethical argument that we should try to honor an author’s words—considering not just multiple interpretations, but which one the author may have intended; it appeals to my sense of decency. But, I also accept the idea that multiple interpretations will usually be possible, and that once a work is shared, the author surrenders his or her authority over the “meaning” of the text. Now it belongs to all of us, including the people who make up test questions.

           Okay, that’s part one. Next time I’ll provide some practical ideas about how teachers may best enable this dual approach to interpretation: how to teach kids to be sensitive to authors and true to what those authors probably tried to mean; and, also, how to ignore an author, appropriately, when trying to develop one’s own interpretation.

           I not only can talk out of both sides of my mouth, I can teach that way.

Teacher question:

I truly want to help teachers strengthen their literacy instruction and students develop and strengthen their reading comprehension. I just viewed your online presentation on “How and How Not to Get Higher Test Scores” and I am intrigued. With only a few short months away from the testing frenzy as you can imagine administrators and teachers are in a panic

My goal is to get my 3rd grade students to navigate and comprehend texts more independently. Would you recommend that students analyze text features (titles, headings, and photograph with caption) to make a prediction about what they will be reading initially? Then have students engage in a partner reading of the text and then a silent reading of the text (build fluency) and then mark up the text with annotations (summarizing statements beside each subheading). I would then ask text-dependent questions such as, “what text structure does the author use to explain how caves are formed? How would you explain how the caves are formed? What is the difference between stalactites and stalagmites and how do the photograph and captions help us understand the differences between the two cave features? What point is the author trying to convey to his/her readers by including the ‘Spelunking Dangers” section and “Rules?” What evidence does the author include to support the ideas that spelunking is dangerous?

My problem is that I believe that I provide too much support to my students and it tends to enable them. I chunk texts up to promote self-monitoring and summarization but see that my students are having difficulties comprehending longer or multiple passages or texts.

Shanahan response:

Good question. If I were still teaching third grade, what would I do to get higher test scores this spring?

1.    First, I would make sure that my boys and girls were reading a lot—within instruction and, to the extent that I could, beyond the school day. Not only should kids be reading every day in their reading lessons, make sure they are reading in social studies, science, and even in math, too. It might help, for a while, to keep track of the numbers of minutes that is happening; it makes it easier to increase the reading time if you know how much actual reading is taking place—oral and silent. I’m talking about reading text, not talking about text, not listening to someone else read, and not the time kids may be off just reading on their own (but accountable reading). Shoot for at least an hour of school reading per day, and then see if you can stretch that out to more like two hours. That’s a lot of reading!

     And, encourage kids to read for enjoyment beyond the school day. You won’t have control over that, of course, but many teachers are effective in getting kids to read. Work with the kids and the librarian to find texts the kids want to read. Enlist parents in supporting this reading. Don’t hesitate to “reward” kids for this reading (that can be as simple as a bookworm that wends around the room showing how many books are being read, to something as complicated as a classroom pizza party once some large        numbers of books or pages are read).

2.    Make sure you are having kids read texts that are sufficiently difficult. Pay attention to the Lexile levels that your state has established for third-graders to read. Make sure kids are reading a wide range of texts every day and every week, including texts that are in the specified range. I would also have kids reading books easier and harder than that range (and when you go higher than grade level, be sure to provide plenty of support and make sure the kids know what you are up to).

3.    As you point out, teachers tend to over-support kids’ reading. We teacher educators tend to provide a lot of guidance and support for scaffolding—but we are less explicit about withdrawing this support. But, withdrawing support and just going cold turkey may not be the best bet.

           Reciprocal teaching is a good model of withdrawal of scaffolding, so I wouldn’t hesitate to use that—even with other strategies. Initially, the teacher guides the reading process, even demonstrating to the boys and girls how to go about working  through a text. This modeling or demonstration is largely or entirely done by the teacher: she implements the strategies—previewing, predicting, reading a portion of the text, asking herself questions, answering those questions, summarizing the text, and then repeating with the next section. The teacher not only does everything but explains why she is doing it and how it is suppose to help.

           Then, the teacher starts to shift the responsibilities to the children, and to withdraw support. Initially, the teacher does what you describe, she makes all the decisions and the kids just carry them out. “We need to preview this text. Let’s read the title and look at the first two pictures.” She continues to explain the purposes of the various steps. When the kids can do that well, the teacher pull back even more. Perhaps she has the kids take over explaining the purposes. Or, they start to make the decisions. “I think we should read the whole first section before talking about it.” And so on. Eventually, the kids should be carrying out the entire process, initially in the group and then individually. All of this—whether   guided by the teacher or done cooperatively in groups and pairs or done individually—should be silent reading.

4.    I know the tests are done silently, but kids should be engaged in oral reading as well. Not the kind of round robin reading that many teachers use (there isn’t enough reading when done that way), but things like paired reading or reading while listening. Have kids do this with texts at their frustration level, practicing repeatedly two or three times. The idea is to start with text that you struggle a bit with, but practicing to the point of being able to read the text well. That oral reading improvement will transfer to the silent reading.

5.    You mention annotating texts. You can do that, but annotating doesn’t push kids’ thinking far enough. I would encourage the kids to write about the texts. Yes, you can ask questions and have the kids write answers to them—and your questions are good—but you also can have the children summarize and explain the text (summarizing in writing like that has a big impact on the reading comprehension of third graders). Perhaps the annotations could be used to guide the students to provide.

     Good luck.

           Last week I posted a blog challenging the amount of testing and test preparation in American reading classes. I got smacked, metaphorically, by friend and foe alike. Some posted their concerns, many more sent them to me directly.

           The grumbles from past foes are the easiest to reply to. They often expressed—in passive aggressive tones—exasperation that I have “finally” woken up to the idea that testing companies are evil and that testing is a conspiracy against kids and teachers. They know because they follow Diane Ravitch’s “research.”

           The thing is—and I’m sure this is true since I’ve reread last week’s posting—I didn’t really come out against testing. Just against over-testing and test prep generally. The politicians have imposed some testing—and I think they have overdone it—but teachers and principals are also devoting too much time to testing, and that's on us.

           Dr. Ravitch seems to be quite upset about accountability testing, which she herself helped impose on educators overriding the critics who depended upon research in their arguments. (Ravitch is an educational historian, and quite a good one, but ignrores—then and now—psychological and educational research).

           I’m not even against accountability testing, as long as the amount of testing is commensurate with the information that one is collecting. To find out how well a school or district is doing, do we really need to test every year? Do they change that fast? Do we really need to test everyone? Anyone ever hear of random sampling? Come onnnnnn!

           If Dr. Ravitch’s minions spent more time in schools, they’d know the heaviest testing commitments are the ones the districts (and, sometimes, even individual principals and teachers) have taken on themselves. We may blame those misguided efforts on the accountability testing—we all want to look good for the picture—but, it is a bad choice, nevertheless. And, it is a choice.

           I do find the critics’ vexation with me a little surprising. For example, when I was director of reading in the Chicago Public Schools (15 years ago), I was ordered, by then Mayor Daley—to emphasize test prep in my teacher education efforts in the city. Unlike some of the critics who these days are so noisy about over-testing, I had skin in the game and I refused.

           It might be worth noting that my refusal led to two outcomes that matter: (1) the Chicago Public Schools engaged in the least test prep—before or since; and (2) Chicago kids made their biggest measured gains in reading. Not a research study, but a policy dispute affecting nearly a half million kids.

           Of course, those who appreciated my past candor were now chagrined at my remarks. They weren’t necessarily upset by what I had to say about accountability testing (many of them concur that it is over the top), but they were scared to death by my comments on the various screening, monitoring, and diagnostic tests that are so much of the daily lives of primary grade classrooms.

           Again, I think I was clear, despite the concerns. The typical complaint: “I understand you, but no one else will.” That is, they get that I am not opposed to all classroom assessment, but they are sure no one else will appreciate the subtlety of what they see as a complex position.

           For example, one dear friend, a grandmother, pointed out her appreciation that her grandkids are given annually a standardized test in reading and math. The reason? She doesn’t trust teachers or schools to actually tell how kids are doing.

           The fact is too often teachers don’t tell parents how their kids are doing. For all kinds of reasons: What if a child isn’t doing well and I don’t know what to tell the parent—why raise a question I can’t answer? What if I don’t think there is anything that can be done—it’s a minority child without economic resources whose family is a wreck? What if I only notice effort and not achievement? What if I just don’t want the argument (often parents don’t like to hear that junior isn’t succeeding)?

           An annual test isn’t perfect, but it doubles the amount of information that most parents have and that isn’t a bad thing. I’m not against that kind of testing.

           One reader thought I was smacking DIBELS, but I wasn’t. I was tough on the notion that tests like DIBELS can profitably be given to ANYBODY every week or two through a school year. But not because I was anti-DIBELS.

           Twice a year I go to my dentist. She takes x-rays every fourth visit. Why doesn’t she do it every time? For two reasons: first, dental health doesn’t change that fast, so they try not to test more than would help; and, second, because x-rays can cause damage, so the balance is best struck between help and hindrance, by testing once every four checkups instead of the seemingly more rigorous testing every time.

           DIBELS-like instruments won’t do physical damage, like x-rays, but they do reduce the amount of teaching and they might shape that teaching in bizarre ways. That is harmful.

           My advice:

1.     Reduce accountability testing to the minimum amounts required to accomplish the goal. Research is clear that we can test much less to find out how states, districts, and schools are doing. Without a loss of information.

2.     Test individual kids annually to ensure parents have alternative information to that provided by teachers.

3.     Limit diagnostic testing in reading to no more than 2-3 times per school year. Studies do not find that any more testing than that is beneficial, and no research supports reducing the amount of teaching to enable such over-testing.

4.     Give most test prep a pass. It doesn’t really help and it reduces the amount of essential instruction that kids should be getting. One practice test given once one or two weeks ahead so kids will feel comfortable with the testing should be plenty.

          I know it is a horrible thing for a so-called “educator” to admit. It’s sort of a social disease.

          Perhaps someone has a 12-step program that could help me… Assessment Anonymous. Perhaps.

          When I was a practicing teacher working on my Master’s degree, I loved collecting tests in a big notebook. Sight word lists, multiple-choice phonics quizzes, informal reading inventories, motivation questionnaires. 3-holes punched in their left margins. Organized by purpose. I loved them all.

           In one of my jobs I even did school entry testing, putting prospective kindergartners through their paces.

          Then, later, as my habit worsened, I started working on tests… the ACT, the SAT, the National Assessment, eventually even co-authoring a state test in Illinois.

          You probably know how this story comes out… everyone hooked on testing eventually hits bottom, the dark night of the soul when you know you have to change or it will be all over. I reached my nadir when I found myself writing a positive review of DIBELS for the Buros Mental Measurements Yearbook.

           Okay, now that I have that off my chest, let’s get real.

           Over the past 15 years or so, we have so overdone the testing thing. Not just the tests that educators usually don’t like—the high stakes accountability tests—but even the instructionally relevant ones that we believe can be beneficial… the running records, informal reading inventories, DIBELS-style screeners and monitors, and a slew of acronym-titled diagnostic measures. All of them. Too much. Too damn much.

Accountability Testing

           Accountability testing was not a bad idea… it just hasn’t worked the way its proponents thought it would. Nothing wrong with that: You have an idea; you try it out on millions of kids without any empirical evidence that it will work; then after a couple of decades of doing that with few victories… you keep doing it?

           The basic idea was this: schools should be run more like businesses. Business figured out how to improve quality by measuring quality. By carefully monitoring their products and services—by testing them, they could ensure higher quality. It’s why your car starts in morning, every morning.  

           By analogy, the idea was that if we tested kids, we’d see which districts, schools, and teachers weren’t getting the job done, then resources and efforts would be focused and kids’ learning would improve. That movement started back in the 1970s, but really got going full-bore in the 1990s… more than 20 years ago. Needless to say, we are still waiting with baited-breath for the uptick.

           I still like the idea of the public knowing how well schools are doing, even if that has no direct impact on kids’ learning. However, we don’t need to test as much as we do to find out how schools are doing. Such tests need to be as brief as possible, and they only should be administered to samples of children, not all children (the National Assessment does a very good job of this on a national basis, testing fewer than 100,000 kids every two years).

           But whether or not we adopt an accountability-testing plan that makes sense, there is NO excuse for teachers to spend inordinate amounts of time getting kids ready for these exams. So-called “test prep” should be banned if it goes more than a couple of hours a year; like having kids take a practice test the week before testing. Almost all of the time currently devoted to prepping kids for the PARCC, SBAC, STAAR, Aspire, and the other state tests should be devoted to…wait for it… teaching! That time could be profitably spent teaching reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and the rest of the curriculum.

           Why would I recommend such a crazy thing? Because the surest way to raise reading achievement is not through test prep, but through teaching kids to read.

Instructional Testing

           But the testing glut is not just due to the politicians and their accountability schemes. A good deal of the over-testing we have brought on ourselves. Again, the theory has seemed reasonable.

           If we know which kids are lagging in which skills, then we can be sure to teach those skills to the right kids, and voila, higher reading achievement. This idea is especially prevalent among those responsible for kids with learning problems; often it is proposed that those children be tested weekly! The claim is that such testing represents a more rigorous effort on behalf of the strugglers.

          But that claim has no basis in research at least as far as reading achievement goes. I’m not arguing against occasionally testing certain skills to see what kind of progress is being made, and if anyone is falling through the cracks… but that can be accomplished well by testing 2-3 times per school year. I’m also not talking about the teachers who observe kids’ performance within daily instruction and who look carefully at kids’ written work (in fact, they’re my heroes).

           But interrupting instruction frequently to have kids take tests—even tests aimed at focusing instruction—is a big time waster. There is no evidence that such testing regimens actually improve learning, but there is plenty of evidence supporting the teaching of reading. Our New Year’s resolution should be, “Let’s teach, not test!” Let’s devote our instructional time to teaching kids to read—not to preparing them for tests, not for administering tests.

Teacher question:     

So today I was conducting a workshop. I was told the teachers wanted information about reading/writing connections. Easy, right? Then I was told that they departmentalize K-6! At every grade they have a reading teacher and a different writing teacher. Any thoughts, comments, best practices, or research that would go against or support this practice? I know what I believe to be correct but would love to have your opinions in this conversation.

Shanahan response:

Wowee!

For the past several years I’ve been complaining about how schools are organizing themselves regarding reading and writing. These days, the most common elementary school organization seems to be the 90-minute reading block, with writing taught some other time of the day (if at all). And, in middle schools and high schools many schools have readers’ and writers’ workshops—managed by different teachers.

I think both of those schemes are dopey and counterproductive.

But you’ve found a structure that is even worse!

These folks sound like the type of people that would separate Romeo and Juliet... Yin and Yang....Lennon and McCartney... love and marriage... Bert and Ernie...spaghetti and meatballs... You get the idea.

Reading and writing are related in many ways. And, though teachers can take advantage of these relationships in ways that can improve achievement, doing that would be very difficult and inefficient when taught separately as in your example.

The combination of reading and writing doesn’t just change instruction—it can affect the curriculum itself. For instance, the Common Core State Standards require teachers to teach kids how to combine reading and writing for various purposes.

I wondered if this is a CCSS state? (your letter didn’t specify). If so, that would be one of my big questions—how are they teaching kids to write about reading? Perhaps those goals can be accomplished within this odd organizational plan, but that would require a great deal of cross-classroom planning (the kind of planning that tends to impinge on teachers’ personal time—and that rarely happens, no matter what the theory).

Admittedly, I’m aware of no studies that directly measure the impact of such organization, and the organizational studies that do exist suggest that organizational plans usually don’t matter much in terms of learning. I guess I could praise this district at least for teaching writing—there are still too many places that haven’t figured out the need for that yet.

However, a major purpose for teaching writing is its strong impact on reading achievement. Recently, some administrators who had been discouraging writing in their districts contacted me. Their concern was that writing took up a lot of time and their state was heavily stressing reading achievement. Time devoted to writing would “obviously” interfere with reaching their reading goals. They wanted to know why I was telling their teachers that writing was a must.

I explained to them that there were several reasons behind my urgings.

First, research shows that reading and writing are closely aligned. That is, reading and writing depend upon many of the same skills, strategies, and knowledge—though those are deployed in different ways in reading and writing. In fact, about 70% of the variation in reading and writing abilities are shared.

For example, to read one must decode words. That means being able to look at the word, recognize its elements (letters and letter combinations), retrieve associated pronunciations for those letters, and to blend those into a word pronunciation. For that to work, of course, you have to do that very quickly—and eventually with little conscious attention.

In contrast, to write one must spell words. That means being able to listen to the pronunciation of a word, to recognize its elements (phonemes—that is language sounds), to retrieve letters that match those sounds, and to recognize whether they are combining properly to make a well-formed word. And, again, fluency is essential.

Decoding is arguably easier than spelling, but learning to both pronounce and spell words simultaneously helps to increase decoding fluency. It provides a kind of overlearning that enhances one’s ability. The same argument can be made concerning phonological awareness, and the use of vocabulary, grammar, text structure, tone, and other text elements—and the same kinds of connections exist between the routines one uses to pull up background knowledge, to set purposes, to predict, and so on.

Given the extensive overlaps, it should be evident that combined instruction would be a lot more efficient. When a school is trying to accomplish higher achievement that kind of efficiency and teaching power is indispensable.

Second, reading and writing are communicative processes, and there are cross-modal benefits to be derived from having students engage in each. Readers, who are writers, can end up with insights about what authors are up to and how they exert their effects, something of great value in text interpretation. Likewise, writers by being readers, can gain insights into the needs of other readers. Imagine how that can help one to write better.

This kind of insight sharing is unlikely without some teacher guidance—and making those kinds of connections across reading and writing experiences depends on sharing those experiences with the students. It would be hard for a teacher to know what came up in the various shared reading experiences that took place in the other class.

Third, reading and writing can be used in combination to accomplish goals. The Common Core emphasizes two goals for such combining: using writing to improve learning from text and using the reading of multiple texts to improve the writing of syntheses or reports. 

Steve Graham and Michael Hebert (201) carried out a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies in which students wrote about text. They found that writing in various ways about what one had read improved comprehension and learning, and it did so better than reading alone, reading and rereading, or reading and discussing.

Students should not just be writing about text, they should be learning how to write about text effectively: how to write to text models, how to write summaries, how to write extended critiques and analyses, and how to write syntheses.

So, my reading of the research says: Teach kids to write and use this instruction to improve reading achievement. Do it separately and you are leaving achievement points on the table. No question this could be accomplished by two different teachers, but what a complicated mess that makes of it. Simplify.

(Pass the popcorn and butter, I'm going to watch some Laurel and Hardy. Some things just go together).

References           

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2010). Writing to read: Evidence of how writing can improve reading. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education.

Shanahan, T. (2004). Overcoming the dominance of communication: Writing to think and learn. In T. L. Jetton and J. A. Dole (Eds.), Adolescent literacy research and practice. New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2008). Relations among oral language, reading, and writing development. In C.A. MacArthur, S. Graham, and J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 171-186). New York: Guilford Press.

Shanahan, T. (2015). Relationships between reading and writing development. In C.A. MacArthur, S. Graham, and J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (2nd ed., pp. 194-210). New York: The Guilford Press.

Tierney, R. J., and Shanahan, T. (1991). Research on the reading-writing relationship: Interactions, transactions, and outcomes. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, and P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 246-280). New York: Longman.

            They tell me that they don’t want to use textbooks anymore. Don’t want to teach novels. Don't seem to really want to teach much of anything.

            They believe that the trick to teaching reading is not teaching it—or at least not teaching it very much. Mini-lessons are in the saddle and independent reading is how they want students to experience the English class.

            I’m skeptical. If this were a new idea, I’d probably be more accepting. However, this influential notion has been around for a long time now (e.g., Atwell, 1987), without any real research. Proponents of Reading Workshop may feel strongly about it, but not so much that they have bothered to find out if it is effective. That tends to give it a religious cast… you just have to believe.

            Above all, Reading Workshop proponents seem to believe that they are teaching students to love reading. They provide a lot of great books. They let kids read what they want to. They get out of the way and devote class time to kids reading on their own. They conference. They minimize teaching. And, the theory is that if you focus on pleasurable reading instead of academic reading, then reading achievement may rise, but love of reading certainly will. Hallelujah!

            But is that really the case? There is little direct evidence, so the musings that follow are aimed at exploring questions more than drawing any firm conclusions.

            1.  If reading workshop is so effective, why don’t kids like reading?

            The increase in use of Reading Workshop provides a kind of natural experiment. Personal experience tells me that Reading Workshop is more widely used now than 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. That expansion must be having some positive impact on this generation’s reading habits, right?

            Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The various reading census results suggest that teens may be reading less for pleasure than they used to and that situation may be getting worse (Scholastic, 2013)—despite more schools adopting these reading-encouraging approaches. At best, reading data (NAEP, 2010; OECD, 2009) are showing no impact whatsoever on recreational reading. 

            Of course, drawing conclusions about instructional practices based on general data is fraught with problems. There could be alternative explanations for adolescent apathy about reading. Perhaps if so many schools weren’t adopting Reading Workshop things would even be worse. But, still…

            Shirley Brice Heath has documented how in the 18^th century readers took their institutional literacy skills and turned them to their own pleasure—novel reading. One wonders what the impact of institutions setting aside academic literacy in favor of an emphasis on pleasure reading. Instead of being able to turn their academic skills to personal use, we seem to be appropriating those personal uses to the institution. Agency matters to adolescents; if we take pleasure reading hostage in our academic programs, don’t be surprised if they reject it as part of their “youth cultures.” 

            2.  But aren’t there benefits to having teens making book choices?

            Generally, psychologists support the motivational power of choice. Choice tends to make us happier. But I wonder what such choice makes kids happier with? Does it make them think reading is great fun so they will want to do it on their own? Or, does it make them tolerate their English class since it’s so much easier than what they may be asked to do the rest of the day? Making one happy for a daily school period doesn’t necessarily change the likelihood that they’ll choose to read independently. (If students connect choice to reading, perhaps; but if they connect it to the English class or teacher, then maybe not so much.)

            Some authorities argue that Reading Workshop is valuable because it teaches students to make good reading choices. But what texts should students be authorized to read for pleasure? 

             Many of my friends are voracious readers of popular novels (e.g., Stieg Larson, James Patterson, E. L. James, George R. R. Martin). I tend towards Library of America volumes and Man-Booker prize winners. And, I have grandsons and nephews who adore books on dinosaurs, snakes, natural anomalies, and the like. Which of us have to change our tastes to be properly Workshopped? Who decides? Remember we’re not talking about which literature to teach, but what students’ personal choices should be for a recreational activity. At least with textbooks and classroom novels, the prescriptions are positive and they are aimed at academic rather than personal reading.

            Adolescence is a time of “no.” It is a time when teens start to push back on adult infringements on their autonomy. Nevertheless, most kids don’t have too much trouble with English teachers selecting books to be read in English—or at least no more resistance towards the games and exercises set by the Physical Education teacher or the experiments set by the science teacher.

            But, telling teenagers that they are supposed to like reading, and that they should devote their personal time to it might be a bridge too far. 

            The benefit of student choice, then, could be a vague positive inclination towards reading (or, perhaps, less than that). While the downside could be that students will not gain sufficient experience in meeting academic reading demands in the kinds of texts in which they are likely to require scaffolding and support.

            Let’s face it. The college professors, employers, and armed forces aren’t complaining that kids don’t like reading, but that they lack the skills and experiences that would allow them to meet reading demands. Apparently, the most widely required books in college include those by Plato, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Aristotle… as well as more recent offerings like the Clash of Civilizations and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. My hunch is that reading The Hunger Games on one’s own, even if supported with mini-lessons in reading skills of questionable value, will not prepare one for Civilization and Its Discontents or the Canterbury Tales.

            Of course, just because Reading Workshop, as usually conceptualized, is unlikely to prepare kids to effectively carry out the kinds of reading that they’ll be expected to do, that doesn’t mean that the novels or textbooks chosen by teachers will do this any better. Reading Workshop typically promotes the idea of guiding students to texts that won’t be overly challenging, but that is often true of textbook selections, too.

            The issue isn’t whether students’ have reading choices, but whether what they read is demanding and valuable enough to develop greater ability and power. I trust those kinds of decisions to teachers more than to kids, since teachers should have a better understanding of what is coming later.

            And, if those kind of demanding texts are going to make up a significant portion of instruction, I think students would be better served by working together under the guidance of a skilled teacher, rather than trying to teach themselves.

            3. Can’t Reading Workshop be structured so as to meet your concerns?

            Of course, Workshop could be restructured in various ways to address the kinds of concerns stated above—and even unstructured it might have a place in instruction (possibly). However, the more it is restructured—letting content and quality drive text selection rather than student choice; focusing on guided text interpretation instead of mini-lessons on skills; intentionally going for text that stretches student abilities and sensibilities rather than texts that can be read comfortably—the more it resembles traditional instruction.

            Over the years, I’ve encouraged teachers to intersperse guided group textbook lessons, with more independent activities. For instance, in my classrooms I would teach skills and strategies with a textbook for some number of weeks, but then would have students select their own books to apply the same skills; interspersing like that throughout the year. Likewise, I have often encouraged teachers to allow students a free choice of books in place of one of their classroom novels; with a lot of attention to the differences in the books the teacher selected from those selected by the students. 

            However, most of the arguments for Workshop are philosophical, and this kind of eclectic purposeful mixing and matching is offensive to that philosophy. If you believe that kids will learn more on their own, that all texts are equal when it comes to their value in reading experience, that choice is more important than quality and that enjoyment should have priority over proficiency… my suggestions are offensive (though, certainly not meant that way).

            I was a high school student in the 1960s. The Vietnam War was raging and the country was deeply divided. High school and college instructors didn’t want to flunk boys, because the alternative was turning them into cannon fodder. Accordingly, we had few reading assignments—and certainly none that we couldn’t blow off without consequence.

            That wasn’t explained to us, however. I dropped out of high school believing that the adults were idiots without any kind of standards. If adults can’t tell you what they think you need to read, they just aren’t trying. I wonder how many kids, even those who enjoy the reading break during English class, think the same about their teachers?

            Just wondering.

            Except for the fact that the low learners haven’t been advantaged as much as the typical learners, this all sounds like good news to me. However, as is usually the case with reading achievement, there are some key things that educators should be concerned about as we go forward.

1.    Research is a great starting place for reading improvement efforts.

            These results are heartening because they suggest that there can be clear learning benefits from pursuing research-based solutions to learning problems, as long as there is a substantial, continuing, wide-ranging effort to bring those solutions to classrooms. Often we know things from empirical study, but they don’t get implemented. That evidently was not the case here.

            Think of all the efforts over the past 15-25 years to enhance early reading instruction. The Reading Excellence Act, Reading First, Early Reading First on the national front, and the many state level initiatives to address these needs. Of course, there have been less-touted initiatives to infuse the National Reading Panel research into Title I and Head Start, and think of the individual efforts of thousands of teachers and school administrators.

            In the current political and economic climate it might not be possible or likely that we’ll see additional efforts of these types to expand the scope of these findings. Nevertheless, it should be absolutely clear that it can be done and focusing on the reliable findings of extensive research is more likely to succeed than pursuing the idiosyncratic agendas of random reading gurus who are willing to put their own opinions above the accumulated empirical evidence.

2.    We need to follow all the reading research, not just the convenient parts.

            One of the concerns that D’Agostino and Rodgers expressed has to do with the fact that much better improvement was obtained with letter names, phonemic awareness, and word reading than was true for text reading,

             I think that pattern of outcomes is to be expected given that these were beginning first-graders. Kindergartens would have a lot more support in providing phonics and phonemic awareness instruction, than they would for writing or oral reading fluency.

            However, that narrowness of focus is inconsistent with the research findings. The National Early Literacy Panel found evidence concerning the importance of advancing young children’s oral language (towards improving later reading comprehension), and the What Works Clearinghouse concluded (Shanahan, et al., 2010) that reading and listening comprehension instruction in kindergarten made great sense. Similarly, I would argue that given the level of word reading these children appear to be accomplishing, there would be no reason to delay fluency instruction either. Past instruction in this skill tended to start in Grade 1, but that was based on the literacy practices of the time; when few kids were learning to read in kindergarten.

            We need to embrace the notion of outcome-focused reading instruction aimed at teaching children to read words, to read text fluently, to comprehend text, to write text, and to expand oral language proficiency… preschool through grade 3. All of these are important. The idea that our emphasis should be on one or another of them at the expense of the others makes no sense.

            I suspect the reason that letter names and letter sounds get the major attention has more to do with the availability of screening measures that allow teachers to easily see whether kids are making progress. We are never likely to see such assessments of higher order abilities like reading comprehension, so it is important that teachers have explicit amounts of time devoted to instruction in all of the areas that children have to learn.

3.    Early leads may not translate into wins.

            Again, hooray for the educators who have so steadily and so surely improved the literacy performance of these youngsters. However, too often, these kinds of early gains do not translate into higher achievement. In fact, it is quite likely that they will not.

            Unless first- and second-grade curricula and instruction are adjusted to accommodate for the advanced beginning literacy skills of these entering children, then I am certain that they will languish. As young children attain these higher levels by the end of kindergarten, that should mean that first-grades spend less time on letter names and phonemic awareness instruction than in the recent past. Likewise, it may have made sense before to delay fluency instruction or reading comprehension instruction until later in first-grade, when the boys and girls could read, but these data argue that kids should be getting the full literacy curriculum in grade 1, from the beginning.

            These teachers and parents have increased the quality of young children’s literacy. Now, first-grade teachers need to build quality on quality—raising the ante with these better-prepared kids. And, then each grade needs to build upon those increasing advances as kids work their way up the grades. Remember, early reading instruction is not a vaccination—one shot won’t protect them. Education doesn’t work that way. Instruction has to continue to build quality on quality to the point where more kids are at high levels of performance by the time they leave school.

            In general, that kind of advice makes sense. Spend all the time you want teaching me my ABCs and it won’t likely improve my reading ability at my advanced level of performance.

            And, the idea of teaching someone something that they find to be inordinately frustrating couldn’t possibly work either.

            Beyond that, things get a bit fuzzy.

            Reading authorities have told teachers that these levels—independent, instructional, and frustration—are the product of two factors: how well kids can read, and how hard the books are. They have also come up with formulas for determining how to match kids and books to avoid frustration. Historically, the scheme usually called for kids to be taught from books that they could read the words of with 95-98% accuracy, and about which they could answer 75-90% of the questions. A bit of challenge—but not too much, was the idea.

            Unfortunately, this insightful plan (that many of us have used in our classrooms) was just made up. In today’s parlance, the instructional level is “fake news.” No one bothered to do studies to determine whether that kind of book matching was beneficial to kids or not!

            That started to change in the 1960s, when various tests of this scheme were undertaken. Again and again, the instructional level came up short. Studies were finding no correlation between how well matched to texts the kids were and they were often identifying kids who made great learning gains despite being placed in books at frustration levels.

            But it wasn’t until 2000 when anyone even bothered to examine the value of the instructional level using a randomized control trial. Then things got really interesting, since those studies found either that it made no difference—in terms of reading achievement—whether kids were matched to texts at their so-called instructional level, or the frustration level kids far outperformed the instructional level ones. In other words, it was either a waste of time to match kids to books or it was hurting kids!

            I’ve written about that issue frequently here and between those writings and the educational standards in many states that require kids be taught to read books at their grade levels there has been some effect. For example, I’ve noticed that several of my colleagues, when prescribing instructional level texts, now suggest 90% accuracy (instead of 95%) as the true identifier of the books kids can learn best from. Of course, they don’t have data to support these new criteria—the new numbers are as made up of whole cloth as the criteria they are replacing—but it is probably enough of a smokescreen to convince some educators that what they are being sold is consistent with research and standards (though in neither case is this true).

            Why am I bringing this all up again? Because this week a new study appeared, this one published in the estimable Journal of Educational Research, and conducted by Lisa Trottier Brown and her colleagues. This study pursues this issue with third-graders. “Results indicate that weaker readers, using texts at two, three, and four grade levels above their instructional levels with the assistance of lead readers [other, better reading, third graders], outscored both proficient and less proficient students in the control group across multiple measures of reading achievement.”

            As in past studies, the results suggest not that we just have the wrong criteria for the true instructional level (there was no best book match here), but that it is unlikely there is such a thing as an instructional level; at least in terms of matching kids with books.

            The key, of course, is that while inordinate amounts of frustration should be avoided in instruction, that can easily be accomplished with grade level books and supportive teaching (like the paired reading that took place in this study). The instructional level is not a student-text match. Placing kids in easier, below grade level books reduces their opportunities to learn, but learning will only take place with accommodative and supportive instruction.

            Past studies have suggested that the traditional instructional level would be a great goal to have for books at the end of the lesson rather than at the beginning. Instead of trying to avoid exposing kids to things they don’t know, we need to make sure that they learn what we expose them to.

            I know some colleagues, Dick Allington, for example, is not impressed that after 70 years there still isn’t any research supporting the idea of matching kids to books (beyond grade 1), and believes that the studies that have been done are flawed because they don’t just vary the book levels, but the instructional approaches themselves. No one, however, is claiming that just placing kids in harder books leads to greater learning—clearly harder books require instructional adjustments by teachers that are an important part of the equation.

            Exposing kids to grade level text will not automatically raise student learning. It just provides an opportunity for greater learning. Instructional techniques—like the dyadic reading in this study—are an example of that kind of instructional adjustment. Additional guidance with vocabulary, grammar, cohesion, structure and other aspects of text complexity should have their place too.

            So now we have even greater evidence that teaching kids with what they refer to as “the stupid books” (the ones below grade level) doesn’t benefit kids. I wonder if teachers and reading supervisors will listen this time?

            Is there a point at which it does not make sense to use a particular challenging text with a particular student? For instance, take an 8th grader who reads at about a 3rd grade level. The student can decode reasonably well but is dysfluent and, due to learning English, has poor comprehension resulting from low vocabulary knowledge and lots of confusion caused by complex syntax. Would you still say scaffold grade-level text to provide access for this student-- or at a certain point, the scaffolding would need to be so extensive and it would take the whole year to read a grade-level novel-- use easier text?

            As a follow-up question, have you written or spoken about the most effective scaffolding approaches? This is something I need to learn more about.

Shanahan response:

            I’ve said a lot about the benefits of having kids read complex text. You are just asking,  “Can there be too much of a good thing?” (You probably already know the answer for chocolate cake.)

            Let me give you two answers.

            The first one is theoretical. It suggests that there is no bridge too far, no challenge too great, and no text too complex.

            Theoretically speaking, you could take whatever the hardest text in the world is (The Meaning of Relativity? Finnegan’s Wake?), translate it into Greek, and scaffold it sufficiently for a third-grader.

            Okay, maybe I’m overdoing it a bit… but there are case studies that we can go by.

            For instance, Grace Fernald (1943, Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects) describes her work with a 13-year-old who was a total non-reader. She took him to the library and asked him which book he would like to learn to read.

            He looked around and lit on the fattest encyclopedia volume he could find, what to him must have looked to be the hardest book in the world.

            Dr. Fernald’s response? Sure, I’ll teach you to read that.

            The good doctor was the one who came up with kinesthetic approaches to teaching reading (with all the tracing of words and such). She literally took the first word in the book and wrote it down and had him tracing it.

            I can’t remember how many years she worked with this guy, but at the end of some length of time he could read the whole doggone book. Now that’s scaffolding!

            Theory tells us what is possible, and in this case it is telling us that there is no amount of scaffolding that could not be effective. Thus, scaffolding your eighth grader across 5-grade levels is very workable.

            But I said that I had two answers. What’s the other one?

            The other answer is the practical one. It’s the answer that admits the theoretical possibility, but is troubled by the quotidian… How much time do I have? How will that work if I have 25 other kids in the class? How will I keep Junior’s motivation up? How will I keep my motivation up?

            Scaffolding someone to read a text that is hard for them takes time and in real classrooms, with real kids, there definitely can be challenges that are simply too great to bridge.

            Frankly, in grades 4 and up, I think scaffolding a youngster (or a group of youngsters or a classroom of students) across two years of difficulty is par for the course. Thus, if your group reads at a second-grade level or higher, teaching that fourth-grade science textbook shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for either teacher or students.

            What scaffolding might be needed in such a normal case? The teacher should provide essential background information… that is, the teacher can tell relevant information about the content that might help readers to make sense of the text—while not revealing what the author is going to say.

            Right now, I’m trying to read an abridged French novel. Normally, I can handle this kind of thing, but in this case, the book is so abridged that I can’t follow it. The abridger cut out too much of the story. Each chapter seems almost entirely disconnected from what came before. If I had a teacher who could scaffold for me, she could, perhaps, tell me about what’s missing, so that when I take on a chapter, I’d know how it is connected to the one’s that I’ve already read. (Unfortunately, I don’t have such a teacher… and this reading is a failure for me.)

            What else? Make vocabulary accessible. The most obvious thing that readers confront in complex text is unknown words. Provide preteaching or simple glosses that allow the students to access those words immediately.

            Third, provide the students with some kind of reading strategy that will help them make sense of the text. One that I find particularly helpful when the text is out of reach is summarizing. I literally write a brief summary (usually just a few words, occasionally as much as a sentence) for each paragraph.  Here are some examples: “conversation about Jews & Arabs becoming French,” “He feels bad like the mouse in his apartment,” “he’s still sick,” “he isn’t like the people there.”

            This kind of summarizing can be important because when you put a lot of work into making sense of a paragraph, it is easy to lose the thread of what came before. So, if I struggle with a paragraph, when I finish, I can refer back quickly to remember where I am.

            Finally, you need to stress that you are available to answer student questions when they get stuck (be frank with them about how hard the text is and that they can rely on you to help figure out whatever may be confusing or impenetrable).

            However, there are MANY times when I want or need to scaffold students over greater spans than that. The greater the distance the more scaffolding that is needed. And, as your question points out, the harder the text, the more likely the student will have problems decoding the text (e.g., translating the print into language).

            In such cases, some kind of oral reading fluency work is usually best. That is, get the students to read the text aloud once or twice prior to trying to comprehend it. This can be done with a parent, teacher, other student, or even a tape recorder. The idea is to resolve the words first and then to shift attention to figuring out the meaning.

            Studies suggest that such oral reading and rereading can raise a reader’s ability to handle a text by 2-3 grade levels, which in many cases—along with the scaffolds noted above—can be sufficient for supporting that eighth grader for handling that eighth grade book.

            Of course, there are many other scaffolds that can be effective. There are powerpoints, videos, and other blog entries on this website that provide additional information.

    Now about that chocolate cake...

I’m a regular reader and it seems to me that you undervalue activities like Reader’s Workshop and what it can do for children. Letting them pick their own books is great for their motivation and this isn’t like free reading, independent reading, or SSR because I meet with them regularly, one-on-one, to talk about what they are reading. There is more to teaching reading than phonics lessons or fluency practice. 

Shanahan response:

Thanks for being a regular reader and I hope that you’ll continue to be after you read my answer.

Your inference is right on the button. I’m not a big fan of Reader’s Workshop—though it wouldn’t break my heart if you occasionally built a unit around Reader’s Workshop. A little of that activity isn’t likely to do much harm and it might allow you liven things up a bit.

More than that would be a bad idea if the purpose was to help kids to become powerful readers. 

Basically, my problem with Reader’s Workshop is the lack of teaching (and the idea of mini-lessons is basically to minimize teaching). 

You didn’t mention how many kids you’re responsible for, but let’s pick a moderate number: 25. And, let’s say those 25 kids pick 25 different books. Even if those books are from your classroom library, I think it’s unlikely that you, me, or any teacher is likely to have a depth of understanding and recall of all those books at your fingertips all the time. (I used to have about 1000 books in my class library).

But in order to push kids to a deeper understanding of a text—beyond just retelling the high points of a story or recalling some important facts from an informational text or generating some low-level inferences—the teacher needs to have read the text and to have thought deeply about it herself/himself. (Admittedly, textbooks can help with this, just like reading published criticism of a text can help you to think about it, but there is nothing like reading and interpreting a text oneself.)

If I’m right about this (and let’s face it, I am)—that you lack that depth of understanding of all the texts that you are asking kids to read—then your conferencing is more likely to be of the variety in which you check to see if the kids are at least superficially reading the text rather than asking them the kinds of questions that require that they notice the nuances and subtleties of a text and figure out how those connect to the big ideas.

Of course, you could operate your workshops differently than that. You could limit kid’s choices more severely—perhaps only allowing for only two or three choices from a carefully curated set of texts. That way you’d still have some choice for the kids, but it would be much more constrained, and you could definitely keep on top of those texts… which would allow you to be a teacher rather than a tester.

However, there are still problems with that approach.

How much time do your conferences last? If you keep them to 5 minutes each—and that is long in my experience, that would allow you to talk to kids about their reading about twice a week (or perhaps 3 times if you are particularly assiduous). But one would expect those discussions, if they were focused on only a few books, to be pretty repetitive. The same questions would get asked again and again. What’s the benefit of that? To me, it would make more sense to group those kids and have guided reading discussions—oops, there goes the individual conferencing.

But let’s say you don’t care about efficiency or the amount of teaching that kids get (big mistake, but let’s just say….). How deeply can you take kids into that text in those 5-minute discussions?

No question that a teacher using a textbook with all of the kids can lead a superficial discussion. That may happen, for instance, when teachers don’t bother to read the texts themselves, or don’t think much about them. However, the commitment to individual conferencing guarantees that you will not impel kids to a deep reading.

I’m not foolish. I get that many teachers who teach classes or groups with a common text fail to gain the benefits of that approach for their students. Such structures allow for excellent teaching, but they don’t assure it. Readers’ Workshop approach, however, even when used relatively well guarantees that teachers will not be able to engage kids in a deep dive into a text’s meaning and craft beyond a level that they can go without the teacher.

Some teachers may not know what deep or close or analytical reading looks like. If you need a model of deep interpretation of literature, then become familiar with the highly readable “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” by Thomas Foster or the erudite critical classic, “Seven Types of Ambiguity” by William Empson. These aren’t paint by number texts. They demonstrate how sophisticated readers read texts closely and intensely—paying attention to how ideas are conveyed powerfully through language. Teachers would have to look at these as exemplars of what great readers do, and then stretch to apply these examples to the books their students will read.

Or even better, perhaps you can find a Great Books discussion group in your area. These discussion groups are not specifically for teachers and they don’t focus on children’s books. However, once you see how reading with a group under the guidance of someone who knows that book well can push your thinking, I think you’ll understand why I’m not that impressed with individual conferencing in a classroom.   

https://www.greatbooks.org/great-books-now/book-groups/

            I am preschool teacher and I would like to know how I can implement a sight word program with 4 year old students. I have tried my best to implement at least three but I feel my strategies are not working. I am trying to do a program to help preschoolers to be ready when they go to kindergarten (Infant 1).

 Shanahan responds:

            My dear, many of my colleagues, would be wearily frowning at you with disdain for this question.  And, regular readers here, knowing my sharp tongue, too, may be anticipating something akin to a public flogging.

            But let me play against type a bit… because, although I cannot make a strong research case for what you want to do, I think I can make a reasonable case for it.

            First, the cautions: Research is very clear about the benefits of teaching letter names, phonological awareness, phonics, and concepts of print to preschoolers (see Report of the National Early Literacy Panel on this site). Why would you go after sight vocabulary when so much good could be accomplished working on the initial mastery of those things? Make sure that your kids are on a first-name basis with letters, make sure they can hear the sounds of language independent of meaning, and make sure they are grasping what we do with print and how it works (e.g., directionality).

            Second, facility with oral language is important, too. Build your children’s language. Expose them to science, social studies, math, and art concepts, and talk to them about those things. Get them to talk to you and to each other. Read to them, too, and talk with them about that as well. Make sure that what you read to them is funny, touching, clever—but above all—rich with meaning, exposing them to a vast array of ideas. That won’t make a big difference in beginning literacy, but over time, it will enable and support your children’s reading comprehension. (I would strongly encourage you to look at the Resources section of this site—particularly the section on Beginning Literacy).

            None of that advice answers your question, however. Those are both aspects of early literacy teaching that make a big difference in kid’s learning, and that you need to do.

            So, if you want to work on sight vocabulary instead of those kinds of things… then I’m going give you a time out.  However, if you want to work on sight vocabulary… in addition to those essentials, then I’m with you. To be fair, there is not strong research on building sight vocabulary in preschoolers, but there is with regard to beginning readers generally so I feel safe enough encouraging you on.

            As a reading teacher, and parent who taught his daughters to read, I would encourage you to start with something called the language experience approach (LEA). It is a wonderful way to get kids started on reading—and one outcome can be the development of a collection of words that children may know by sight.

            Start with a shared experience. This could be as simple as some object that children can discuss with you. It might be a toy or model (preferably something that will intrigue the children and that will generate a lot of discussion and questions—and it helps if they can handle it themselves—so leave the fragile stuff home). I often started with a little puffer fish or starfish that I had purchased on a vacation.                 However, this shared experience could be something more involving than that. Cooking something, mixing different colors of paints, feeding the class gerbil, building a terrarium, playing a musical instrument are all classroom experiences that can be the basis of LEA. (And, field trips—including within school field trips, like a trip to the nurse’s office or to observe the custodian planting the new shrubs—can work as well).

            In any event, these shared experiences should both increase children’s knowledge of the world, while giving them lots of opportunity for discussion with you that will help them to learn language relevant to that experience.

            Once an experience has taken place along with the associated discussion, then it gets to become the basis for a language-experience story.  Instigate the children to tell you things about the object/event/experience in their own words. Initially, I’d do this with the whole class, depending heavily on your most verbal youngsters. That shows everyone what is expected, and as time goes on you can do small group stories or even individual ones (and, yes, even a single sentence is sufficient).

            If kids just name something, “volcano,” try to help them stretch that into a sentence. “Yes, Mary, we did make a volcano. What do you want to say about it?” or “Let’s try to say something about the volcano, like someone would write in a book,” or “What did we do with the volcano?” If they are really stuck, just craft a sentence from what they tell you (“We made a volcano.”)—over time this will get better. 

            After printing each sentence, credit the contribution… “We made a volcano,” said Mary. “It caught fire,” said Jack. Say each word as you write it, and reread each sentence once it is written. When the whole article has been dictated—I’d limit the early ones to 3-5 sentences—then reread the whole thing more than once; involving children in the readings—getting them to try to “read” the piece with you as you read and point to the words.

            The next day bring the chart out again. Read it to them again and have them do some more choral reading.  Then ask them for some help. Ask if anyone thinks they can find the word, “volcano”… or “said” or “DeAndre’s name,” etc. They love to get up and point to these words.

            “Who knows any of the other words?” They’ll want to try and they will likely need some help. Perhaps rereading a sentence for them if they get lost. You can provide clues if necessary… “the word is in the second line or it begins with a d, can you find a d.”

            On day three, bring in a copy of the story for everyone. These can easily be Xeroxed on half sheets to save paper. The children can illustrate these, but, again, with lots of rereading. I would also ask the children to underline any of the words that they think they can read.  Some might not mark any words at all and some might underline everything.

            I then go to each child and I point at words—jumping around but relying on the underlinings—asking them what that word is. If any child is able to read any of the words, I record it on a small card (typically a quarter of an index card), and we save those cards for the children. It can help to put initials on the backs so they don’t get mixed up. Some teachers make a big deal out of making word banks, but something as simple as a sandwich bag with a child’s name is a sufficient container.

            Review those cards again and again. Some teachers spend the first 5 minutes of the day with that kind of review. If a child forgets a word, it can easily be removed from the bank (this isn’t a punishment—the idea is simply that the bag is for words that you really know).

            Over time, with more stories, the word banks should grow. However, the less the child knows about letters and sounds, the slower the banks will expand (and the more often you’ll take away forgotten words).

            During the preschool years it is a good idea to teach kids to print their names…and it can be good to have them trying to copy and eventually write their favorite words (from their banks)—perhaps in different colors (who has a read “volcano,” who has a blue “the”). Orally spelling these memorized words makes sense, too. As does playing games or doing activities with these words, such as showing children two words and having them guess which one is volcano (make sure the choices are very different in preschool).

            The “stories” that are the basis of their sight vocabulary can be expanded to include some texts that they “know”… like familiar stories, chants, poems, and songs (e.g., Brown Bear, Brown Bear; Mary Had a Little Lamb; Happy Birthday).  These are terrific because, since they know these by ear, they are great texts for finger-point reading (that is, the kids try to recite the text while pointing to the appropriate sets of letters). These kinds of activities help the children to develop a sense of how print works—including where to start reading on a page, the difference between words, syllables, and letters, what to do at the end of a line of print, or what to do with those spaces between words.

            I’m recommending several key things:

            1). Get kids to memorize words through repetition, but without a lot of a drill and practice. I’m making sure children see these words over and over again, and I’m getting them to pay attention to the letters; but it is meaningful repetition and meaningful analysis.

            2). Build word knowledge within a language rich and content rich environment. We don’t start with words, we start with experiences, which are translated into language, and which are eventually transcribed and read as words.

            3). Don’t worry too much if kids aren’t learning a lot of words, or if they are forgetting them along the way. What you are doing is building word familiarity, and helping the children to look at words carefully—particularly looking at the letters. If they manage to remember some words, then all the better. I would expect kids to learn 5-20 words in preschool—and some might not grasp any at all.

            4). Keep these lessons positive. Working with words in these ways is fun and it should stay fun. If you get anxious that they aren’t learning words quickly or are learning words and then forgetting them, you may pressure them unnecessarily and unproductively. (The ancient Greek teachers wrote letters and words in honey to show their students the sweetness of literacy.) As children become more adept with letters and sounds, their memory for words will improve as if by magic.

            5). Keep these lessons short. You’ll likely never work with the words themselves for more than 5 minutes at a time. The shared experiences, dictation/transcription, and re-readings can take as much time as you are able to hold the children’s interest—but those aren’t just about sight words. Several short reviews of words throughout a day is more productive than one long review.

            Finally, the teaching of sight words is not a reading program. But working with words is fun for kids and can help provide some supports for the rest of a good literacy program. Make sure that preschool kids are getting daily work with letters and sounds (and words); that they are working on listening comprehension—particularly listening to stories and other texts; that they are engaged in some of the finger point reading and choral reading activities described here (the roots of fluency); and I would also encourage them to try to write their own stories and books, too.     

    Currently, I am a Kindergarten Reading Interventionist at our K-2 school. My team is struggling with some philosophical differences about how students are placed in classrooms. Most of the kindergarten teachers feel we should be looking at the whole child (academic, emotional, social…) and find the best match for each individual child. But our school places students by guided reading level. Each class would have a certain range of guided reading levels in their class. The idea is to lessen the range of levels in each classroom so there is not a huge spread, making instruction more manageable for the classroom teacher. However, some feel as this is "tracking" and that some of the lower level classes lose good role models. They also feel that reading level defines the child in this type of system and that a student who may excel in math or another area, but not in reading are at a great disadvantage. Help

Shanahan’s response:

    This is a tough question… there is a lot of research on grouping and tracking and streaming, but none of those studies focus on this kind of kindergarten tracking (though the practice is quite common). This is a complicated research literature, as well, with lots of different methodologies and conflicting results. In other words, I can’t give you a solid answer, one way or the other.

  Part of the problem has to do with whether one looks at the kind of tracking schemes that you are talking about (e.g., dividing 75 kids into one of three classrooms based on whether they are in the top 25, the bottom 25, or the group in between) or more the kinds of within-class grouping schemes in which the kids in a given classroom are divided up further for ability group instruction. And, what about assigning kids to heterogeneous classrooms, while facilitating cross-class grouping for reading instruction?

  Another complication is whose achievement (or other outcomes) we are focused on. Often the research has suggested that the changes wrought by such tracking or grouping don’t show up for the overall classroom or school. That is there is not necessarily an overall benefit or disadvantage due to tracking; that is, the average achievement may stay the same. However, that doesn’t mean there would be no differences, just that the gains some kids would enjoy are balanced by the losses of their classmates.  

      I think the existing research—and remember one has to make some pretty big generalizations from these studies to get to your question—doesn’t suggest any kind of definitive answer… just lots of cautions. In any event, one way or the other, there don’t seem necessarily to be overall big benefits—or big problems—with the scheme, but it would be wise in this case to pay attention to the cautions.

1. Many studies indicate that tracking is a problem… it often has provided small achievement advantages for the kids on top, with somewhat larger achievement losses for the low kids… and, overall no overall academic benefit. In fairness, almost all of these studies have been done with older kids, usually not with reading, and there are at least some contradictory findings (e.g., some small overall achievement advantages).  Given that, if I were going to group classes by ability in this way, I would consider providing some additional advantages to the lowest achieving group. For instance, why not make the lowest ability classes smaller than the others—making it easier for that teacher to take advantage of the homogeneity? Or, perhaps this is the classroom that gets a push-in teacher from Title I or RtI funds? Just creating three equal size classes and equally resourced that have been formed based on the basis of who reads best would not be likely to create an “equal” learning situation.
2. Many studies find that in such schemes the African American and Hispanic kids are more likely to be placed in the bottom groupings, meaning that the schemes may have a segregating impact. I don’t know the demographics of your situation, but if you are ending up with most of the minority kids placed in the low ability classroom, I would probably not do it. In our divided society, that kind of segregation is a really bad idea. If your school isn’t mixed demographically, or if the placements don’t exacerbate this kind of segregation, then that wouldn’t be a problem. Of course, there are other social segregation concerns as well (e.g., SES levels).
3. Some of the studies—and reviews of studies—have found that tracking or grouping may have no independent impact on learning or socialization omits own, but that its effects come from interactions of such grouping with other variables.  For instance, some studies have found that within-class grouping was problematic for the lower achieving kids, but that as larger amounts of teaching were available this grouping difference dissipated. Apparently, the longer instructional periods allowed those teachers to do a better balancing job with the lowest kids—something that didn’t happen under conditions of lower amounts of reading instruction. If the reason for tracking is to enhance literacy achievement then make sure that the kids are getting a lot of instruction!
4. Tracking can be a social problem as opposed to an academic one. I’m obviously a big fan of higher reading achievement, and there are definitely some studies that find such grouping schemes can be academically beneficial (at least with the older kids who have been studied). However, that doesn’t mean that I think it is a good idea to socially isolate particular kids; remember, early reading tends to be correlated with lots of other variables (e.g., gender, race, SES, age, social-emotional functioning). Placing kids in kindergarten classrooms on the basis of their reading ability may create the kind of social isolation that is a concern. Given that, if I were in a tracking situation, I would try to find ways to combine kids across these classes for various other activities through their day—lunch, recess, gym class, bus partners, other learning activities, including some reading activities. As you point out, a lot of learning takes place across peers and through observation: cutting the low attainment kids off from those who are doing better, may reduce their opportunity to learn. Perhaps some kind of partner reading and writing activities across classrooms would be a solution.

  Personally, I’m not a big fan of tracking, and, yet, at least some studies find benefits from it. Given that, I wouldn’t ban tracking, but if I were using it (or having it foisted on my classroom), I would seek to gain its benefits while mitigating its potential problems. 

I need your help in teasing out reading instruction in middle school. When we are modeling and reading aloud with a mentor text, do we use shorter texts rather than longer novels? If we read aloud a novel, I worry that approach takes so much time away from students actually reading. Thank you in advance for your insight.

Shanahan responds:

         Let’s consider why a teacher might read to students.

         First, reading to infants is a powerful way of bonding. Studies show that when parents/caretakers read often to their children during their first year of life, they end up closer emotionally. The children, for example, are more likely to talk to the adults about their feelings (Sato & Uchiyama, 2012). One suspects that parents who hold their babies close and talk to them for extended periods of time using adult language might have the same impact… and, yet, reading a book to a baby is a wonderful and easy way for parents to accomplish that.

         That probably won’t buy you much in middle school teaching, but the images it arouses are kind of cute!

         Second, reading to young children has been found to positively impact oral language development (Karrass & Braugart-Riehur, 2005; NELP, 2006; Westerlund & Lagerberg, 2008). This impact has been found all the way through early childhood, and I know of some studies that show that even older kids can pick up the occasional vocabulary word from being read to.

         That makes sense, since books expose kids to words they wouldn’t hear otherwise. I assume that can even happen with middle-schoolers—as long as the teacher is reading a text that introduces unknown (to the students) words. (There is also a small amount of weak research showing an impact of shared reading on listening comprehension—particularly with younger students).

         Despite the ubiquitous advice to read to kids, there is really no research showing the practice has much direct impact on reading. It does improve oral language, and that may (or may not) translate to improvement in reading—but that has yet to be proven.

         Importantly, there are studies showing that reading to primary grade kids is not as powerful as having those students reading to adults (Senechal, 2004). One wonders why parents aren’t told to listen to their children’s reading! Your suspicions/concerns seem well in line with this research. 

         Third, reading can be an efficient way of sharing information that might not be otherwise accessible. This makes sense when there is only one text and it is important to get the information to everyone, or when the text wouldn’t be otherwise understandable. For instance, the principal might issue a memo explaining an upcoming change in school entry rules or lunchroom procedures. Or, maybe there are some directions in a teacher’s guide that need to be shared with kids. No research seems needed on that one.

         This kind of oral reading obviously will be occasional and brief—in middle school or anywhere else.

         Fourth, when teaching particular skills, reading to students can provide useful modeling. For example, when teaching oral reading fluency, many schemes present a text aloud to students once or twice, and then the students give it a spin. Or, another example: you want to teach students to use a particular comprehension strategy, and you have them try it as a listening strategy first to see how it works. You mention a mentor text, so perhaps you are reading a complex text to the kids to reveal some aspect of text construction—how an author organizes the information, or uses literary devices, or creates suspense—that the kids will then look for in the text they are trying to read.

         This kind of modeling makes sense at any age (and there is a small amount of research supporting it with fluency, at least), but this reading tends to be brief, relative to what the students will be asked to do, and it needs to be targeted on a particular skill or text feature.

         Thus, in the fluency example, the teacher might read a sentence, paragraph, or page, and then the students try to read and reread that piece. Or, with the comprehension strategy, an entire class period might be devoted to demonstrating the strategy through listening, but then kids would likely practice that strategy through their own reading over the next couple of weeks (in other words, the teacher reading is proportionally small).

         Fifth, reading to kids may be motivational in some way. This motivational power may interest kids in a particular story, article, book, or topic. I remember that from my own teaching days. I would read a book to kids, and then some of them would like to take a run at it themselves. I know some teachers who use read-alouds with first chapters as a form of advertising the books to the students. Nothing wrong with any of that.

         Sixth, reading to kids can be fun. It just adds a bit of pleasure to the school day for teacher and student.

         What does that mean to your middle school classroom? I would suggest it means minimizing the teacher reading, while maximizing student reading. It is very sensible to share critical information with kids, but that will be very occasional and brief. Modeling is sensible, but that needs to be very targeted and brief, as well, relative to the student reading. And, reading something to your kids, just for fun, can be a good idea, too, once in a while. Follow your instincts, reading a novel to middle school kids is not a sensible use of time.

Recently, I received a letter from a middle school teacher who was being pressured to read novels to his students. He questioned the appropriateness of the practice given the great amount of time that takes and the learning needs of his students. He wanted to get my opinion or to find out what research had to say about the practice.

In response, I explained that there were definitely some benefits to be derived from reading to kids; though in fairness almost all of that research has been done with preschoolers (with a handful of additional studies conducted in the primary grades). That means we are going to generalize from studies of 4-year-olds to determine the appropriate instruction for 14-year-olds. However, even with that, none of those studies have ever reported that reading to kids improves the kids’ reading ability (though such shared reading does improve vocabulary—at least when measured with the kinds of vocabulary tests that are not particularly related to reading).

I didn’t rule out the practice of reading to teens altogether, including doing so sometimes “just for fun,” but I did suggest that the time could be better spent, and that reading to teens should be kept brief and targeted (that is, purposeful).

There was much heated and opinionated response to that research-informed advice. So much so, that I thought it would be worth a little further analysis.

How long does it take to read a novel to students? Obviously there are a lot of factors that would determine the time, but given that adults typically read aloud between 150-175 words per minute, a good estimate might be that it would take roughly 16 hours of class time. I estimated that with the idea that the book would be about the length and challenge level of The Scarlett Letter (kind of an average length).

The teacher had asked about “novels,” so let’s say he meant two… then it would take 32 hours of class time to read those two books to the students. Of course, many of the angry responses pointed out that kids enjoyed being read to and that reading novels to them is a good way to get engagement. Fair enough, but I suspect that would mean it would take the teacher somewhat longer to read these novels than I have estimated, since an engaging presentation of the texts would require added teacher explanation and student discussion. My time estimates then are a bit short since they only count the reading itself. But, for the sake of argument, let’s stay with what I’ve come up with so far, as conservative as it is.

Some of the respondents pointed out that it wasn’t just reading to kids that engaged them, but having them reading self-selected texts on their own was important, too. None of them gave any time estimates for that activity, but over the years what I think is most commonly recommended is about 20 minutes of this kind of reading 3-5 times per week. Let’s go with the low end of this suggestion… which would mean kids would be doing their “on your own” independent reading for about one hour per week (or 36 in a school year) in the classroom.

English classes vary in length, but I’ll do my calculations on the basis of a 45 minute English class—longer than some, shorter than others. Plugging all these estimates into this schedule, you end up with kids spending 42 days per year doing nothing but listening to teacher reading, and another 48 days per year doing their home reading at school.

Where does that get us? It leaves teachers with only 67.5 hours per year to teach reading comprehension and literary interpretation, composition, grammar/usage/mechanics/spelling, literature, and oral language. Not much!

For those who complained about my unwillingness to devote roughly 25% of the English program to reading novels to secondary students (heck, 4-year-olds who are read to do better on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test), I would point out a few facts:

• The National Assessment of Educational Progress estimates that about 1/3 of American high school students are prepared to do college reading by the time they graduate high school
• That 60% of students entering college require remedial coursework
• And, that 80% of the professors who teach freshmen and sophomores indicate that those students are unable to read the complex texts required.

It might be easier—it might even be more fun—to read to kids than to have them trying to make sense of a novel through their own reading efforts, but don’t confuse that kind of reading to kids with teaching them to read. (And, sending them off during class time to do self-selected reading, instead of the typically-more-demanding reading of texts in the English curriculum with the scaffolding and accountability a good teacher brings to the mix, won’t get the job done either).

A less pleasant way to think about the implications of this issue: Kids who are reading self-selected texts on their own need books and safe, quiet places to sit, but they don’t need teachers. And, these days there are spectacular recordings available of novels read by skilled actors with trained voices. No need for certificated teachers to hit the on/off switch on recorded books. If this is what English teaching has devolved to, then these calcuations suggest that we could easily employ 50% fewer English teachers (since those are arguing so vociferously for 50% less English instruction than districts have budgeted).

Teaching matters. Even with the cacophony of responses, I still can’t think of any reason why a secondary teacher would read a complete novel to his/her students, and I have given many reasons for not doing so. In the original posting, I explained that there were places for reading to kids within the secondary curriculum, but they should be brief and they should be targeted. After considerable additional thought, I agree with myself.   

  Maybe not much of a vacation, and, yet, I’m gaining valuable insights into what we must do to teach successfully with complex text.

  Our tour includes about a dozen people; some are studying French, and some are not. Because our group is petite, they could only provide two French options. One for absolute beginners, and the other a mid-level French course attended by immigrants to France.

  My self-taught reading lessons—and sporadic forays with Duolingo and Rosetta Stone—placed me well beyond the beginner class. The advanced class is a better fit for me: I can read the textbook with facility, while the oral language demands are well beyond me (translation: I rarely know what is going on). I suspect I can now read French at something like a junior high school level, but my oral language skills are more in line with the attainments of an average two-year-old.

  But what of my American classmates?: one, with a Quebecois background is far ahead of me; but the other two, oo la la.

  We just finished our first week. The group that we’d joined had been working on a chapter for almost two weeks. That left us two days to master the material before the big exam. Needless to say, we were at a great disadvantage.

  I did okay, but one member of my crew was devastated by how poorly she had scored. She was embarrassed and hurt by the experience. If they can’t find something more between the level of the two current classes, she’s out.

  The thing is, I’ve observed this student this week and have no doubt that she could thrive in this environment. She is bright and motivated, but her sense of failure (and, let’s be honest, it is a rather small failure in the life of an evidently accomplished woman) and the possibility of social embarrassment (no matter how slight and brief), have been enough to derail her.

  Of course, if she were taught at a level of French that was better matched to her current level of functioning she would have felt better about the whole experience. I doubt she would have learned as much, but she would have found it easier to maintain her efforts going forward.

  So what does it take to teach someone to read with texts that are at their “frustration level?” Most state standards—and state tests—now require that students learn to read texts of particular levels. No more just teaching children at relatively easy levels (their so-called instructional levels).

  Here are some insights from this week:

1. Learners must have some basic foundation of a language before it makes sense to take on much complexity. In reading, that basically means kids should develop their decoding skills early—and, then later, we can worry about cranking up text levels. K-1 teachers may read complex texts to children, but beginners themselves need to read texts that will help them gain decoding facility and the basic concept of how reading works. Studies show clear benefits from working with complex text as early as grade two, but there are no such studies earlier than that. Focus early instructional attention on mastering decoding skills and applying those skills to texts simple enough to allow success.
2. It is essential that students have a high level of motivation if they are going to succeed with particularly demanding texts. I hear frequently from teachers who want to motivate kids to be lifelong readers, but not so much about those concerned about motivating sustained learning efforts during reading lessons. Perhaps they think that is already being accomplished, but my own classroom observations caution that they should think again. Obeying is not the same as engagement. Are kids doing as you tell them or are they trying to learn something? Kids need a lot of encouragement to succeed with demanding text, or they’ll end up like my classmate. Explain to children that they are being asked to do something hard, and let them know how hard it is. We’ve spent generations hiding book levels and reading levels from the kids. I’m suggesting we do the opposite. “Johnny, right now you can read second-grade books. I’m going to teach you with a third-grade book. That means it is going to be hard; even harder than it will be for some of your friends who can already read a bit better. But don’t worry I’m going to help you. Together, if we both work hard at this, you’ll succeed.”
3. Learning to read is incremental. Find ways of allowing kids to see their gains, week-to-week and even day-to-day. I don’t care if it is an accumulating list of vocabulary words, or a series of graded books/passages that let kids see for themselves that they are making progress. The more specific this information, the better. Occasional conferences and pep talks to discuss student progress make sense, too. Many teachers hold conferences to talk about “independent reading” books, but what about conferences about a students’ reading progress?
4. Scaffold, scaffold, scaffold. We’ve been working with two different French teachers. One buries us in her quiet and quick oral language and we’re all struggling to figure out what she is saying (and we’re all too anxious or embarrassed to tell her, “Repetez” or “je ne comprend pas” (I don’t understand). While the other teacher speaks more slowly, repeats herself more often, pauses between sentences, does effective member checking (she’ll look me in the eye and say, “Comprends?”). They both let us see print versions when we do not understand. In other words, these teachers know many ways to make us successful. They demonstrate. They explain. They show us the same idea in other forms. They even have us reading and rereading texts over and over in multiple ways. That should be happening with kids, too. How often do you pull a sentence out to see if kids are figuring out how to make sense of its complex grammar? How often are kids being asked the meanings of words that can be figured out from context? How often are you quizzing kids on the connections among referents? Are they just answering questions or are they searching to locate particular information in the text? How purposeful is the oral reading within reading comprehension instruction? Too often guided reading looks like an oral quiz rather than a quest to figure out what a text says and how to unlock that information.
5. Repetition is critical. If you are trying to learn to read a text that is above your level, you need to read it multiple times, including reading it both silently and aloud, reading it chorally, listening to it being read while following along, and so on.

  We can teach students to read better with more complex text, but we can screw it up, too. Adjusting text levels, requires a changing of instructional procedures and supports. 

            What makes good readers? What are kids lacking making them not so good readers?

 Shanahan response:

            I love this question because it cuts to the heart of everything we do. If teachers don’t have clear purchase on what it takes to become a good reader, and what some kids might be missing, then their instructional successes will be fortunate accidents. The same can be said for the professors who prepare teachers and for the principals and coaches who supervise them.

            So what is the answer?

            Let’s start with something pretty self-evident, but that is worth mentioning… the only thing that matters in kids’ learning—in anybody’s learning—is their own experience. What I mean by that is that no one can learn something for you; and what adults do when the kids aren’t around—adopting textbooks, talking about teaching, participating in professional development, and so on—can’t either lead to or interfere with learning.

            To learn anything you have to put your mind on something. You might use your eyes or ears or hands to explore that thing that you want to learn or to collect information about it, but ultimately it is the mind that has to do the work with that information. Nothing is learned without thinking about it, and we only think about things that are in our own experience. (My point isn’t that if you want kids to learn about the Serengeti Plain that you have to take them to Tanzania so they can experience it themselves—though there would obviously be some value in that; however, vicarious experience counts too including books, films, audiotapes, teacher descriptions, and so on.) 

            I think that is a pretty simple premise to accept, but it leads to another question… if a child learns to read through his or her experience, then how does one describe or define experience in a useful way?           

Again, let’s stay to simple conceptions and straightforward principles: There are three fundamental components of academic experience that we as teachers can influence in any powerful way.

First, there is the amount of experience, second, there is the content or skill that is the focus of the experience; and, third, there is the quality of the experience.    

            Amount of experience. Children differ greatly in how much experience they get with literacy and language. Studies show, for instance, significant differences in vocabulary knowledge by the time kids are two—differences that are not surprising to those who have read studies on the differences in the amounts that babies are spoken to by parents.

            We are usually pretty blithe about the amounts of literacy instruction that we provide to kids in school. I think that is because most teachers assume the amounts of time are the same from class to class. Observational studies—and my own experience in visiting classrooms--reveal that not to be the case. Studies often find as much as a 100% difference in the amount of potentially productive reading instruction that is offered to kids, even in different classrooms within a school.

            If two teachers schedule the same 90 minutes of reading instruction each day, and one manages to actually use all that time for teaching and the other only can manage about 45 minutes of teaching (the rest of the time lost to management problems, poor planning, replacing potentially effective instruction with things that we know don’t work, etc.)… Guess which class does best on the end of year reading test?             Of course, kids have relevant experiences beyond the school day. That’s why—even if a teacher fails to provide sufficient literacy learning time to kids—it might not matter much if the home is managing to replace this time. Some kids get lots of literacy experience at home and school and they tend to outshine the rest. And, some are almost totally dependent on the school for literacy learning, and so, for those kids, getting a teacher who is cavalier about learning time can be a deathblow to their reading progress.

            Teachers lose a lot of time. Kids spend too much time just waiting for things to happen.

            One reason why some kids struggle with reading is that they have so little opportunity to learn and to practice their literacy ability.  

            Content of experience. What I wrote above about time is kind of a trick. I believe all of my claims to be true, but there is something important that I didn’t explain.

            In science, time alone never can be a variable. It can only be a measure of something.

            An example: it takes time for iron to rust, but iron does not rust because of time. Iron rusts because of exposure to moisture; moisture combines with the iron molecules to form rust. Time can be a measure of the amount of moisture the iron will be exposed to, but it is the moisture that causes the change—not the amount of time.

            I failed to mention it, but it is true with learning as well. Time is important because it is a measure of how much exposure to the literacy curriculum children receive. Ultimately, it is the engagement with particular aspects of literacy and text that lead to learning—and time just tells us how much opportunity to engage with these components.

            If we were talking about content subjects— science, social studies, literature, health, and so on—then we would need to engage in a consideration of what content we wanted to expose kids to. Is it more important that they learn U.S. history or world history? Do we prefer greater knowledge about physical science or life science? Do we want kids to study the classics (Huckleberry Finn) or contemporary literature (Hunger Games)? In each of these examples, our choices as educators will determine what kids can learn about—what will be the focus of their learning experience—but these are all values choices. They come down to what do we want kids to know.

            However, reading—like cooking, cycling, and dancing--is a skill. To gain skills there are things that one has to know and know how to do. These aren’t values choices as in the previous examples. Do I prefer that kids be able to recognize what an author has written explicitly or that they make inferences based on a text? It should be pretty obvious that both of these actions need to be part of a reader’s repertoire.

            Which is more important decoding or knowing word meanings? Again, not really a choice—good readers will excel in both or they won’t be good readers.

            What all that means is that what we teach to make kids literate is not arbitrary. The content of experience in literacy learning should not be a choice!

            Research has identified particular skills that students need to know to be readers. Studies have done this many ways: they have shown that teaching a particular things improves not just that skill, but overall reading ability (like the impact of teaching fluency on reading comprehension); they have shown that poor readers are relatively weak in particular skills but not in others when compared to better readers (poor readers struggle with decoding tasks, but they tend to guess from context as well as better readers); and there are studies of kids who are particularly good with particular skills (like studies that identify kids who can write well, but who don’t read well).

            These kinds of studies indicate that kids need to learn particular things:

(1)    They need to learn to hear the sounds within words (phonemic awareness)

(2)    They need to know their letters (recognition, letter names, letter sounds)

(3)    They need to know how to decode words quickly and easily (sound-symbol relationships, spelling patterns and how to use these pronounce and spell words)

(4)    They need to be able to read text accurately (reading the authors’ words), quickly (not speed reading, but reading fast enough that it approaches oral language production), and prosodically (it has to sound like language—none of that “read as fast as you can, Henry”)

(5)    They need to know about language: the meaning of words and parts of words, how sentences convey meaning, how ideas cohere across language (e.g., “My sister Mary and I like to go to the movies. We eat popcorn”, readers have to connect “sister” with “Mary”, and “Mary and I” with “we” to get the meaning)

(6)    They need to be able to comprehend text (that means, both being able to read a text and to retell it or answer questions about it or use the information to do something, but it also means having some tools available that can be applied when one isn’t understanding—like summarizing as one reads, or making mental images of what is being described—to improve attention or memory); to be able to evaluate the information that the yead—to determine quality or value.

(7)    They need to be able to compose their own texts—using all of those elements noted above to convey meaning to others through their writing.

            Time devoted to those aspects of literacy has been found repeatedly, across a wide range of studies, to lead to literacy learning. If teachers teach those things, then kids have a greater opportunity to become readers. If kids fail to learn any of those—with or without instruction—then they tend not to be very good at literacy.     

            Quality of experience. The final aspect of what is essential has to do with quality. Unfortunately, I only have a negative definition of that, but I think you’ll get the point of why this is pretty quickly.

            Imagine a situation in which two teachers are trying to teach identical skills or information to two equivalent groups of kids. They are given a set amount of time to deliver this teaching, and student learning is evaluated at the end of the lessons. One group learns more than the other.

            These learning differences obviously cannot be due to amount of instruction—both groups received the same amount of teaching; nor can the differences be due to the coverage of different skills, since they were both taught the same skills; and the differences can’t be due to one group being smarter or more motivated or better supported at home (because we made sure the groups were equivalent). 

            Hmmmm…

            What could have led to the learning difference here?

            The only possibility is the quality of instruction or quality of experience.

            Studies show that some teachers explain ideas better than others (and that it is possible to train teachers to provide better explanations), and some manage to motivate better. Some teachers present lessons in which one student gets to answer a question and others make sure all of the kids are answering all of the questions (such as using writing). Some teachers are better able to make on-the-fly adjustments to student responses: this group needs an extra example, this one can skip the next exercise, and so on. Some teachers find ways to evaluate what their kids know—without a lot of formal testing (since that takes instructional time).

            You asked what it takes for kids to become literate? It takes large amounts of time devoted to learning key things about reading and writing, and that the instructional support given for this experience be of high quality; allowing more kids to learn what is essential more quickly and surely so that time can either be devoted to scaling more challenging aspects of literacy or to building extensive bodies of knowledge about the social and natural world through their literacy.

Our district is exploring and embracing Personalized Learning. We have a committee that has been going to professional development all year and a small group that is trying this out in their classrooms. Next year another group of teachers will be brought on to implement personalized learning and mentor under those trying it this year.

  Coinciding with this, our elementary building will be undergoing renovation and a committee has been working on plans. Construction is to begin next school year. We have not seen the final plans. They will not show them to the staff yet. The guidelines for their renovation were to make classrooms and spaces more conducive to personalized learning. Currently, we are fortunate to have our own individual rooms where we can provide the necessary intervention without noise from other groups beside us.

  I have discovered that we are going to be grouped in a large room!  It sounds as if there will be 3 of us in one room and the others in another room in the other part of the building. When they asked why this was, they were told things were going to look different under personalized learning. When they questioned further what that looked like for intervention support, they got no direct answer. My colleagues seem resigned to this development as construction is already planned, but I am concerned. 

  What are your thoughts on how an intervention will look under personalized learning? 

While I understand that a classroom teacher has to hold small groups in a classroom with many other students working independently, do you recommend that intense reading support should also operate where there are multiple groups going on around them? 

Shanahan response:

Okay, imagine this scenario. I go to the doctor and he finds a problem. But he tells me not to worry. He and some of his colleagues have a new scheme that they really like and they are starting to institute it with their patients.

  I ask, “What research has been done on this scheme?”

  You know where this is going.

  He says, “Research? We don’t need research. We really like this innovation.”

  If something that crazy were to happen, I’d be looking for a new doctor. And so would you. Because…well, it would be crazy.

  People’s lives matter and when it comes to caring for their lives, it makes no sense to subscribe to unproven schemes no matter how innovative or cool they may seem.

  And, kids’ educational lives matter, too.

My physician friends tell me their colleagues are foolish investors, my engineering pals bemoan their colleagues who have trouble speaking with other human beings, and why do professors lecture, not only their classes, but their wives? The members of every profession seem to have their odd quirks.

I don’t know what it is about schoolteachers, but too many are intrigued by fads and a gaping dearth of evidence supporting such whims doesn’t seem even to slow them down.

  Back in the day when I was becoming a teacher, the cool thing was to build schools without walls—the so-called open classrooms. Open classrooms were going to create open minds, and they fit right in with long hair, love beads, and peace signs. They were groovy, man. People—who hadn’t taught school—even wrote books promoting that great idea.

  Of course, it didn’t take long before the districts that had spent huge pots of money building open classrooms (the roof beams required to keep ceilings from falling were costly), and then had to retrofit their buildings to install artificial walls.

So much for history.

In fairness, there is not especially strong evidence available on this issue. I know of no experimental studies in which noise (visual and aural) has been manipulated, to evaluate its impact on learning.

But there has been a great deal of theoretical work on the issue; along with correlational and clinical findings suggesting that the kinds of environment that you describe can be especially problematic for learning-disabled readers and struggling math students

I’ve listed a few studies from that literature below that might be informative.

  I don’t know if you have run the new construction plans past whoever deals with the American Disabilities Act for your district, but that might be a good idea since this plan this plan seems to run the risk of doing some harm.  

  Why would it matter so much? Because it is difficult to sustain attention in a noisy environment. Disabled readers usually have specific problems learning to decode and studies show that decoding is best taught in a quiet environment.

  Additionally, second-language learners often remark about how hard it is to understand English when there is much background noise (something my own experience supports).

  I don’t get what this building plan has to do with Personalized Learning—or frankly what Personalized Learning has to do with academic success, but schools need to preserve some spaces for the instruction of such children that allows for reduced aural and visual stimulation. Placing learning interventions into those kinds of complicated spaces won’t support literacy learning.

References

 Courage, M.L., Bakhtiar, A., Fitzpatrick, C., Kenny, S., & Brandeau, K. (2015). Growing up multitasking: The costs and benefits for cognitive development. Developmental Review, 35, 5-41.

Glod, C.A., Teicher, M. H., Butler, M., Savino, M., Harper, D., et al., (1994). Modifying quiet room design enhances calming of children and adolescents. Journal of American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 33, 558-566.

Muyskens, P., & Ysseldyke, J.E. (1998). Student academic responding time as a function of classroom ecology and time of day. The Journal of Special Education, 14, 411-424.

Preston, A.S.; Heaton, S.C., McCann, S.J., Watson, W.D., & Selke, G. (2009). The role of multidimensional attentional abilities in academic skills of children with ADHD. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42, 240-249.

  Our core reading program includes weekly assessments. We are all supposed to give those tests every week, but to tell the truth, it is kind of hit or miss. The tests don’t seem to be linked to our accountability test, but our reading coordinator says that we have to do weekly testing if we are going to use the program “with fidelity.” What do you think?

Shanahan response: 

    We are testing too much. Weighing the pig more frequently don’t make him no fatter! And there are no such thing as "insta-tests" (tests that could be given in an instant without some sacrifice of instructional time).

  There are basically two kinds of tests that we give in schools: accountability tests and instructional assessments (e.g., screening, monitoring, diagnosis).

  The former are not necessarily aimed at improving teaching in any specific way. They are there so that parents, taxpayers, and other interested parties know how we’re doing.

  I have no problem with that kind of accountability testing as long as the tests are valid (reading tests need to test reading ability) and reliable (there are a consistency and stability to how children perform)—and that we limit the time devoted to these instruments. One big problem in schools that I visit, is that while the accountability tests themselves may be relatively brief, the teachers and administrators waste large amounts of instructional time trying to artificially make themselves look good on these tests.

  The kind of assessments you are asking about fall into the second category—the tests that are aimed at improving teaching more directly. For instance, many schools use instructional tests to determine who will get extra help with phonics or fluency. Or, teachers will quiz students to give feedback to them or their parents about how they are doing; like the weekly spelling test.

  These kinds of tests will typically take up more class time than the accountability instruments, but that can be okay—at least if they help teachers to improve learning.

  Unfortunately, there is not a lot of evidence that this kind of testing actually improves things much in reading. There are several such studies in math and some other subjects, but in reading not so much. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to use such tests to improve the teaching of reading, but it does place an extra burden on us to be particularly cautious and careful to ensure they work.

  The kinds of tests you are asking about—the weekly tests that are often included in commercial core reading programs—are pretty limited in terms of what they can tell you.

  First, these tests are usually pretty brief, which makes sense if you are going to give them weekly; no one wants to sacrifice a day of teaching just to find out how well the kids did on the first four days of the week. But that brevity means these tests are likely to be unreliable; no professional in their right mind would want to make consequential decisions on the basis of these tests.

  Second, these weekly tests typically don't purport to provide a valid sampling of the skills and abilities of reading. Their focus is limited to the words, spelling patterns, and other skills taught earlier in the week. That’s why a youngster who does well on one of those tests will not necessarily do well on the end of year accountability measure (or even on monitoring tests like DIBELS—just because you learned particular words this week doesn’t necessarily mean that you can read a lot more words).

  Given all of that, what good are these kinds of weekly tests?

  Teachers and principals often want such tests so they can use them to give grades. I don’t have any big problem with that, but I do wonder why that can’t be done with the copious assignments that should be included in such programs. Weekly tests aren’t necessary if kids are engaged in daily decoding exercises, oral reading fluency practice, writing, and reading comprehension—under the supervision of a teacher who is paying attention. Why not collect information along the way from that kind of work and use that Friday time, for--wait for it--teaching.

  For example, in the schools that I work with, I strongly encourage teachers to listen to the reading of 4-6 kids each day during fluency instruction—and to jot the results down as they observed. Over a report card marking period that would provide 9 observations of oral reading fluency (and while none of those observations alone would be sufficiently reliable to predict results on something like a state accountability test—the collection of them in aggregate certainly would).

  Similar data can be collected from writing assignments, worksheets, and observations of discussion groups.

  The real benefit of these brief weekly tests is that they should give the teacher a clue as to whether the kids have mastered that week’s skills… which should trigger an instructional response.

Poor performance on such tests should lead to re-teaching.

  Your question makes me think that is not the case in your school. Why bother to identify a problem if you aren’t going to address it anyway?

Done.

Teachers in grades 3, 4 and 5 spend weeks and weeks (like 5-6) reading aloud chapter books to their students. In some classrooms, students have a copy of the book. Is there research that speaks to the effectiveness of a read-aloud over a period of time?

Does student interest wane after 2 weeks or so?

Are there ways to think strategically about read aloud time ... to incorporate instruction?

What do we want students to know and be able to do as a result of a read aloud in this context?

How can we structure close reading of passages for struggling readers along the way?

Shanahan response: 

            I’ll answer this one with a proverb: “Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.” 

            You might be surprised by how often I get this kind of question from educators: We are doing something as part of reading instruction… could you tell us why it is good to do that?”

            This is backward. Professional action needs to be purposeful. As the proverb suggests, instructional action with no clear learning purpose can be a nightmare for kids!

            I know this isn’t a new point—but it is a darn good one. Years ago, Walter Doyle (1983) gathered the research revealing how activity-bound teachers tend to be, and how purposeless these activities usually are. He argued for a greater focus on learning than on implementing particular instructional routines.

            Even earlier, Benjamin Bloom advanced his soon-to-be-famous taxonomy to focus attention on learning within teaching—to guide teachers to focus their lessons on specific, meaningful learning objectives. Accordingly, his objectives emphasize outcomes, not inputs; the idea being that once you were committed to teaching a particular objective you would select activities that would have a reasonable possibility of accomplishing that objective.

            Or, how about this quote from a school superintendent from the minutes of the National Education Association… in 1909!:

      “The teacher must have an objective point in every lesson…. Inattention is too often encouraged by inefficient, aimless, purposeless teaching. The lesson without a definite purpose may well be omitted. (J. Koontz, 1909, p. 191).

            With great regularity I am asked why teachers are being read to, why kids are reading aloud in class, why reading workshop is being used, why guided reading is a good idea, why teachers need 20 minutes per day of free reading time, why teachers need to use end of lesson basal reader tests and so on… Nothing wrong with any of those questions, but so often they are being asked by the teachers who are doing these things or by the administrators who are ordering them to do them.

            Reading directors who have decided to commit their teachers to an instructional practice frequently contact me to find out if there is any research supporting that practice. They have already decided the practice must be implemented—a decision made without any evidence. But they want evidence to fend off any naysayers who don’t want to implement the particular practice. Research to them is apparently not a light, but a bludgeon.

            The question being asked in this case is whether reading chapter books to upper elementary students is effective. My question back is, “Effective at what?

            Effectiveness can only be evaluated against a clear purpose and as readers can see, there is no such purpose specified. The teachers are already committed to such reading, and they would sure like some research support. (Or, someone is trying seeking evidence to try to persuade them to be less committed to the unexplained activity).

            If the question is, does reading books to older students improve their reading ability?, I can answer definitely that there is no research either supporting or rejecting this idea, but that is rather unlikely. There are studies with primary age kids that indicate having kids read rather than being read to is the better way to improved reading achievement (Sénéchal & Young, 2008).

            Studies show that reading aloud to preschoolers increases their vocabulary (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). This makes sense (even with older kids) since meaningful exposure to new words--reading on one’s own, watching media, having new social experiences—all contribute to that. (The one study of reading to older kids that I know of, found that they were more familiar with words from the texts than were kids who were not exposed to those texts).

            However, none of the studies with younger children showed transfer from vocabulary improvement to better reading, and the tests that showed vocabulary improvement are not particularly related to reading achievement.

            That shouldn’t be too surprising since the vocabulary gains would be with words from the particular books—rather than a general improvement in vocabulary. Such learning would only impact comprehension when students were reading texts that used these particular words.  

            Of course, reading aloud to kids certainly must expand their knowledge of the world, if the texts include information or ideas that the kids don’t yet know. If someone reads a science chapter to me about genetics, I am likely to gain some info on genetics. This is so stunningly obvious and so consistent with experience (e.g., television news commentators read news, sports and weather “stories” to us on a daily basis) that no one has ever bothered to test it.

            Reading aloud can also stimulate an interest in reading. Kids sometimes hear their teacher reading a book and then try to read it on their own. We don’t know how much this really happens, but I certainly have experienced it as a teacher and parent. Having kids following along with such reading can have some impact on reading fluency, but that is typically done with shorter pieces and involves the kids in trying to read the modeled text aloud. That doesn’t sound like the case here.

            If you are requiring that teachers read aloud books with the idea that this will improve student comprehension or build their knowledge of the world or expand their vocabularies or increase their fluency or even foster improved reading motivation in some measurable way, then I suspect that reading a chapter book aloud to the kids over several weeks may not be the best way to go -- since there are so many more powerful alternatives towards each of those outcomes. 

            I would suggest that you figure out what you are trying to accomplish, then consider the alternative ways that this might be done… selecting the most powerful avenues you can find. Sometimes that might be reading a chapter book to the kids, but other choices might win out as well.

            Personally, I never taught a day in the primary grades in which I did not read aloud to kids. I didn’t do this as part of my reading instruction, however.

            It was just an effective way of fostering a positive tone in my classroom; a closeness between the children and me. I didn’t do this in place of strategy lessons or what is now referred to as close reading. I did it because I love books and wanted to share a bit of that love with the kids I was teaching. (There are other ways of accomplishing that goal as well, but reading aloud to the kids was a way that I could do this.) If I were back in the elementary saddle again, I would probably make the same choice; but that activity would in no way be allowed to reduce my instruction in decoding, fluency, vocabulary, reading comprehension, or writing. I hope it doesn’t for your teachers either.

Teacher question:

             E.D. Hirsch makes a compelling argument for the systematic teaching of essential knowledge in elementary school as the best way to close the achievement gap. Daisy Daidalou in her book, Seven Myths of Education, makes a similar argument for building a broad, but not necessarily deep, knowledge base in assumed knowledge to improve reading comprehension. First, is there a solid research base for their claims? Second, what are the implications for a middle school, especially one with many students who are lacking strong background knowledge? Thank you.

Shanahan response:

             Research over the past 40 years or so has made it clear that the knowledge that students bring to a text—any text—will have an impact on what is comprehended or learned from that text. The more you know, the better your comprehension tends to be.

             Studies have shown that prior knowledge influences comprehension in many ways. Most obviously it reduces the learning load. The more you already know about what an author is telling you, the less new information that you have to learn. That makes the reading task an easier one. (Of course, that can also lead us to overstate what it is that prior knowledge provides, since it can make it look like you learned a lot from a text when you really didn’t learn much at all.)

             Knowledge (prior knowledge just refers to the knowledge that we already possess “prior” to reading a text) also helps us to draw inferences and to elaborate on what a text must have meant. It allows us to figure out ambiguity—when you don’t know what an author really meant prior knowledge is a great resource to turn to. It reduces processing difficulty during reading, as operating on items already in long-term memory is less demanding than operating on items from the text newly placed into working knowledge. And prior knowledge helps to improve long-term recall, since we can store the new knowledge that we gained from a text within the prior knowledge structures in memory that we already possessed prior to that reading.

             No question about it—the more you know—the better that you tend to comprehend (correlational studies certainly support that). We use our knowledge when we read.

             However, we don’t have experimental studies (or studies capable of showing causation) with this variable. What I mean is that we don’t have evidence that if you increase kids’ awareness of cultural literacy (such as Hirsch’s –and other’s--intriguing lists of social, historical, literary, and scientific touchstones) that the students’ reading scores consequently improve. It makes sense that they would—the more we know the better we tend to comprehend—and, yet, no direct proof. Just correlations. Lots of correlations.

             Given that, I wouldn’t drop direct lessons in reading skills and strategies in favor of teaching science, social studies or the arts.

             But, like most scholars, I an persuaded that American children don’t know enough, and that increasing their knowledge about the world—whether or not it directly enhances reading comprehension—would still be valuable. Surveys routinely reveal our collective ignorance about science, government, current affairs, history, literature, and geography, and television seems rife with shows that revel in this ignorance (e.g., Jay Leno’s Jaywalking routine, or “Are You Smarter than a 5^th Grader?”).

             Personally—without research evidence—I don’t see increasing general world knowledge as a certain way of enhancing reading achievement; at least not in the same way that I think improved phonics or reading comprehension lessons are likely to. But I do believe that we should take knowledge more serious in schools, even within the literacy curriculum at all grade levels.

1. What kids read matters. There are good arguments for the use of decodable texts within decoding lessons and beginning reading materials necessarily have to be simple to facilitate early reading development (Grades K-1). However, beyond these specific limitations, there is little excuse for not using reading materials that expose children to classical literature (e.g., Fairy Tales, Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are), or to rich content about geography, history, science, social science, and other subjects. Just because it is a reading lesson, there is no reason that the content of the texts one is practicing reading with can’t be rich in information (and the same can be said for the books that are read to children in the classroom). Check out your own middle school reading curriculum: how much opportunity is there for kids to enhance their science, social studies, or math knowledge? We often tell content teachers to expand their instruction by showing kids how to read like a scientist or an historian. Perhaps they should be telling us how to enhance our literacy curriculum by increasing students’ exposure to particular content from their fields of study. (I’m a reading guy, but I think that is a good idea).
2. Kids should learn what they read.  Too often the emphasis of a reading lesson is so much on the reading skill or strategy that the opportunity to expand children’s understanding of their world is lost. If kids are going to spend the next three days reading and rereading a selection about Martin Luther King or why empathy matters or about children in Brazil—studying the vocabulary, answering questions, practicing fluency—there is no excuse for them walking away from those lessons not knowing who the Reverend King was, what empathy means, or where Brazil is. Reading lessons needs to have double outcomes: an improvement to reading ability and an increased knowledge about whatever was read. (When is the last time you tested kids on the content of the texts they were reading in reading class? I think we should do more of that.)
3. Content instruction needs to be protected. Regular readers of this blog know that I promote increased reading instruction as a way of improving reading achievement. However, I not only place a minimum on the reading instruction time, I place a maximum on it, too. I do this to protect time for math, art, music, social studies, science, and so on. It is crucial that kids get instruction in all of those areas and that those subjects should both give kids additional opportunities to read and write, but also to expand their knowledge of the world. Low reading scores are not a good excuse for dropping social studies instruction.
4. Encourage kids to read on their own time.  One way a lot of us learn is by reading. Kids don’t read enough, but they can be induced and encouraged to read more away from school. Hook them up with books that they can read on their own, beyond what you do with them in school. Work with local librarians to identify hot books about science, the arts, and social studies and actively promote these with kids.  
5. Review matters. I understand the idea of a spiral curriculum, but I also fear that what kids walk away from such lessons may deliver the idea that it doesn’t matter very much whether they learn something or not (since they will be exposed to it again). Content lessons need to be taught with the idea that the facts matter and that we care whether students retain that information. That typically means that we need to do more review, revisiting content again and again.  
6. Encourage parents to help. Parents can help (or more accurately, some parents can help) by getting their kids magazine subscriptions or watching educational, nature, and current events shows with their children, or by encouraging the use of those kinds of Internet resources. There are many television shows that are great for building children’s knowledge (e.g., Arthur, Nature Cat, Wild Kratts, National Geographic) and many terrific websites that can help there too (e.g., Time for Kids; Here, There, and Everywhere; Learning Network, CNN Student News); encourage kids to watch and use these—advertise them in the classroom, and promote them with parents, too.

        I suspect that our kids would read better if they knew more, so expanding kids’ knowledge of the world very well might promote higher literacy.

            I also suspect that knowing more about the world will foster curiosity, adventure, a greater sense of community, environmental responsibility, health, patriotism, and even, healthy skepticism—so it definitely isn’t all about reading. 

        However, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to teach kids how to read about these things.

                  Typically, I don’t do reviews here and don’t intend to today. Instead, I have pulled several incisive quotes from the text that captured my attention (there were many more, I assure you), and I have added comments of my own. I hope you and your colleagues will read these quotes and discuss them, and, perhaps, as a result, some of you might choose to read the whole book—it’s well worth it.

                  As you can see from these quotes, Professor Seidenberg has a great deal of knowledge about reading and a sharp tongue, willing to write the truth, even if it is a truth that some may not like to hear.

                  If you are interested in this book, it is on the recommended book list on my site.

“The 3-cueing theory is the product of teachers with little knowledge of the science working with large numbers of like-minded people, under the influence of a few authorities, constructing accounts of how reading works and children gain literacy. This process yielded an amorphous theory that was compatible with existing beliefs…within the teachers’ comfort zone.” (pp. 303-304)

                  The 3-cueing systems theory is still taught to many teachers and prospective teachers, which is a shame because it is descriptive of how poor readers read rather than how good ones do. The idea that readers use phonological-orthographic, semantic, and syntactic cues to figure out words is the cornerstone of several instructional approaches, and, yet, it fails to describe how good readers actually decode words. I can certainly understand why someone might observe a proficient reader, and then try to teach others to implement those practices and processes that confer proficiency… I just can’t understand why anyone would try to make their students more like the worst readers.

 “The exact number of words per minute is far less important than the fact that this value cannot be greatly increased without seriously compromising comprehension.” P. 71 

                  Seidenberg here is talking about proficient readers—and their average reading times (acknowledging the varied difficulty of different texts, etc.). Essentially he is reminding us something that Ron Carver demonstrated pretty convincingly decades ago—speed reading is skimming and skimming lowers one’s comprehension (despite the claims of the companies that want to teach you to speed read). I paid several hundreds of dollars for speed-reading training when I was in high school. I thought these scams were behind us, but the past few years have seen their re-emergence. Save your money, we are limited in how fast we can read.

“Our knowledge of a word is therefore not very much like a dictionary entry, unless your dictionary is endowed with the capacity to experience the world and track statistics about how often and in what linguistic and nonlinguistic context the word occurs.”  p. 111

                  Vocabulary is extremely important in reading, but part of the statistical knowledge about words that children are learning is grammatical (which tells you what role that word may play in a sentence), cohesive (which links it to other words in a text), pragmatic (which tells you under what circumstances that word might be used), and it carries other knowledge along with it, too. Seidenberg points out that vocabulary knowledge is not like a dictionary entry, and I would add that effective vocabulary instruction is not like teaching dictionary entries—and, yet, most of the vocabulary instruction that I see is pretty much that.

 “For reading scientists the evidence that the phonological pathway is used in reading and especially important in beginning reading is about as close to conclusive as research on complex human behavior can get.” P. 124

                  Seidenberg notes this while complaining about educators whose practices ignore this well-proven fact. To become a reader, one has to develop these phonological paths. There are several ways to do this, but no way has been found to be more effective than explicit decoding instruction (focusing on phonemes—not on cueing systems). Again, why not teach what students need to learn rather than things with no evidence?

"Learning to treat spoken language as if it were composed of phonemes is an important step in learning to read an alphabetic system.” P. 28

                  This wise statement comes right after Seidenberg shows you how difficult it can be to separate out the phonemes (the sounds) within words. We are able to separate phonemes proficiently because of our knowledge of the visible aspects of words—the letters. Thus, it is smart to try to teach kids to perceive the separable phonemes within words, but it is also smart to make this instruction reciprocal with decoding instruction. Instead of trying to reach complete proficiency with phonemic awareness and then turning our attention to decoding, it is more sensible to work on each of them alternately—moving back and forth between them. (Something that Linnea Ehri told me a long time ago).

“Children who struggle when reading texts aloud do not become good readers if left to read silently; their dysfluency merely becomes inaudible. Reading aloud and silent comprehension are causally connected…”  p. 130

                  If you know that, then it should not be surprising that effective fluency instruction typically involves kids in reading texts aloud multiple times, and that such practice improves reading comprehension. Oral reading is an important dimension of reading instruction and things like round robin reading and Popcorn Reading do not provide sufficient practice (and just working on silent reading does not provide appropriate practice).

“Learning to read is a complex problem because multiple overlapping subskills develop at the same time.” pp. 104-105

                  I still find people who believe that young children would best learn to read if we focused on one skill at a time… teach phonemic awareness and once it is accomplished focus on phonics and then when kids can decode sufficiently start working on oral reading fluency, the accomplishment of which should open the way for vocabulary work, and eventually we’d get to reading comprehension. Just as babies/toddlers who are learning language must deal with the phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics systems of language simultaneously, it is important that children get support and experience with all of these parallel tracks of reading skills. That means that even when kids are learning their phonics, they are working on comprehension, and so on.

I am interested in understanding how phonemic awareness and phonics can support students who do not have a structure for learning the English language. For example, English Language Learners who have no structure for language in their home language or in English. If you can suggest resources that address this matter, I would be so grateful.  

Shanahan response:

The research on these aspects of second-language literacy learning is limited. However, the work that has been done indicates that English learners benefit from explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics for English reading (Shanahan & Beck, 2006).

That shouldn’t be surprising. No matter what your background, if you are trying to learn to read English, you will have to learn to decode. You’ll need to learn to perceive English phonemes in oral language, the relationships between letters and sounds and spelling patterns and pronunciations. (If we are speaking of non-readers, this need would be true at any age level).  

However, such instruction tends to have a smaller impact on overall reading achievement (e.g., reading comprehension) than is the case with first-language learners. Phonics instruction helps one to translate from print to pronunciation. If you don’t know the meaning of the word you have translated, then pronouncing it properly won’t increase comprehension.  Native English-speaking children are likely to know the meanings of more English words than will their English Learner classmates, so phonics has a bigger positive impact for them (phonics helps, just not as much).

Second-language learners, like all learners, bring knowledge with them. I’ve written before about my experiences in teaching myself to read French. My knowledge of the sound-symbol relationships in English is helpful because I can often apply my knowledge of English to French. Take a word like, “danse.” Except for the medial vowel, all the sound-symbol relations are the same as in English… and the replacement of the /ah/ sound for the “short a” sound is not jarring or foreign to my English ears. Reading a word like “danse” is easy for me because I can still make use of my knowledge of English phonemic principles and sound-symbol relations.

What you know in your home language can be helpful.

It can also be misleading. When I was first learning French, I would read a word like “ecoutent” as AY-COO-TAHNT… what I assumed to be the French pronunciation of those letter combinations. However, that isn’t actually how the French pronounce that combination of letters. What they say is more like, “AY-COOT.” In English, we pronounce those last letters, but in French, not so much. I had to learn to swallow most final consonants in my approximation of French pronunciation.  Generalizing from my home language boosts my decoding ability in some cases, and it misleads me in others. Fortunately, it has been more of a help than a hindrance.

The same is true with students who speak other languages. The more similar a home language is to the one you are trying to learn, the more transference that is possible. I can translate much English decoding to French, and I’ll do reasonably well. That kind of transfer would not be possible with Arabic or Russian (since their scripts are not the same as in English). The greater the differences between the languages, the more the learner will have to deal with to learn to read the second language.

You write that these students have no “structure for language.” I suspect that you mean they come to school not being literate either in their home language or in English. If a Mexican youngster can’t read Spanish, then he won’t be able to transfer those common sound-symbol relations from Spanish to English. But that doesn’t mean that he or she couldn’t learn to hear the English sounds or to decode with them. (That’s why some authorities argue for teaching children to read in their home language: it should be easier to learn the language that you speak and then to transition from that written language to written English. Research suggests that can be helpful, though not necessary).

Even when students aren’t literate in their home language, they may have relevant knowledge to bring to the task. For example, phonemic awareness is the most transferable aspect of language. If youngsters can hear the sounds within words in their home language, they should be able to hear those sounds within English words. Of course, there are languages that lack some of the English phonemes (Japanese doesn’t have “l” or “r”), or some sounds may be combined with other phonemes in ways that we don’t combine sounds in English. Those instances can benefit from direct instruction.

What does all this mean?

1.      Teach phonemic awareness and phonics to beginning English readers no matter what their language background or how much literacy they have. (If you’re teaching kids to read in their home language first, then teach the decoding for that language, and provide additional instruction as needed when the transition takes place).

2.      If students can already read in the home language, you should be able to reduce the amount of phonics to the extent that there is overlap between the two languages.

3.      If students are phonemically aware in their home language, you shouldn’t have to do as much with that (though there can be a benefit from focusing on those English sounds that are unfamiliar).

Finally, second-language students in U.S. schools often underperform in reading. That means they may need some kind of intervention to provide additional support. Many schools rightfully provide special interventions that target skills like phonemic awareness and phonics.

However, just because a young reader is struggling doesn’t automatically mean the problem is with decoding. That is especially true for these second language learners. They, too often, are assigned to extra decoding work even when their decoding skills are adequate. For them, the extra focus should be on developing their English language.

Here are a couple of relevant resources that you should find helpful:

Reading 101 for English Language Learners

What Does Research Tell Us About Teaching English to English Language Learners?

How do you make kids love reading?

Before I answer, let’s consider something similar.

Several years ago, I invited Bertram Bruce to speak to our graduate students.

Chip is a thoughtful, soft-spoken, Fulbright scholar at Urbana-Champaign who has spent a lot of time considering the role of technology in learning, and he has done some cool studies on reading and community inquiry.

While we were visiting, I asked him a question that was then nagging our Literacy faculty: How could we teach the teachers enrolled in our Master’s program to teach technology in their classrooms? Teacher preparation standards were starting to require that kind of thing and let’s face it, digital technology was (and is) intruding more and more into our lives (reading and otherwise).

I figured he was going to tell me to add a course to our program, a course that would teach how to distinguish a bit from a byte, how to select instructional software, how to write code, and other technology skills. Maybe he’d suggest that our teachers militate for classroom tech centers.

But as I said, Chip is a thoughtful man. He knows his stuff and he knew what it would really take to get teachers to commit to technology.

He said, “Start using technology in your program.” In other words, post readings online, send assignments by email, hold virtual office hours, and so on.

Most people don’t use technology because they love technology. They use it because it makes their lives easier or better in some way.

For me, the initial benefits from this kind of technology were professional. Electronics gave me ways of writing papers and analyzing data that reduced my work time and allowed me more time with my own kids. (Of course, then email took much of that back, but it also provided me with a wider and closer network of colleagues.)

After that, I started doing family budgets and figuring our taxes on a computer. And, now I find it hard to shop without one (thanks, Amazon!).

I vividly remember colleagues—those who were gaudy in their pride of never having used a computer. Well, when their kids headed off to college, the dam broke. It was amazing how quickly these Luddites immigrated to digital. Staying in touch with college kids is a huge technology motivator for my generation.

Recently, I started thinking about Chip’s technology advice and its germaneness to reading. Teachers often tell me that their goal is to make kids love reading or to turn students into lifelong readers. We can argue about whether those are thoughtful educational goals some other day (don’t get me going), but the question is how would you accomplish these goals?

The solutions that I see seem pretty far from Dr. Bruce’s well-earned insights.

These teachers tell me that they make kids love reading by requiring them to read on their own for certain amounts of time. Or by dumping required readings; choice is big. Or by paying the kids off with free pizzas or rooftop principals.

Chip never said that we should require that our teachers log onto computers for 20-minutes a day. He didn’t tell us to inundate the classrooms with technology. He didn’t tell us to reduce instruction to give our students free technology time. He didn’t tell us to avoid websites that we thought would be most beneficial to our students so that they’d have sufficient Angry Birds time.  

No, his notion of getting people into technology was to make technology serve real purposes in people’s lives.

Hmmm… could that really work in reading?

That made me think about some other thoughtful friends of mine, Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey. Along with all the other things they do, they are Teacher Leaders at the Health Sciences High and Middle College, a charter high school in San Diego.

At their school, the curriculum is shaped by big ideas… questions—real questions that students want to answer. Each year, the kids nominate questions, and then there is an election to select the questions that will shape the curriculum. This year’s cohort is exploring:

• What makes you unique?
• Who can we trust?
• What is love?
• What is the difference between surviving and living?

To answer these successfully, teachers will have to align their curriculum in ways that can support the kids’ investigations, and a lot of reading is likely to be needed, of course; reading that isn’t being done because teachers are saying, “Read! I want you to like this,” but because reading can help solve real problems of intellectual curiosity in these kids’ lives and because reading allows them to be part of the group and to contribute to its success.

[In my own reading life, I’ve gotten interested lately in the big intellectual ideas of the Twentieth Century, and how they shape our lives. Cyndie decided she wanted to ride along with me on this journey. We just finished Spengler’s lugubrious Decline of the West (both volumes) and now are immersed in the economic formulations of Lord John Maynard Keynes. It takes all kinds. But we’re reading these—not to read—but because we want to know something, and reading them together is like a continuing date night.]

If you want kids to love reading, then make reading important in your students’ lives.

Instead of providing free reading time during the school day, pose academic and social problems for the kids to solve (or, better, let them pose their own); problems that reading can help address.

The idea that loving reading means reading particular kinds of texts in a particular fashion, like sitting with a book for 20 minutes of continual reading is a pretty narrow vision of love anyway.  

As a father and now grandfather, I’m able to take the long view.

My daughters both liked reading. The oldest would have rather read than breathed, and the younger liked reading, too—though not as much as she enjoyed talking to friends, burning CDs, talking to friends, swimming, talking to friends, building things, and so on.

Now they have their own careers and families. Reading waxes and wanes in their lives based on their current needs. My oldest, the inveterate reader—the Accelerated Reader record holder, doesn’t read so much these days, at least not for pleasure. She is addressing the medical needs of a family member now, and novels and free reading time aren’t the meat she seeks.

Her love of reading looks much more like the environments that Chip, Doug, and Nancy emphasize.

Of course, reading can help in lots of different ways: It can be a source of entertainment or emotional escape. It can provide spiritual fulfillment and insights about how to live one’s life. Reading has something to do with forming an identity, too. But kids are more likely to discover reading while tackling those needs than they are to discover the relevance of reading to those needs during free reading time.     

Instead of trying to make kids love reading, why not make reading important in their daily lives, and then trust that reading will be loved in the only way that really matters—they’ll use it when it meets their needs. 

Teacher question: 

Any link to how the 'Repeated Reading' strategy works? How long text can be repeated, how long can text be, depends on accuracy? 

Shanahan response:

I received this note while in Ireland, and it is such a basic question that I was gobsmacked by it. These are just the kinds of queries that I love to respond to on this site: Topics that many teachers assume they know about, but that often turn out to be full of surprises.

The idea of repeated reading emerged in the late 1970s… as a result of the writings of S. Jay Samuels (1979) and Carol Chomsky (1978). They found, in separate studies, that engaging kids in repeatedly reading texts aloud improved reading ability. It was kind of a no-brainer that such approaches were beneficial by the time the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) concluded that they were (that portion of the report was written by Jay Samuels and me—and even he was a bit taken aback by how that work had proceeded since when he’d first written about it).

Multitasking is essential to good reading.

Scientific studies (e.g., LaBerge & Samuels, 1976) revealed the importance of “automaticity” to reading. Readers have to be able to decode without thinking about decoding. We only have so much thinking space available. The more cognitive space devoted to figuring out words, the less available to grasp the text's meaning.  

Samuel’s idea of repeated reading was that it could help readers to gain automaticity. He thought it would help readers to master the art of reading words accurately and with sufficient speed.

When children are learning to read, they initially struggle to read words accurately. That is very common in Grade 1. These students then often gain mastery over accuracy at the expense of speed—such accurate but slow reading tends to emerge in Grade 2 (Morris, 1999). Samuels’ goal was to build accuracy and speed to a point where comprehension would be possible. The more efficient the reading of the words, the more that readers' attention could be turned to meaning.

Carol Chomsky (1978) had a similar notion of the problem. She thought there was a subgroup of poor readers who “knew” phonics—that is, they knew the letters and sounds and could decode words reasonably well. However, these strugglers couldn't apply these skills fluently during the reading of a text.

Chomsky believed that this special group of readers might benefit from reading texts aloud repeatedly since it would give them essential practice in applying those known skills.

Samuels and Chomsky both reported research studies that had positive results, as have many other researchers since that time. 

What specifically is “Repeated Reading?”

Repeated Reading is a particular method proposed by S. Jay Samuels to develop decoding automaticity with struggling readers. In this approach, students are asked to read aloud short text passages (50-200 words) until they reach a criterion level of success (particular speed and accuracy goals).

However, research shows there are many ways that teachers can successfully exploit the idea repeated oral reading, so I’ll talk about “repeated reading” here (rather than Repeated Reading).

What are some of those other ways of doing repeated reading?

In Chomsky’s scheme, the kids listened to audiotapes of a text and then worked on making their own tapes—trying to match the quality of the originals. Reading while listening or echo reading works too, as does Radio Reading (in which kids work with scripts—making the oral reading purposeful), and Neurological Impress (don’t ask).

All of these schemes include oral reading. They also all include reading the texts multiple times (either to a particular quality criterion, such as a particular number of words correct per minute—or a set number of repetitions, usually 3).

What's the goal of such instruction, to get kids to read fast?

No, the goal is to get students to read the author’s words accurately, to read texts at about the speed of oral language, and to make this reading sound like language (pausing in the right places so that ithe text makes sense).

What is the outcome of such practice?

Repeated reading usually leads to better reading performance. The biggest payoffs tend to be with word reading, but it also has been found to improve oral reading fluency and reading comprehension (the most frequently reported area of improvement). This comprehension finding surprised Jay Samuels. Remember the comprehension impact should be indirect--through word reading improvement. He was shocked that so many researchers failed to include word reading measures in their studies, even though they always tested reading comprehension. There was a very good chance that such studies would have found no differences in comprehension and would have, therefore, concluded that repeated reading didn’t work. Fortunately, the comprehension payoffs were large enough and consistent enough that it didn't turn out to be a problem.

Were there special kids who needed repeated reading?

The research suggests that part of Chomsky's theory was wrong. Studies of repeated reading sometimes aimed at these special "average phonics skills but low reading" kids, and other times they just focused on all readers in regular classrooms. The results were exactly the same: repeated reading improved reading ability across the board.

How many re-readings should kids be doing?

The research suggests that three readings should be sufficient so I would limit it to that. Three readings and it is time to move on to another text. 

How long should the passages be?

Samuels used passages of 50-200 words; with the shorter texts used with the students with the lowest reading abilities. That makes sense to me. In classroom reading practice, that would be like a page or two in a primary grade reader. It is important to keep the texts brief for this work so that when students reread, memory becomes a useful scaffold. The longer the text, the harder to carry over what was figured out on the first reading. (Joe Torgesen has emphasized the importance of using texts that share a lot of vocabulary. That way, when a student improves with one text, it is certain to immediately carry over to the next.)

How challenging should the texts be?

The texts used for fluency practice should be at students’ so-called “frustration levels.” If students don’t make many mistakes with a text (say 10 or more per hundred words), then the repetition is unlikely to improve their reading very much.

What about integrating comprehension work into this kind of fluency practice?

Some of the repeated reading routines have included a comprehension component, such as asking students a different question at the conclusion of each reading or having the student complete some kind of comprehension task each time. Other approaches do not do this. The research says that repeated reading pays off, whether there is a comprehension step or not. I'd include one under the well-n=known scientific precept: “It couldn’t hurt.”

How can a teacher listen to a whole classroom full of kids?

I recommend paired reading. Have one youngster read to another. Then they switch. While this practice is going on, the teacher circulates among the students listening to several one-at-a-time and giving feedback.

What about silent reading?

Silent reading should also take place regularly—I try to provide both an oral reading fluency period and a reading comprehension period daily. In the latter, except with beginners, the reading is silent. There are also a couple of studies in which kids read silently while a computer monitored their reading that has led to fluency improvement (Rasinski, Samuels, Hiebert, Petcher, & Feller, 2011).

What about round robin reading? We do “popcorn” in my class?

Schemes in which one child reads aloud and the rest of the students wait their turn are lousy. They don’t allow much oral reading; simply not enough practice to foster improvement. This is because only one child reads at a time. Second, repeated reading is very rare in round robin, making learning unlikely. Third, you may get pushback; kids who read poorly may refuse to read—something that never occurs when everyone is doing the reading.

Twice in the past couple of weeks I’ve heard about an article that directly challenges ideas I’ve published on Disciplinary Literacy (Dunkerly-Bean, J., & Bean, T. (2016). Missing the savoir for the connaissance: Disciplinary and content area reading as regimes of truth. Journal of Literacy Research, 48(4), 448-476.) My first contact on that said that I needed to respond somehow. I demurred not thinking it mattered much. Then, this week someone wrote saying that obviously, we don’t need to teach disciplinary literacy since there is no such thing—we can just keep doing what we have been doing with content area reading. Okay, now I’m interested….

 Shanahan responds:

  Heck, I thought I was going to get away with not having to respond to that paper. And, I guess its not enough to just say they got it wrong.

  What does the paper get wrong? Well, for starters it evidences almost a total lack of understanding of the disciplinary literacy project. Beyond that its analytic framework is either inappropriate to the purpose set for it or it is so badly implemented that the “results” are laughable, the analysis is biased, and the conclusion that disciplinary literacy is really just content area reading is a position maintainable only if one ignores the sources of the research, the purposes of the research, the nature of the research, and the research findings themselves—and this paper manages to do all of that. (Other than that the two concepts are almost identical!)

  Content area reading has been around for a long time—almost a 100-years now, with its mandate that “all teachers be teachers of reading.” The basic premise of content area reading, and this is something the paper gets right, is to get content teachers to teach “reading skills.” (The reasons for that are not explored in this paper, but they tend to be a bit murky. In most treatments, the idea has been to help kids better handle their content area textbooks and tests, while other times its point seems to be to advance general reading abilities).

  The paper is correct that reading educators early on recognized that disciplines “featured distinct rhetorical patterns and different perspectives on constructing knowledge.” In fact, this is a point content area reading buffs have promoted consistently since the 1920s. But though their rhetoric has been spot on, it is an idea more honored in the breach than in content area reading lessons.

  It seems to me that if you really believed that literacy worked differently in the disciplines, you’d have some interest in what those differences may be and how to support kids to develop those varied literacy practices. But is that what happened?

  No, over the past 75 years, dozens of books chock full of content area reading strategies have been published, but always from the point of view of authorities in the field of reading education (talk about cultural insensitivity—we’re the ones who know how to read math texts apparently, not the mathematicians or math teachers)—and without careful sustained study of the actual reading, texts, language, and inquiry practices evident in these fields. And, now that anyone dares do such studies, we hear from the content reading experts that this is just a continuation of their work (since they always knew reading was different). It would be like saying Edison didn’t really invent the light bulb, “since we always knew there must be something better than candles.”

  Okay, so reading educators skipped the empirical study of these kinds issues, but that doesn’t mean the pedagogical suggestions that they floated weren’t disciplinary specific, right? Well, actually that would be a rewriting of history as well.

  For example, the landmark Herber textbook (1970): The first chapter could have been written by anyone doing disciplinary literacy research today. It does a great job of suggesting reasons why literacy must work differently in each discipline. But what about the rest of the book? Each chapter shows how one learning strategy can be applied in all the disciplines because it encouraged students to answer literal, inferential, and applied questions (and, apparently, since the disciplines are so different it is important that we ask the same kinds of questions when thinking about the intellectual explorations of each).

  The problem is that Dunkerly-Bean and company in their Foucaultian exegesis of the divide between these two empirical projects simply ignore the purposes of the two fields of study. Content area reading is, as they point out, about teaching kids reading skills within content area classrooms. Accordingly, content area experts have come up with a bunch of teaching and study techniques that can be applied to any content.

  I have no doubt that Dunkerly-Bean is correct that learning the meanings of lists of vocabulary words is not likely to differ much from one field to another (though the words themselves would surely differ). Word webs, four squares, mnemonics and memorization techniques are not the tools of the disciplines, as much as they are tools of students trying to learn any lexicon. These kinds of approaches have nothing to do with how historians read or how mathematicians write, they are about how students best learn information and so are as appropriate with a medical student as with kindergartner, and as appropriate in math as in literature.

  The reason why this article is so far off base is that it seems to assume that the disciplinary literacy project is also about teaching reading skills in content classes or about making every teacher a teacher of reading. They’ve simply missed the point, which is why, when they analyze pedagogy that is related to disciplinary literacy they assume it must be the same stuff they have been peddling.           

  Disciplinary literacy experts point out that literacy is used differently in the various disciplines and subjects areas because those fields create different kinds of knowledge, and they create that knowledge differently, and communicate that knowledge differently, and critique and evaluate that knowledge differently. Consequently, scholars who are studying disciplinary literacy are trying to figure out what those differences may be.

  Their purpose isn’t to come up with new teaching methods, but to alter the curriculum. Disciplinary literacy studies are trying to figure out what it is that a novice would need to understand about the literacy and language use of those fields of study so they could participate more fully in those disciplines as they begin to study them.

  Dunkerly-Bean et al. see sourcing in history as just a new teaching strategy for building reading comprehension—that can be included in a cafeteria of content area reading techniques like I-Charts, 3-level guides, and KWL. While Sam Wineburg, the historian and history educator who identified this heuristic through his disciplinary literacy research, sees it instead as a fundamental characteristic of the mindset needed to understand history. Sourcing isn’t a technique for raising reading achievement but for thinking about the appropriate ideas when one is reading history (in this case, appropriate means thinking about that information in the way a historian might, rather than the way anybody else would).

    Another example of their missing the point: “This work has produced an ongoing map of the particularities of discourse across the disciplines aimed at guiding instruction. For example, music classes focus heavily on performance dimensions…” (p. 459). They evidently think disciplinary literacy is about looking in the classroom. But, in fact, disciplinary literacy research looks not at pedagogical circumstances as much as at what it is that practitioners (musicians in this case) read and how they carry out this reading and whether those texts or reading practices have any unique qualities that should be made explicitly available to students.

  This kind of misunderstanding permeates this paper. For example, we developed a summarization approach for use with chemistry. Indeed, there are lots of content area reading techniques for teaching kids to summarize text and lots of research showing that summarizing text information has a positive impact on learning.

  The disciplinary literacy issue isn’t whether summarization helps learning (it does) or whether chemists ever summarize (of course, they do), but whether they summarize in any special way. In fact, think alouds during the reading of chemists revealed that there were particular types of information that they specifically sought out. These categories of information were not just useful but were part of the foundations of chemistry.            

Accordingly, we asked students to summarize these four categories of information in a structured chart. The Beans jumped on these charts as evidence that disciplinary literacy was just content area reading, since many of the study techniques in content area reading use charts.

  Talk about confusing the superficial with the crux.

  They teach kids to use charts to summarize text information as a form of rehearsal to enhance kids’ learning of text information in any subject. We, on the other hand, recognize that importance is not a general property of ideas, but is bound up in the intellectual cultures of the disciplines.  Thus, we used charts to help kids to use four fundamental concepts of chemistry to summarize information in a chemistry text. They wanted kids to know how to use charts as a study technique so they would be better learners. We didn’t give a damn about the charts. We were trying to teach kids to use the same organizing concepts chemists would when thinking about our chemical world.

  Similarly, it has been noted that historians learn how to translate narrative history into a historical argument (or rather to recognize the implicit historical argument being made in a narrative history). Because the device we used to try to stimulate kids to think in this way had columns and rows, the Beans decided this was the same as any content area study technique aimed at getting the kids to master the information in the text. But our purpose wasn’t to help kids memorize these historical stories (we didn’t care whether they could remember the stories at all).

  As with the history and chemistry examples above, all of these techniques are about getting kids to confront ideas that are specialized or unique to these disciplines. Teaching students to source a text is central to historical thinking; the same cannot be said about mathematical thinking. The four fundamental concepts that chemists try to identify and relate can be summarized in a chart, but the basic idea is to get kids to use those fundamental concepts to construct a deep understanding of chemistry inquiry (and, by the way, those concepts are not applicable even in other science classes). Transforming narrative history into historical argument gets at basic issues of what history is and how we use it.

  In fairness to the Beans, I would point out that early in the disciplinary literacy project, researchers fell into some of the same kinds of interpretive errors evident in this paper. For example, an early study found that scientists took notes while reading and therefore scientific literacy consisted of taking notes. The problem with that, of course, is that we all belong to several communities (note taking is not specialized to science or even to the community of educated individuals).

  The point of disciplinary literacy isn’t to identify text features (we spell words with letters) or reading practices (we read English from left-to-right) that everyone or nearly everyone engages in. Seeing that kids learn to negotiate those things is the realm of the reading teacher. We are interested in insights like science is the only field that uses colons to indicate a causal relationship or that mathematics discourse embeds graphic elements into the discourse itself, unlike how it is done in a science text.

  One last important point: Most of the states have recently adopted disciplinary literacy standards. It is essential that teachers recognize that these standards are not championing the kinds of content area reading strategies long promoted, but are getting at the kinds of unique or specialized reading practices described here (and that have generally been ignored by content area reading educators). The Beans may be confused about this, but teachers cannot afford to be.

I currently teach English as a Second Language to grades 6-8. Next year I will have high beginners, many of whose spring MapR reading scores are in the K-1 range (153-165), and many of whom had interrupted education in their home countries. Where I teach your work is cited as the basis for a requirement that we give all students, regardless of their ESOL level, grade-level texts in English in ESOL class.

  While I am OK with scaffolding up 3 or 4 grade levels, I think the gap between readers at a K or 1 level and a 7th-grade text is too great to help advance the students' reading, particularly when the reading is in the students' second language.

  I found in one of your blogs that you recommended staying with relatively easy books with older readers who are reading at a kindergarten or first-grade level; the response from my county's staff when I showed them your blog was that it can be difficult for teachers to adjust their paradigm. Can you please clarify about how many grade levels above an ESOL students' English reading level a text in English should be?

  As a novice skier, I'd freak out if someone put me on a black slope. I could get down the mountain, but I'd be on my fanny most of the way, and I don't think my skiing would improve overall. Thanks in advance for your time in responding.

Shanahan response:       

This would be an easier question if you were asking about native speakers. With them, the idea would be to give the decoding parts of literacy a chance to get a firm footing before you worry much about providing kids with linguistically and substantively challenging text. You would do that by starting with simple texts with consistent spelling patterns and easy to see sound-symbol relations (e.g., lots of CVC, that is, consonant-vowel-consonant words) and with lots of repetition (e.g., using some words over and over, making sure the nascent readers saw the letter “d” as the first letter in lots of words or the letter “a” as the medial letter in lots of words).

Once the firm phonic footing was accomplished, say by the time the kids could read a beginning second-grader reader, then scaffolding a 7th-grade book wouldn’t be as big a deal—at least it wouldn’t mean you’d be trying to scaffold most of the decoding, too.

      But with English learners that advice might be incorrect.

      English learners come in different flavors. For example, some English learners can already read in their home language and that can change the situation, especially if those students read an alphabetic language with a lot of shared commonality with English. If the student can’t read in any language, then the English learner is no different from children who grow up in homes with only English. They need to learn to decode, so I’d start them with beginning reading books.

        If they could decode, but in a language like Arabic, that shares little similarity to English, I’d still start them with the beginning reading books, to get the beginnings of that decoding system in place. 

      But if they could read Spanish or French or other languages with great similarities to English, I wouldn’t be so careful about starting with easy, beginning texts.

      I can turn your question around a couple of ways: You could be asking me (1) is it possible to scaffold a student through six grade levels of text—my kids are in grade 8, but read like second-graders? (that would be the same distance as from your seventh-grade to first-grade question but without the decoding confusion) or you could be asking (2) is it possible to scaffold a beginning reader (K-1) to any higher level, like grade 3 or grade 7?

        If it is the latter of those queries—the one about scaffolding beginning readers up, I’ve answered it. It doesn’t make sense to me to try to scaffold over any appreciable distance when a youngster is trying to figure out how to decode basic text. With those kids, I would teach phonics, I would engage them in reading easy texts, and I would read the seventh-grade texts to them with all of the scaffolding needed to keep their heads in the game about the ideas in those texts.

      If it is the former of those queries—the one about scaffolding a great distance, like 6 or 7 grade levels, then I have a different answer for you. In fact, it is possible to scaffold that kind of distance, as long as the readers aren’t beginners. I’m saying that It is possible to scaffold the reading of an eighth-grade book for a student who now can only read at second-grade level, and there are benefits to doing this (though I’m certainly not claiming it to be an easy way to go).

      The benefits of scaffolding over that distance is that the students who I presume are 12- or 13-years-old are allowed to focus on topics and treatments that match with their intellectual and social levels (just because someone reads like he is six-years old doesn’t mean he has the interest and intellectual apparatus of a 6-year-old).

      When I taught myself to read a foreign language, I usually read two texts per day. One was a primary grade text (usually magazine articles because that was what I could get my hands on), and one was a grown up text (books, magazine articles, etc.).

      I would suggest the same pattern with the students that you work with: two texts per day, one on grade level (maybe the social studies book or the literature anthology if your school has one), and one text that could be a beginning reader or slightly higher than that. Both texts will need scaffolding, at least initially. Both texts will benefit from oral reading (for awhile). Obviously, one text is going to require greater support, so I would suggest adjusting their lengths… thus, if you read a page of the seventh-grade reading book, you might read the entire story in a second-grade reader.

      What you—and the students—will be able to see as you progress is that the easier texts (that were pretty unreadable originally) become easier as you work with them, reading them and rereading them along the way. You will also see that the seventh-grade book is still far out of reach for independent reading, but that, over time, it is becoming increasingly attainable. That means that you will be raising the level of the easy book frequently, but you probably won’t be raising the level of the higher reader (you’ll raise the lengths of those harder texts, you might raise the portion of time devoted to it, but you won’t be looking for an eighth-grade book very soon).

      How can you scaffold this?

      First, make sure the kids know what you are up to, that they have English dictionaries, and that they recognize what the challenge is. Teaching someone to read in a language that is foreign to them is something that takes a lot of effort on the part of the learner (they need to figure the language out, and your instruction can help them to do that).

      Rereading is a particularly important scaffold. Working over a selection 2-3 times can be a big locus of learning. It is demanding to do this, I can’t even always get myself to reread, even though I know that I learn from it. Don’t worry about perfection with this rereading, worry about making each re-reading better than the last. Whether students recognize the meaning of words that were unknown the first time around sound more like English readers on the reread, the improvement from reading-to-reading needs to be obvious (one thing a teacher can do is to help make these improvements obvious).

        When I was starting out the most useful scaffold I had was the dictionary; looking up words that helped me to figure out the sentences. The difference between the beginning books and the adult books was that I had to look up more words in a sentence to figure out the adult one. With the children’s books, I could sometimes (especially as I progressed) look up a word and guess the meanings of some others to make sense of a sentence. Be prepared to be the children’s dictionary for a while. Tell them the meanings of words (and supplement the text reading with working with those word meanings—vocabulary instruction--even flashcards for a period of time).

      Background knowledge is a great scaffold. I found that I could read the articles about Britney Spears and American politics more easily than I could read the ones about French politics or certain French historical events (for which I had no background). Again, with no teacher, I would zip off to look up a topic in Wikipedia to see what I could figure out—and then would go back and read the French, usually doing a better job, with the new information fresh in mind. As you can be the dictionary at first, you can also be the encyclopedia.

      Grammar was harder. I didn’t have a teacher like you who could get me going with French grammar, so that languished for some time—with all the problems that poses for meaning. Once I had mastered a basic vocabulary (I still had to look up words in the beginning books, but not as many as initially), I started to either impose English grammar rules (like that subjects proceed verbs) or I had to use devices like Google Translate to tell me what sentences meant—no, that doesn’t always work—and from that I would then try to figure out what the meaning revealed about unique French grammar patterns (like tucking the direct object between subject and verb, boy is that confusing).

      I get your skiing analogy and definitely understand the insights and appreciations that they express. Learning is scary (you won’t fall down and break your leg because the book you are reading is too hard, but you can be embarrassed or overwhelmed by it). Skiing breaks down as an analogy (at least for me—I don’t ski) because I can’t imagine a trainer going down the hill with you, adding balance or reminding you to keep your knees bent.  In reading, that is exactly the kind of thing that I am suggesting that you scaffold—helping the student break down a sentence, showing him how to make cohesive links or to pull in background information. 

      Theoretically, there is no distance that cannot be scaffolded successfully when it comes to language learning and reading texts across grade levels. However, the greater the distance the more impractical this kind of scaffolding becomes.

      There is so much I don’t know about your teaching situation: how much conversational English your kids have, how motivated they are, how many minutes per day they are with you, what materials are available, what the size of the groups and diversity of attainment that there is. Obviously, the more difficult the situation, the less of what I have described you will be able to do easily.

        I suggested the importance of varying text levels—working with both easier and harder texts. I don’t know what resources are available to you, but I would suggest that you consider working with more levels than I did. Perhaps working with the seventh-grade book sometimes, but with a third- or fourth-grade book in place of that as the hard book on other occasions. Make sure the kids know what you are up to, and listen to their feedback and watch their progress. You are not trying to get the kids to a seventh-grade reading level this year (not from a second-grade level), but you are trying to get them to the highest level possible as quickly as possible, and I don’t believe that using fourth-grade books sometimes as the hard text is going to slow that progress down appreciably

        If your district is saying that students should only be taught at grade level, I think they are going to slow student progress. If you are saying that six grades are too impossible to scaffold, I think you will be doing the same. However, teaching these kids with a mix of texts, including the seventh-grade target texts… is likely to be the best prescription.

      Make sure the kids know what you are up to and what the text levels are. That way they can manage their own progress a bit, and I think you’ll find they’ll work harder at becoming more proficient English readers if they understand what is going on. They'll be more willing to work hard on the hard texts and won't be particularly insulted when you drop to the easier ones. In athletic training, strength comes from varied practice (intermittent intensive work under the greatest demands for brief periods, punctuating more extended but easier practice times). There is some evidence that varied difficulty matters in intellectual learning as well. If you are allowed to--and inclined to--follow this advice, i hope you'll keep me posted as to what you and your students figure out.

I coordinate reading interventions for my district. I have been told to stop referring to the National Reading Panel, as it is old and no longer relevant. Our universal screener is based on the 5 components of reading, and our basal interventions are also aligned to the "big 5". I don't think there is any way for me to stop referencing the NRP. Would you please comment?

Shanahan's response: 

That’s about as dopey as it gets.

  The National Reading Panel reviewed a great deal of empirical study in the late 1990s (we published the NRP Report in 2000). There was not a lot of controversy around the report, though there were a handful of critics who complained about various things the Panel did or did not do.

  However, whenever anybody reanalyzed the data they ended up with pretty much the same conclusions about what needed to be taught.

  Science is different than skirt lengths or necktie widths. It doesn’t go out of date by taste, but only once some new findings supersede it. We used to think that the speed of light was variable until Einstein proved that it wasn’t. Now we’re stuck with that idea until someone can come up with better evidence that helps us to understand it better.

  We have learned a lot in the intervening period—17 years is a long time—but even with that, newer reviews or my own reading of the various individual studies in the research literature that have been published would suggest that those five things that NRP wrote about continue to garner research support. If NRP found that phonics instruction was beneficial for young kids, and someone does a new study showing that it even helps some older struggling readers, that wouldn’t impeach the NRP findings—it would simply extend or broaden them.

  In fact, most of the studies of phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension strategies completed since NRP have tended to confirm the generalizability of the findings to an expanded range of students (e.g., younger kids, older kids, second language learners).

  NRP did conclude that there was no convincing evidence that giving kids free reading time during the school day improved achievement—or did so very much. There has been a lot of work on that since NRP but with pretty much the same findings: either no benefits to that practice or really small benefits (a .05 effect size—which is tiny). Today, NRP would likely conclude that practice is not beneficial rather than that there is insufficient data. But that’s arguable, of course.

  What I’m saying is that the evidence supporting instruction in the five areas in which NRP concluded were beneficial continues to accumulate—meaning that the case is even stronger today supporting the need for those kinds of teaching. The evidence is stronger now than it was in 2000.

  Whoever is telling you to ignore the NRP Report knows very little about reading or reading research and is really doing kids a disservice by pretending to know something about those things. 

I checked into Google Scholar today and looked up how many citations for the “National Reading Panel” there had been during 2017. The response: 699 citations this year alone (more than 16,000 since the year 2000). Those 2017 citations are appearing in high impact, scholarly journals like Developmental Psychology, Learning & Instruction, Reading & Writing, Journal of Research in Reading. I guess the scholarly community hasn’t gotten word from your school district that this is inappropriate.

  Bottom line? It is still a good idea to explicitly teach kids to hear the sounds within words (phonemic awareness), to decode (phonics), to read text aloud accurately, with appropriate speed, and with expression (fluency), to know the meanings of words, and to use reading strategies when reading text in order to understand it better (reading comprehension).

  Given that this report seemed to settle many of the arguments swirling around those things, and that the NRP Report has been ranked as third most influential educational document (right behind the NAEP tests and the international comparisons in mathematics), I think you are safe still relying on the NRP—until science comes up with something better. 

My district has moved into an approach of asking teachers to locate materials for standards-based instruction.  They have opted to create assessments to isolate individual standards to teach/test each standard individually. Each assessment is named by reading standard and is associated with grade-level English Language Arts courses. What thoughts do you have on how I might guide them to move from assessing isolated standards to a more integrated approach? 

Shanahan response:

Research has made it pretty clear that it is not possible to assess any of the individual standards so spending time on as your district is doing is a fool’s errand. Whatever scores or ratings they are coming up with have much in common with the syllables used for decoding in DIBELS; they’re nonsense.

Several years ago, ACT found that if texts are easy enough, kids can answer any kinds of questions about them. And, if the texts are hard enough, kids can’t answer even supposedly easy questions about them. What makes the difference in reading performance isn’t practice answering certain question types, but practice in interpreting texts that are challenging--that pose barriers to meaning.

That finding has been replicated numerous times between 1944 and 2017.

That’s the reason why both PARCC and SBAC are so careful to describe how they have developed tests based on the reading standards but then make no attempt to report on how well students or schools are doing with regard to any of the individual standards. It can’t be done in any meaningful or useful way, so they don’t do it.

School administrators and reading directors not knowing the difference between item writing and the psychological reality of the underlying cognitive constructs supposed to underlie those test items, blunder forward anyway.

The point isn’t that the standards should be ignored, but that teachers have to understand that reading comprehension tests do not/cannot measure single, separable, independent skills. These instruments provide nothing more than an overall indicator of general reading comprehension performance.

I don’t want to sound too negative on this: the point isn’t that reading comprehension tests are bad. They’re not. It is just that they measure “reading comprehension,” not independent skills like identifying the main idea, making comparisons, or drawing conclusions. Those “skills” can’t be separated and they certainly can’t be interpreted separately from the passages they are inquiring into. 

Instead of focusing on trying to get kids to answer certain kinds of questions, teachers should be teaching kids

• to read complex texts that pose various comprehension/interpretation barriers;
• vocabulary and how to figure out word meanings from morphology, context, and reference guides;
• how to connect the ideas in a text with what they already know;
• to interpret complicated sentences (by untangling the grammar);
• to make and trace cohesive connections across a text;
• to identify a text’s structure and how to use this structure to understand and remember the purpose of the text and what it says;
• to use comprehension strategies when they find a text to be tough going (like summarizing, questioning, visualizing/imaging);
• to pay attention to text meaning and to do something if it isn’t making sense;
• to decode the words;
• to read the text fluently with proper phrasing (paying attention to punctuation and meaning);
• to write about the ideas in a text (modeling, summarizing, analyzing, critiquing, synthesizing).

Beyond that, teachers should be giving kids lots of practice reading such texts, participating in discussions of those texts, writing about those texts, and using those texts to accomplish other purposes (e.g., doing science experiments or art projects, constructing websites, or conducting historical investigations). All of those things should take place with texts that the students initially struggle to read, but that they master through instruction and practice.

What teachers should not be doing is spending inordinate amounts of time scrambling to find texts to work with, or teaching kids to answer particular kinds of questions, or having them practicing the answering of such questions. Those, it seems to me, are the teacher versions of having kids copy spelling words 10 or 20 times—a big time waster, with little potential learning payoff.

If you have kids reading texts and you have deep conversations about the texts—conversations that critically explore the ideas communicated and the value and quality of how that information is expressed—I have no doubt that an appropriate mix of question types will be considered.

I think your district is making a big mistake. What a waste of resources and effort. What a waste of children’s learning opportunity. 

      One of the best things about research is that it can let the wind out of windbags and force some hard thinking. Our field suffers fatuous pronouncements as much as any. An example?

      How about the constant drumbeat concerning the failure of “one size fits all” instructional approaches? Seemingly, everybody agrees with that one.

    I typed the terms “one size fits all” and “reading instruction” into Google and came up with almost 97,000 documents. The basic premise of the aphorism is that we are all different and that we, therefore, learn differently.

      Let’s face it. Twenty-First-century classrooms are a mélange of IQs, races, ethnicities, genders, languages, disabilities, religions, SES levels, and who knows what else. Our kids certainly are different from one another.

      The conclusion drawn from that circumstance is the widely expressed claim that teachers can’t be expected to follow an instructional program because kids vary so much that teaching needs to be highly individualized.

      That makes sense. I know I’m pretty special, and the idea that society needs to adjust to my particular needs seems reasonable to me. Okay, maybe not so much.

      But that’s the cool thing about research. It encourages us to challenge popular beliefs; to ask questions like, is it true? Does research confirm what everyone thinks?

      The answer in this case, surprisingly enough, is “Not exactly.”

  Reading research isn’t challenging the idea that people aren’t infinitely complex or that each of us isn’t unique and special. It’s just that we don’t learn as uniquely as is so often claimed.

      Research has certainly done a great job of identifying ways that we differ: Boys don’t read as well as girls (Loveless, 2015), nor do they tend to like reading as much (Love & Hamston, 2004), nor do they choose to read the same books (Merisuo-Storm, 2006). There are racial and ethnic differences in literacy attainment, too (Musu-Gillette, Robinson, McFarland, Kewal, Ramani, et al., 2016); and more and better children’s books are available in different neighborhoods (Neuman & Ceprano, 2001).

Looking for Interactions

      But the issue is not whether kids vary—they do—but whether what works to teach them to read differs. Researchers try to get at that question by looking for “interactions.”

    Here is how it works: Let’s say the researcher wants to know if the Handy Dandy Reading Approach improves learning. Perhaps kids will be randomly assigned to a treatment group and a control group. The treatment group will be taught Handy Dandy and the control group will get the usual methods and materials. At the end, everyone will be tested and the two groups will be compared to see who won.

      Let’s say Handy Dandy is as wonderful as its creators imagined. Indeed, the kids taught with that program clearly outdistanced the controls, or as the researcher might say, “there was a significant main effect for treatment.”

      But then the researcher starts to wonder. Since one-size-doesn't-fit-all, and all kids are different, maybe the program works differently with some kinds of kids than with others. That leads the researcher to look beyond the main effects (whether the program had worked over all), to consider interaction effects (whether some subgroups may have performed differently).

    Boys might have underperformed the girls with Handy Dandy, but the control group boys also may have lagged, so that isn’t exactly what we’re getting at. A significant interaction, on the other hand, would reveal something like: The girls learned best from Handy Dandy, but the boys did somewhat better when they were taught with the traditional instructional approach. Such an interaction would reveal that the boys and girls were learning differently (not just that some were doing better than others).

      So, what is the result of those kinds of interaction analyses? More often than not, reading studies report no significant interactions. All the groups usually benefit similarly from the various instructional programs, approaches, materials, and procedures that we try out.

      Of course, there can be exceptions. For example, in a study in which students were encouraged to read over the summer—by providing them with books matched to their reading levels and interests and with some ongoing encouragement—there were no main effects; that is, the summer reading didn’t improve reading achievement (White, Kim, Kingston, & Foster, 2013).

      However, there was a significant, and puzzling, interaction.

      The children from the schools with high concentrations of poverty (75%-100% of students receiving free/reduced-price lunches) actually made small gains in reading achievement due to taking part in the summer reading program. Unfortunately, those from schools with lower poverty concentrations (46%-74%) not only didn’t gain as much as the more disadvantaged kids, but they declined in achievement in comparison to the non-booked controls. Encouraging reading was a small benefit to some kids, but it appears to have harmed some others. Yikes!

      The researchers opined that perhaps this interaction was an “anomaly.” It is true that the results of research are never 100 percent certain, so occasionally we may obtain a result that cannot be replicated. But this peculiar result illustrates how tenuous interactions tend to be in reading studies.

        One reason research hasn’t been able to tease out differences in learning has to do with power problems. What I mean by that is that if a sample of students is very small, it is harder to identify a significant difference; you can only do that with a small sample when the learning difference itself is especially large. Most studies have sample sizes large enough to provide a sound test of the main effect, but they do not necessarily include enough participants to allow for the subgroup comparisons needed to adequately test the “one size fits all” idea.

      A benefit of meta-analysis—since meta-analyses combine data from lots of individual studies—is that they can sometimes detect learning differences that the original studies wouldn’t have been able to. Meta-analysis can do that since sufficient numbers of subgroup members can be accumulated across the multiple studies. If one study had three black students, and another had 24 and two others 15, you may eventually gather enough data that would allow for a good racial comparison—even though none of the original studies may have had enough students to do this.

      With all of our large public research syntheses in literacy (e.g., National Reading Panel, National Early Literacy Panel, National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth, Committee for the Prevention of Reading Difficulties, Writing Next), we must be identifying a lot of interactions, right?

      Not really.

      Unfortunately, accumulating those differences across studies only works if the original reports provided key information about each subgroup. It isn’t enough to have included varied samples of kids in the studies (most literacy studies seem to do that). The studies need to report how those particular students did (such as providing the means and standard deviations for the various groups and measures—even if the study itself wasn’t analyzing those particular comparisons). That kind of reporting is required in medical studies these days, but it is still rare in reading.

      The consequence?

  Not many interactions are well tested in reading. However, even when they are they have tended to be either non-significant or dubious, as in that puzzling summer reading study. As the National Early Literacy Panel reported: “This meta-analysis evaluated whether such variables as race or SES mitigated or moderated the effectiveness of the various interventions. Unfortunately, it was all too rare that the original studies had provided sufficient data to allow for unambiguous conclusions to be drawn.” (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008, p. x). And, when it did manage to test such comparisons, it found no differences.

        The lack of such interactions undermines the mantra about “one-size-fits-all” instruction. For instance, what about learning styles—the notion that learners think differently or learn best from auditory or visual inputs, and so on? No interactions; there are no meaningful, reliable, or significant differences in learning styles that impact literacy learning (Willingham, Hughes, & Dobly, 2015).

      Yeah, but what if my child is “right-brained”? No interactions; there are no meaningful, reliable, or significant differences in the phony left-brain/right-brain divide in learning (Nielsen, Zielinski, Ferguson, Lainhart, et al., 2013).

        I could go on, but you get the idea—a lot of the individual differences that supposedly require different instructional responses from teachers are, well, baloney. 

That sums up the problem and points out some of the mythological differences that supposedly undermine one-size-fits-all approaches. Next week, I'll explore the one consistent difference in learning to read that really does exist. Until then...

      Last week, I pointed out that research had found few interactions in literacy learning. That is, research hasn't actually uncovered many situations in which different kinds of kids learn differently—despite many claims to the contrary.

      The idea that research would identify important aptitude-treatment interactions has been trumpeted for a long time (Cronbach & Snow, 1977). It just hasn’t panned out, for the most part, when it comes to reading instruction.

      Individual differences are extensive in reading—and in lots of variables that have a big impact upon learning (e.g., IQ, SES, language). Nevertheless, these variables tend to have a pretty consistent impact upon literacy progress.

      There certainly are some interesting instructional interactions—like the fact that kids seem to learn more when taught in smaller groups than in larger ones(Schwartz, Schmitt, & Lose, 2012). But that impact doesn’t vary by the type of kid. Children generally learn more when taught individually than when taught in somewhat larger groupings—no matter who the kids are.

      But does that mean that there are no important individual differences when it comes to learning to read? Not exactly—and that’s where it gets interesting. There is at least one important characteristic that consistently has distinguished learners from one another and that influences how much is learned; and, in that sense, the idea that one-size-doesn’t-fit-all makes a lot of sense.

        What distinguishes learners?

    To help answer that, let’s turn our attention to some studies by Carol Connor and her colleagues. Over the past decade or so, their work has been demonstrating that one particular child characteristic does lead to learning differences in reading, and that characteristic is….  wait for it…  what the students already know about reading.

        For example, there has been no more consistent research finding than that explicit phonics instruction is beneficial to young readers (NICHD, 2000). Teaching the relationship between letters and sounds and spelling patterns and pronunciations have been found to improve decoding ability, spelling ability, oral reading fluency, and even the reading comprehension of first-graders. 

      But that isn’t what Connor and her colleagues found (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004).

They examined first-graders’ decoding growth and whether there were interactions between the kind of instruction provided and what children already knew about decoding and vocabulary. As they described it:

“We predicted that children with stronger fall vocabulary or decoding skills would achieve stronger decoding skill growth in classrooms that provided more child-managed implicit decoding instruction and less teacher- managed explicit decoding instruction. In contrast, we expected children with weaker fall vocabulary or decoding scores to achieve stronger decoding skill growth in classrooms that provided more teacher-managed explicit decoding instruction and less child-managed implicit decoding instruction.” (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004, p. 310).

The kids who were more advanced in literacy and language at the beginning of the year didn’t respond as well to explicit phonics instruction. These kids did better when provided the opportunity to apply those already-obtained phonics skills by engaging in real reading and writing activities, especially those that students could manage themselves (such as independent silent reading, or independent completion of worksheets).

Their less knowledgeable classmates evidenced the opposite learning pattern. They, being less advanced, learned the most about decoding when their teachers provided them with explicit teaching in letters, letter-sound associations, phonological awareness, spelling or decoding words—especially when the teachers themselves managed these activities.

Other studies have found the same pattern with phonics instruction—that it is significantly more beneficial for kids who are low in phonics knowledge (Wolff, 2016), and this is true even with older struggling students (Solis, Vaughn, & Scammacca, 2015). Connor and her colleagues found something very similar with reading comprehension instruction for third-graders (Connor, Morrison, Fishman, Giuliani, et al, 2011): poorer readers gain a comprehension benefit from reading coherent text, while text coherence doesn’t seem to enhance the reading of better readers, presumably because they are already skilled enough to provide that themselves (Lien, 2013). And, other researchers have reported similar patterns (Müller, Richter, Krizan, Hecht, & Ennemoser, 2015).

I suspect that the occasional demographic interaction that does turn up in reading studies is not due to real differences in learning nor to statistical aberrations.

What is really going on is due to differences in what the students happened to already know about reading at the time of the study (Crowe, Connor, & Petscher, 2009). Thus, a method that looks to be particularly advantageous for poverty kids or second-language learners may just be apt for kids with a particular level of literacy attainment.

If one were to try out the same method with better-achieving kids from those same demographic groups, the supposed advantage would likely disappear.

It is rare that students will benefit from being taught what they already know, and more support—instructional or textual—will usually be most helpful for those who need that support than for those skilled enough to get on by themselves.

When we think of all of the demographic differences—real and invented—that supposedly divide us (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, religion, region, learning styles), maybe we aren’t that different after all. What it takes to become literate appears to be pretty much the same for all of us. We all need to learn the same things about reading and text to be literate and we all benefit from the same kinds of instruction.

But while that appears to be true, learning—learning to read, learning to use reading to learn about our world—affects us. Learning changes our brains, our interests, our abilities, and it’s those changes, ultimately, that need to be adjusted for in our teaching.

If children already know their letters and sounds, devoting time to such instruction is a lost opportunity. This time would be better dedicated to guiding kids to apply those skills to writing or text reading; or to teaching more advanced skills.

If youngsters can already read a text with a relatively high degree of accuracy and comprehension, such as is the case with texts at the so-called independent or instructional levels, then there is little opportunity for kids to learn from those texts (Morgan, Wilcox, & Eldredge, 2000). Kids who are placed in books in that way are at a learning disadvantage; one would expect greater learning to accrue from more challenging book placements. 

And, if youngsters can already read a text fluently, practicing fluency with it won’t help much. It would make greater sense to do this work with a harder book (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003) or to shift the attention to comprehension or writing.

Is it true that one-size-doesn’t-fit-all when it comes to learning?

If we’re talking about what kids need to learn to become literate or what kinds of instruction are likely to effective in guiding kids to master reading, then the answer is, we’re pretty darn similar, and one size is just fine.

However, what we learn changes us. Instruction should be respectful of those differences in knowledge and skill because doing so can provide learning advantages. Teachers should use assessment information to ensure their teaching focuses on guiding kids to master what has not yet been accomplished. In that sense, research supports the notion of instructional differentiation and one-size-definitely-does-not-nor-ever-will-fit-all in reading instruction. 

References     

Connor, C.M., Morrison, F.J., Fishman, B., Giuliani, S., Luck, M., Underwood, P.S., Bayraktar, A., Crowe, E.C., & Schatschneider, C. (2011). Testing the impacts of child characteristics X instruction interactions on third graders’ reading comprehension by differentiating literacy instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 46, 189-221.

Connor, C.M., Morrison, F.J., & Katch, L.E. (2004). Beyond the Reading Wars: Exploring the effect of child-instruction interactions on growth in early reading. Scientific Studies in Reading, 8, 305-336.

Cronbach, L., & Snow, R. (1977). Aptitudes and instructional methods: A handbook of research on interactions. New York: Innovations.

Crowe, E.C., Connor, C.M., & Petscher, Y. (2009). Examining the core: Relations among reading curricula, poverty, and first and third grade reading achievement. Journal of School Psychology, 47, 187-214.

Kuhn, M.R., & Stahl, S.A. (2003). Fluency: A review of development and remedial practices. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 3-21.

Lien, C.S. (2013). Text coherence, reading ability, and children’s scientific understanding. Bulletin of Educational Psychology, 44, 875-904.

Love, K., & Hamston, J. (2004). Committed and reluctant male teenage readers: Beyond bedtime stories. Journal of Literacy Research, 36, 335-400.

Loveless, T. (2015). How well are American students learning. Washington, DC: Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings.

Merisuo-Storm, T. (2006). Boys and girls like to read and write different texts. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 50, 111-125.

Morgan, A., Wilcox, B.R., & Eldredge, J.L. (2000). Effect of difficulty levels on second-grade delayed readers using dyad reading. Journal of Educational Research, 94, 113-119.

Müller, B., Richter, T., & Krizan, A., Hecht, T., & Ennemoser, M. (2015). Word recognition skills moderate the effectiveness of reading strategy training in Grade 2. Learning & Individual Differences, 40, 55-62.

Musu-Gillette, L., Robinson, J., McFarland, J., KewalRamani, A., Zhang, A., & Wilkinson-Flicker, S. (2016). Status and trends in the education of racial and ethnic groups 2016. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

National Early Literacy Panel. (2008). Developing early literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction: reports of the subgroups. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.

Neuman, S.B., & Celano, D. (2001). Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities: An ecological study of four neighborhoods. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 8-26.

Nielsen, J. A., Zielinski, B. A., Ferguson, M. A., Lainhart, J. E. & Anderson, J. S. (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PLoS ONE, 8, e71275–11.

Schwartz, R.M., Schmitt, M.C., & Lose, M. (2012). Interactions between size of groups and learning. Elementary School Journal, 112, 547-567.

Solis, M., Vaughn, S., & Scammacca, N. (2015). The effects of an intensive reading intervention for ninth-graders with very low reading comprehension. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 30, 104-113.

White, T. G., Kim, J. S., Kingston, H. C., & L. Foster (2013).  Replicating the effects of a teacher-scaffolded voluntary summer reading program: The role of poverty. Reading Research Quarterly, 49, 5-30.

Willingham, D. T., Hughes, E. M., & Doboly, D. G. (2015). The scientific status of learning styles theory. Teaching of Psychology, 42, 266-271.

Wolff, U. (2016). Effects of a randomized reading intervention study aimed at 9-year-olds: A 5-year follow-up. Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 22, 85-100.

You hope to write something that someone will find useful. But the responses might make you feel more like you’ve been dropped onto the set of Fox News or MSNBC.

Recently, I’ve experienced some interesting responses.

m For example:

Studies show that phonemic awareness (PA) training helps young kids learn to read (PreK through Grade 1). From those studies, I claimed we should teach PA to the point where kids can fully segment words into their individual phonemes. This conclusion was based both on the experimental impacts of training studies and on large-scale analyses of children’s development.

Before long I heard from David A. Kilpatrick, author of Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. He took exception with my claims about the importance of segmentation. He rightly pointed out that studies show that phoneme manipulation tasks are harder than segmentation tasks; that phoneme manipulation ability continues to develop through Grade 4; and, that PA continues to correlate with reading through Grade 6. Based on this, he believes we should continue to teach PA long beyond full segmentation.         

How can one disagree with such a thoughtful and reasonable argument?

My position, ultimately, is based on the fact that there are more than 100 studies showing the learning benefits of PA instruction—in PreK, K, and Grade 1.

And, how many studies show its benefits in Grades 2 and up?

None.

David Kilpatrick may be right about the value of continuing the PA instructional regime into these upper grades. Perhaps there are achievement points to be found in continuing PA instruction to the point where kids can easily do mental manipulations of phonemes (e.g., adding, deleting, reversing). But you won’t see me touting that until someone actually proves a learning benefit for kids.

Hypothesizing a benefit and proving a benefit isn’t the same thing.

More recently, I’ve been smacked upside the head by several readers upset with me for not proposing more, and more thorough, spelling instruction and morphology instruction focused on spelling aimed at advancing students’ reading ability.

Some of those arguments have been enthusiastic.

Traditional phonics instruction emphasizes letters and sounds but ignores the morphological and etymological reasons for spelling, my critics have pointed out. Reading experts have long recognized the importance of the morphological aspects of word meanings, but there has been little pedagogy aimed at the morphological aspects of spelling.

I’ve been sent lots of linguistic evidence to convince me of the morphological nature of our spelling system—and most of that work cites Dick Venezky’s seminal work.

In the 1960s, when computers first allowed for the ambitious quantitative study of language, Dick revealed the surprising consistency inherent in the English spelling system. Contrary to what was long believed—that our spelling system was a confusing mess—Venezky argued that whatever was lost in ease of pronunciation, was more than regained in the consistency of meaning inherent in our spellings. Hence, the endings of dogs and cats may be pronounced differently: /z/ and /s/, but their identical spelling consistently and helpfully signaled plurality.

I’m happy to see that Dick’s work continues to bear fruit in linguistics (he was one of my teachers—he even helped me to design morphology-oriented spelling measures for my doctoral dissertation). But I think he’d be surprised to hear his work used as an argument against phonics instruction – he was a big phonics proponent (though I’ve seen him offer the same kinds of linguistic critiques of phonics programs that have been sent to me recently).

Dick not only had expertise in linguistics but extensive knowledge of psychology and computer science. He knew that teaching kids to read was different than inputting a linguistic system to a computer. Despite the flaws and shallowness of many (most) phonics programs when it comes to features like morphological sophistication, such teaching still gives students a clear learning benefit.

What Dick Venezky came to believe was that phonics instruction gave students “clues” to the English spelling system. Students then use those clues to figure out how the system works. Phonics instruction does not teach everything one would need to “decode” text, but it provides useful pointers and puts kids into a mindset of trying to understand the system.

That doesn’t mean he would—or that we should—reject the idea of introducing morphological explanations and “clues” earlier, only that we shouldn’t be so sure that it would improve things as much as some morphology proponents assume.

For example, one colleague pointed out that in some phonics programs, kids are taught to divide the syllables of “action” in the following manner: ac/tion. He argued that this was a bad choice because it obscures that the root word is “act.” That’s correct linguistically, but does it matter when you’re 7?

Initially, we hope to teach kids enough to allow them to come up with an approximate pronunciation of a word that is in their mental lexicons (primary grade kids know 5,000-10,000 words). It is more likely they’ll come up with “action” by saying “ak/shun” then by saying “act/ion.”

Of course, if they don’t know the word action—don’t know what the word action means—then, breaking the word the second way (emphasizing “act”) may just get them to the meaning no matter what the pronunciation.

The issue here turns on what would be best for beginning readers… is it best to help them to figure out the meanings of unknown words or to help them to translate print to pronunciations of words already in the child’s oral language? I think it is the latter, so I don’t mind delaying most morphological work until phonics is mastered (e.g., Words Their Way).

However, there are arguments that we should teach morphology earlier and even in place of phonics instruction (one critic wrote that the National Reading Panel findings were out of date since we now know morphological training to be more beneficial than phonics). Eeks!

I looked at these critics’ evidence (Bowers & Bowers, 2017 provides a nice summary of this work). Specifically, they point to two studies of morphological training for young children. One especially weak study—impossible to tell if the outcomes were due to the training or to existing ability differences in the participants—claimed long-term benefits to preschool morphology training.

And, an experimental study that examined the impact of 10 hours of morphology teaching: This one claimed to enhance reading performance by more than a grade level! Not surprisingly, the outcome measures used were tightly aligned to the training and there were other design problems, too.

That’s the entire body of instructional research one could use to prescribe instruction for preschool and primary grade kids (and in both studies, everyone got lots of phonics instruction, too—not exactly proof of the inadequacy of phonics).

Again, I can’t really say these folks are wrong—we might be able to affect clear reading improvement by teaching the morphological aspects of spelling earlier and more thoroughly, instead of what we currently provide with phonics.

But I definitely won’t be prescribing reading instruction based on a single 10-hour study.

The reason why I insist that we teach phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary (word meanings including morphology), oral reading fluency, reading comprehension strategies, and writing is because there are dozens, even hundreds, of studies done by different researchers, with different kinds of kids, with different variations on the instructional routines, but with a consistent and substantial learning payoff. Why trust 100 such studies on phonics—some carried out for as long as 3-years—over a single small study of 10 hours of morphology instruction? I think you can probably answer that one for yourself.

I hope researchers will continue to propose provocative hypotheses about learning, and that they’ll continue to evaluate these ideas rigorously under a broad array of instructional conditions. And, if they find something that consistently helps kids, then I hope we’ll adopt their ideas. Until then, I won’t be recommending morphology over phonics or other terrific but unproven ideas—no matter how intelligently, reasonably, or vociferously those opinions may be stated. 

Teacher question:

I have a question regarding my school's reading program. My question today is about the reading portion of our literacy block and most specifically the partner reading and independent reading.

I'm finding that my homogenous group of fourth-grade students aren’t fluent readers. The routine expectation is that partners take turns reading a paragraph at a time. The partner who is following along and not reading aloud is to provide a brief summary of what was read by the partner before reading the next paragraph. I love this, except that my students aren't fluent readers, so I feel that first the comprehension is low because of non-fluent reading, and second the time is a bit wasted because of the lack of fluency and therefore comprehension. After students do their partner reading, they read the next couple pages independently. Again they aren't fluent, so it's taking quite awhile. I feel that comprehension is low.  

Shanahan response:

Fluency instruction can be valuable with fourth-graders (and with lots of other kids in grades 1-12)—it can help them to decode better, read more fluently, and improve reading comprehension.

What you describe is not likely to have much impact on kids’ learning. Fluency instruction requires, well, instruction.

Text selection. Good reading instruction requires appropriate texts. On this, it sounds like you’re doing fine—that often isn't the case. Fluency practice is best carried out with texts that students will struggle with, and with fourth-graders this is most likely to mean that the kids won’t recognize all the words.

I would shoot for texts in which kids would make about 10 mistakes per hundred words. Given that your boys and girls are struggling to read the texts well enough to understand them, it sounds like you are using texts are hard enough to be effective for this teaching.

But while you want to use texts that difficult for these lessons… you don’t want to end there.

If kids aren’t reading the text fluently by the end of the lesson, then the lesson itself is ineffective. (Unlike you, many teachers try to teach fluency with texts that are too easy. That doesn’t help the kids learn anything because they are already sufficiently fluent when they start.)

Purpose setting. Fluency lessons are no different from any others; students need to understand the purposes of the lesson.

I usually start out with a discussion of what oral reading should sound like. You might consider making a poster or bulletin board based on the kids’ insights about oral reading. Perhaps read a text to them to show what reading should sound like, and then do some less than terrific readings (e.g., making mistakes, reading too slow or too fast, pausing badly, reading choppily).

Tell kids upfront that you are starting them with texts that they will probably not read well the first time through. Explain that you want them to work on that text until they can read it well.

Before each day’s fluency work, remind the kids what they are trying to accomplish and what reading should sound like.

Modeling. There are some studies of fluency instruction in which teachers read the texts to the students before the students do their own oral reading. That can be helpful because it tips kids off to some of the unknown words and gives them some clues about the content. (Sometimes audio recording provides the modeling).

However, there are also many studies in which there is no such modeling.

I tend to put myself in the “don’t model” group. Experience tells me that it only helps if you read a very short portion of the text, like a sentence, and then immediately have kids try to read the same sentence. Verbatim memory in these circumstances doesn’t last longer than that, so modeling tends not to be a big help.

If a student tries to read something and makes a real mess of it (e.g., lots of mistakes, poor phrasing, etc.), then I might read that sentence aloud and have the child try it again. In other words, I’d provide modeling only when I think the students are struggling so much with a sentence that they are not likely to improve on a second (or third) reading without that extra boost.  

Partners. Research suggests that lots of people can be effective reading partners. Teachers, parents, volunteers, cross-age tutors, computers, and classmates have all been tried in one study or another and they have all been effective. In your case, you have kids partnered up, but you told me nothing about how these pairings were made and what training was provided to them to enable them to be effective.

Studies (and personal experience) tell me that not all kids are great partners. Some are careful and supportive and others could care less. If you get Mariel as a partner, there is a good chance that your reading will improve; if you’re paired with Bobby—not so much.

In some studies, children are paired on the basis of ability, and that can be successful, at least generally. In such pairings, the bottom students are placed with the top ones. This makes sense: The better readers can certainly help with errors, but that means they get no help and just because someone is a good reader, that doesn’t make them patient or helpful.

I believe in sharing the pain, sharing the gain.

Match kids with a different student partner every day. That way, if getting to work with Mariel is a great opportunity, everyone will enjoy that opportunity every few weeks. If Bobby is a dud, everyone suffers that occasionally, too.

Feedback. Partners should be trained to give beneficial feedback. In all of the studies that have found fluency instruction to have a positive impact on reading, the readers received feedback.

I’m a fan of the “Pause, Prompt, Praise” system. If a student errs, the partner waits until the end of the phrase or sentence. The idea of that is to give the reader a chance to fix the mistake. If the reader doesn't take it on, then the partner should stop him/her.

The partner should then try to help by offering a prompt. There are three kinds of prompts: (1) encourage the reader to sound out the word (e.g., look at that more closely; sound it out; try to break it apart, etc.); (2) encourage the reader to use meaning to figure out the word (e.g., does that make sense? what should that say?). Or, (3) you can tell the reader the word.

Never give more than two cues. If the reader doesn’t get the word right, then tell him/her the word.

If neither partner knows the word, they should write it down and the teacher can guide then guide the whole group to decode these words at lesson’s end.

Rereading. Your letter does not mention it, but research suggests that the single most important step in fluency practice is rereading. Your students are reading a text badly, and your lesson seems to go on.

What should be happening is that the students should be asked to reread those portions of the text again. And, they should sometimes do so even a third time.

That’s where the learning is. By reading and rereading a text the students transform it from one they can’t read well to one that they have read well. In some schemes, they read the text again and again until they can do so, and in others, 3 readings seem to be sufficient.

Having kids taking turns reading paragraphs aloud poorly is not effective teaching. Whereas, having kids read and re-read a text gives them an opportunity to figure out unknown words and how to make the text sound meaningful.

Teacher’s role. The teacher plays a very important role in this process. Teachers should supervise these paired readings. Teachers should coach readers through the partners (this is part of partner training). For example, I would eavesdrop on a pair, listen to the reader read and wait to see what the partner does. If the reading was weak I’d ask the partner, “What do you want her to do?” or tell the partner, “I’d tell him to read that again.”

Make your way around the group, making sure that you hear several kids reading each lesson and that you add your feedback and modeling as needed.

Comprehension. In some studies, comprehension is handled in the way you described. In others, comprehension is not dealt with a fluency lesson. It might not be absolutely necessary, but I would encourage you to continue with the summarization practice as described. But have the students delay doing it until the paragraph has been read reasonably fluently.

Amount of Fluency Instruction. Schedule anywhere from 30 minutes to 45 minutes per day for fluency teaching (about 25% of the reading instruction time).

If kids finish the text prior to the end of the lesson time, then have them switch places, reading the paragraphs that their partners read the first time.

If you want kids to learn from fluency instruction, you need to teach fluency. Try that and let us know how it goes.

 We are having an interesting conversation in our district. We currently give AIMSweb as a screening probe three times a year. One of the school psychologists pointed out that for the last several years the first graders seem to do better in the fall than in the spring on nonsense word fluency. When we look at measures of comprehension and fluency using other measures, we do not see a decline. Is there any research out there that might help us understand what we are seeing and whether or not this is a serious issue?

Shanahan responds:

What you describe is a common experience with AIMSweb and other progress monitoring tests. And, the more often you re-test, the more often you’ll see the problem. (Thank goodness you are only trying to test the kids three times a year.)

I could find no studies on the nonsense word portion of AIMSweb. But every test has a standard error of measurement (SEM).

The standard error gives an estimate of how much test scores will vary if the test is given repeatedly. Tests aren’t perfect, so if someone were to take the same test two days in a row, the score would not be likely to be the same.

But how much could someone learn (or forget) in one day? Which is the point.

SEM tells you how much change the test score is likely to undergo even if there were no significant opportunity for learning or forgetting. It is not a real change in reading ability, but variance due to the imprecision of the measurement.

Schools tend to pay a lot of attention to the standard error with their state test scores (the so-called “wings” around your school or district average scores). If your school gets 500 in reading on the state test, but the standard error is + or – 5… then we can’t be sure that you did any better than the schools that got 495s, 496s, 497s, 498s, and 499s. Your score was higher, but we can’t tell from this whether your kids actually outperformed those schools within the standard error.

When you calculate the SEM for a school or district score, it will tend to be small because of the large numbers of students whose scores are being averaged. However, when you are looking at an individual’s score, such as when you are trying to find out how much improvement there has been since the last time you tested, SEMs can get a lot bigger.   

Unfortunately, schools pay less attention to SEMs with screening or progress monitoring tests than they do with accountability tests.

Nevertheless, AIMSweb has a standard error of measurement. So do all the other screeners out there.

That means when you give such tests repeatedly over short periods of time (say less than every 15 weeks), you’ll end up with unreliability affecting some percentage of the students’ scores.

I’d love to blame AIMSweb for being particularly bad as a predictor test. That would sure make it easy to address your problem: “Lady, you bought the wrong test. Buy the XYZ Reading Screener and everything is going to be fine. You’ll see.”

In fact, studies suggest—at least with oral reading fluency—that if anything AIMSweb has particularly small standard errors of measurement (Ardoin & Christ, 2009).

But even with that, you’ll still find changes in scores that make no sense. John got a 49 when you tested him early in the school year. I couldn’t find an SEM for the AIMSweb nonsense word test, but let’s say to be 95% certain that one score is higher than another is + or – 10 points. Thus, if on retesting you find that his score is 45 it looks like a decline—but what it really means is that John’s score isn’t any different than before.

Teachers usually like knowing that; what looked to be a decline is just test noise.

They usually aren’t quite as happy with the idea that if John goes from 49 to 58 on that test that the change is too small to conclude that any real progress was made. Changes that are within the standard error of measurement are not actually changes at all. 

Since I can’t recommend shifting to some other comparable measure (e.g., DIBELS, PALS, CBM) that would necessarily be any more precise, I think what you are doing—comparing the results with those derived from other measures—is the best antidote.

If you see a decline in AIMSweb scores, but no comparable decline in other tests that you are giving…. I’d conclude that there was probably not a real decline. I would then monitor that student more closely during instruction just to be sure.

On the other hand, if the score decline is confirmed by your other tests, then I would try to address the problem through instruction—giving the youngster greater help with the skill in question.

Contact your test publisher and ask for the test’s standard errors of measurement. Those statistics will help you to better interpret these test scores. In fact, without that kind of information I'm not sure how you are making sense of these data. 

The problem here: You are expecting too high a degree of accuracy from your testing regime. Give the tests. Use the tests. But don’t trust these changes, up or down, to always be accurate—at least no more accurate than the standard errors suggest that they should be.

Reference

Ardoin, S.P., & Christ, T.J. (2009). Curriculum-based measurement of oral reading: Standard errors associated with progress monitoring outcomes from DIBELS, AIMSweb, and an experimental passages set. School Psychology Review, 38, 266-283.

I am a reading specialist at a K-5 elementary school and I am working with classroom teachers to implement a book buddy program where older students (2nd and 3rd grade) will read to younger students (K and 1st grade). I am planning to spend some time with the older students to coach them on selecting appropriate books and engaging their buddies by reading with prosody and stopping to ask questions, make observations, etc. I would love to hear if you have done any research on the effectiveness of such programs or if you have any tips on how to make book buddies beneficial for all involved. Our primary goal is to inspire kids to read and share books together, and in the process, we hope our students will become better readers. Thanks so much!

Shanahan response:

If what you do motivates kids to read more on their own that would be great. Unfortunately, we don’t know an awful lot about that.

There isn’t an extensive research base that reveals effective ways of getting kids to like reading or do more independent reading. We have lots of opinions, of course, but not lots of knowledge.

Researchers have usually ignored these issues. When they have taken these issues on, they’ve usually been so ensorcelled with the reading achievement gains they’re so certain are going to result from their efforts that they don’t pay much attention to whether their wonderful encouragement scheme is… well, encouraging.

Few studies on reading motivation even consider whether the free pizzas, book floods, extra reading time, mentoring, and so on will entice kids to read more. Or, if there is more reading, whether it persists.

Thus, when their wonderful handy dandy motivational regime fails to raise reading ability—and in most cases that is the outcome—we can’t tell whether it even should have. Let’s face it, if your book buddy program fails to instigate more reading, then there’d be no reason to think it would make better readers.

An unfortunate research exception was the Summers & McClelland study (1982) that looked at the impact of a sustained silent reading (SSR) program on a large sample of Canadian middle schoolers. The idea was to give kids free reading time regularly within the school day to allure them into a love of reading. The kids would pick books that they’d get to read independently during the school day.

Summers and McClelland not only found no evident learning payoff from this, but the kids’ reading diaries (a rarity in such research) revealed that the practice led to less reading, not more. Gadzooks!

      What you’re planning to do is so much better—both pedagogically and motivationally.

And, instead of buying into the automatic motivation fallacy (the idea that however we encourage reading will automatically increase the amount of reading that kids do), you are starting out trying to find ways of ensuring success.  

One of the real pluses of your plan is its social nature. I know this will surprise some teachers, but requiring someone to read for fun may be anything but.

Studies of motivation typically do not find that people are inspired or incented by isolation—but children, especially poor readers, often remark on the aloneness of reading.

A big motivator for most people is the social connection and your plan is rich in that. What you’re trying to do might be fun for the kids, either because it allows the older ones to feel like big shots since they get to be model readers for the younger ones, or because it’s cool for the youngers to get to hobnob with the older ones.  

        So far, so good.

      My concerns are two-fold. One, will the reading activities provide any real opportunities to learn (we are talking about school time here)? Two, will the kids make a motivational connection between the fun activity that you are providing and the idea of reading more on their own when they are away from school?

        It would be great to have both of these, but I’d settle for one.

      Let’s think about the learning opportunities first.

      Research hasn’t found much payoff—in terms of reading improvement—from being read to at these ages. There are several studies at a variety of ages showing some oral vocabulary growth, however.

      Most of the studies of reading to kids have been done with preschoolers and kindergartners (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). Those studies have consistently found improvements in oral vocabulary on measures like the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). It’s possible that PPVT gains would translate into better reading, but performance on the PPVT is only modestly connected to reading ability.

      There are few studies of the impacts of reading to kids once they enter school. But those haven’t found reading gains either (Senechal, 2006).

        That means that I wouldn’t bet on reading improvement for the younger students from book buddies, though there is a reason to think that they could become familiar with unknown vocabulary or valuable content.

        What about the elders?

      Things are more promising on that end. Studies do show that oral reading fluency practice can make for better readers. For that to work, the texts must be hard enough initially that there is room for improvement. Then, the students should read the texts aloud multiple times—in this case, rehearsing for their performance for the youngers. I like the purposefulness of that.

The most certain payoff will come from texts that the younger kids would be able to learn from (e.g., unknown vocabulary, valuable but unknown content) and enjoy (to keep the activity itself fun and to advertise reading effectively). But those same texts need to be demanding enough that the elders can’t read them well on a first try—though not so hard that they can’t read them fluently and well eventually.

I’d suggest you guide the elders to texts that are sufficiently challenging in terms of their current reading ability, but that have rich content and language that will push the youngers a bit. Then let the elders select from those the ones they think would be the most enjoyable.

Then the older readers must practice reading these texts aloud—that’s the fluency work. That practice, reading and rereading the texts until they can read them well enough that the youngers would enjoy the experience is where the learning will come for the elders.

Several years ago we helped out with a program in which children read to dogs (SitStayRead). It was just goofy enough an idea to be intriguing. The kids loved reading to the dogs, but their learning payoff came from their willingness to practice prior to sharing with the canines. Without that practice—rereading a book until they could read it well—they would not have improved their ability to read.

The idea of having the elders question or discuss the texts with the youngers is a good one. Make sure some of that emphasizes unknown vocabulary in the texts. Perhaps you and the teachers could help the elders to identify some keywords worth teaching. The learning payoffs to the youngsters are most likely to result from their increasing knowledge of the text content and vocabulary.   

You might consider providing partner training for the youngers, too. What does it mean to be a good book buddy who is being read to? Paying attention, showing gratitude, asking questions about the book that connects with the reader, etc. Maybe the younger readers could participate in the reading, too, trying to read a page or paragraph to the older partner?

Another idea might be occasional meetings of both groups along with the teachers. These meetings may be useful for connecting reading with the children’s lives outside of school. Does being a book buddy make you want to read more on your own? Instead of just assuming that the paired reading experience will lead to more outside reading, you might want to try to salt that mine a bit. (The idea that the read alouds might tip one off to a particular reading interest, or that aspiring to be a book buddy by going home and reading to a younger sibling or teddy bear might not occur to everyone on their own).         

Finally, I know I’m recommending a lot of teaching here, and yet, I’d stress the importance of keeping it fun.

I see three potential sources of motivation here:

(1) Curiosity—kids can work with cool texts that they will enjoy or learn from. Content should be king.

(2) Collaboration—kids get the payoff of working with other kids: The book buddies get to hang with each other of course, but you could also build in some collaborative work for the older ones for their preparation time. Maybe partner them up to practice their fluency or to come up with their text questions.

(3) It is possible that the fluency and vocabulary work will have a positive impact on the kids’ reading achievement. It is easier to like reading if you can read well.

      And there are a bunch of those. (Sisyphus ‘R Us.)

    Which one caught my eye this week?

      A blog follower raised a question about educational policies aimed at getting all kids up to a third-grade reading level by Grade 3. He was surprised about my response, and maybe you will be, too.

      There is a slew of studies that reveal the persistence of reading problems... for instance: http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/persistence-of-reading-problems-research-based-fact-or-urban-myth#sthash.rtzSGGAi.dpbs Those studies show that kids who are struggling with reading in the primary grades continue to struggle long after.

      Given that, many states have committed to the idea of addressing those reading problems once-and-for-all in the lower grades. I’m usually pretty supportive of such efforts… someone wants to improve preschool and primary reading instruction, I’m there.

      So where’s the surprise?

      My reply included the following statement: “There is no research that suggests a deadline for reading proficiency. There is no question that the longer one delays addressing reading problems, the more prodigious they will become over time. But older readers can benefit from remedial work.”

      My correspondent’s surprise was that the overheated rhetoric about catching reading problems early had misled him into thinking that was a line of demarcation: kids would either be successful readers by then or they would not be. But is that really the case? Is that really what that body of research means?

First and foremost, please understand that if you’re responsible for a student who is older than 8, a struggling reader… It is not too late. There is a possibility of redemption. There are great reasons for teaching kids well early on—just as there is reason to be wisely skeptical about such efforts. But it is never too late; learning can happen with older students (there is a body of literature on adult and adolescent literacy that would suggest the artificiality of any age-based reading demarcation that divides the possibility of success from the certainty of failure).

        It is certainly true that struggling beginning readers tend to continue to struggle, but we are working with correlations here. The reasons young readers struggle early on are all still likely to be true later in their post-third-grade-reading level lives as well.

        Let’s make things simple: the barriers to early reading success are going to be in the head or out of the head.

What I mean by that is that there are some potential barriers within the child: how efficiently the brain processes information, the suppleness of its cognitive coordination, the strength of memory, ability to concentrate, genetic predispositions, and so on. And, there are many potential barriers that are environmental: parents’ education levels, the child’s experiences with language, quality of teaching, availability of books and other relevant material resources, and so on. (Yes, inside the head and outside of the head do interact which complicates what I’m saying, but those complications don't change the conclusion.)

      If youngsters have several of these barriers—or profoundly serious versions of any of them—they may have difficulty learning to read. If you are successful in getting them to read like the average 8-year-old by the end of third grade, that would be great….but would it actually remove or overcome any/many of those barriers for all time?

        If Johnny’s parents don’t provide much academic support when he's six, will they now that he can read at a third-grade level? If his brain requires significantly more stimulation and experience to figure something out, will alter this situation?

        That’s one of the reasons why the effects of programs—even those that are clearly successful--tend to wear off over time. The kids don't forget what they have learned, they just don't continue to make the same kind of progress they made when they were getting a lot of supportive teaching. A lot of literacy learning has to take place after Grade 3 for someone to reach common adult levels that we depend upon in Western society, and whatever slowed these kids initially, will continue to.

        Let’s face it: the reason why reading problems persist is that our efforts to address those problems usually do not.

        There are great reasons to invest heavily in beginning readers: those reading problems can be addressed later, but the longer we wait the further behind these kids will fall. That’s inexcusable since the youngster can fall so far behind his/her peers that there is little chance the schools will later be willing to invest in trying to fix it then. Of course, being a struggling reader is unpleasant as well, and can limit other opportunities to learn. Why let a child languish? What's the benefit of that?

        Addressing reading problems early and powerfully is a smart move. But, if for some reason that hasn’t happened, that is not an excuse for tepid later responses. Remediation with older readers can be quite successful.

            I live in Chicago—the place that is known for “voting early and often.” That should be the byword of anyone who has responsibility for a struggling reader. We need to intervene early—providing powerful teaching to young children throughout preschool and primary education. AND we need to continue to provide effective instructional support well beyond that.  

We teach early and often!

 A colleague asked me about using e-books in high school science classes instead of textbooks. I like the idea that e-books might be more current and kids would likely read outside of class if they didn’t have to lug a huge book home. However, I remember reading something about the brain processing the reading of e-books differently than traditional texts. Do you know of any sound research on that?

Shanahan response:

I knew this question was coming.

  Back about 25 years ago or so, I just knew someone would ask me about such reading. So I conducted a small study.

  No, I didn’t do a real study. Not the kind of empirical investigation that I would publish in a journal or anything. I conducted a kind of personal investigation to gain some insights based on experience until real research existed on this topic.

  I knew someone would eventually want to know about digital reading so I “read” four books:

• I read an adult novel silently (usually in bed just before sleep).
• I read a children’s novel aloud to one of my daughters in the evening before her bedtime.
• I listened to a recorded book in the car while driving to and from work.
• I read a book online (Dracula from Project Guttenberg) on a computer (pads didn’t yet exist) usually over lunch.

  The point of engaging in these different kinds of reading simultaneously was to see if there were any differences in my experiences as a reader. One thing stood out to me about the digital reading:

  My digital reading was more like skimming than reading. I was coming away with a general idea of the plot, but I wasn’t developing a highly detailed memory of it. I enjoyed the book, but I didn’t find myself reading it particularly critically.

  Remember, I didn’t have to do any of this reading. I chose to do it. I picked the books myself, too. There was nothing unpleasant about any of it, and yet I found myself hurrying along, skimming over sections in a blur in a way that I did not with the other readings. Of course, reading aloud or listening to a tape limits the amount of skimming one can do (you can be inattentive with listening to a text, but you can’t skim per se, and reading aloud forces a thorough or complete processing of the words at the very least).

  Since my personal exploration of the problem, there have been many systematic studies into the issues that you raise. I didn’t find any evidence concerning different neural processing for digital and traditional reading, but I did find lots of data that should give you pause in using such texts to help teach science.

1. You assume that kids will like using e-books because they won’t have to tote a heavy textbook. That may be true, but generally, studies seem to report that kids don’t like reading digitally as much as with traditional text (Chou, 2016; Ketron & Naletelich, 2016; Walton, 2013; Woody, 2010). Whatever you gain in happiness about a lighter backpack may be lost in terms of how kids negative feelings about this reading itself. I know in popular culture the idea is that kids love everything electronic and that they prefer to live on their screens. However, true any of that may be, it appears not to be the case when it comes to reading an extended text. We simply are not there yet (and Scholastic’s annual surveys with younger kids suggest that it might be a while before we get there).
2. There is some research suggesting that it is a bad idea to project light into one’s eyes too close to bedtime (Chang, Aeschbach Duffy, & Czeisler, 2015). It disrupts one’s sleep and reduces next morning alertness (unlike reading the reflected light of a traditional page). Perhaps the e-book reading will be done late in the afternoon or with reversed text, but just as likely it may reduce your students’ science success—at least for those who have your class early in the day.
3. But here is the kicker. Most studies find that your students are likely to be like me. They don’t read as well when reading digitally (Ackerman & Goldsmith, 2011; Baron, 2015; Huang, et al., 2013; Jabr, 2013; Wolf, 2008) and traditional reading is related to growth in inference making in comprehension, but digital reading experience is not (Duncan, McGeown, Griffiths, Stothard, & Dobai, 2016). Your students might be able to gain purchase on main ideas that are high in an information hierarchy in the e-books, but they can be expected to lag in learning the details that support those main ideas (Singer & Alexander, 2017). Studies also suggest that even when students comprehend digital texts almost as well as traditional texts, their memory for this information deteriorates more quickly (Garland, 2003). In other words, e-books are not likely to help your kids learn science, as well as traditional science texts, will.

  Given all of that, you’d think that I would conclude that digital texts are a bad idea.

That is not the case.

  The fact is e-books are coming. Whether you assign them now or hold off for a few years, you will eventually do so (e-book reading has a lot of benefits—ecologically, economically, factually in terms of providing up-to-date scientific information, etc.).

  If you are going to assign e-reading, then I suggest the following:

  Teach your students about the problems of e-texts and brainstorm with them how they can overcome these limitations.

  Help your students to slow down and intensify their digital reading. Provide greater amounts of scaffolding for electronic reading than you would for traditional reading.

For example, have the students take formal notes—by hand. Perhaps provide them with a structural organizer for a chapter, an organizer that graphically shows them the relations among the various ideas or concepts. Then have them record their notes within this structure and review these with the students to see if they have managed to grasp the key ideas.

  Or, provide them with questions or tasks that require them to connect the main ideas with the supporting details.

  Or, give them greater opportunity to reread and review the texts.  

  Indeed, assign e-books, but make sure that your kids can read them as well as they can read traditional science text.

Boy, have things changed.

In the early 1990s, NAEP expanded to permit state comparisons—meaning that more students had to be tested to provide adequate samples from each individual state. Instead of a twice per decade look, NAEP now monitors reading every other year.

In the early 1970s, Michigan established its own testing scheme—based on the NAEP model—and by 2000, every state had adopted such a regimen.

Now state testing is much more ambitious. No longer limited to NAEP-style sampling estimates, now most kids at most grade levels are tested, and sometimes with high-stakes outcomes for the kids (e.g., retention, summer school).

And, that doesn’t even scrape the surface of what individual districts and schools have been doing: screening and monitoring, diagnosing and dip-sticking, benchmarking and “using the data.”

What’s the purpose of this ten-cent history lesson?

Not just to point out how ubiquitous testing has become in the reading lives of most teachers and students. That’s well known.

My contention is that this massive testing effort has led teachers to an unfortunate conception of reading comprehension.

Simply put: Reading is NOT the ability to answer certain kinds of questions about a text.

Reading is the ability to make sense of the ideas expressed in a text; the ability to negotiate the linguistic and conceptual barriers or affordances of a text.

Students who can make sense of a text’s ideas will be able to answer any kind of questions about that text. While students who fail to scale those linguistic and conceptual barriers will struggle with the simplest of questions.

Our job as teachers is to teach kids to read text successfully.

Not how to answer knowledge, comprehension, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation questions.

Not how to answer “right there,” “think and search,” “author and me,” or “on my own” questions.

Not how to answer main idea, detail, inference, out of context, logical structure, or author’s tone questions.

What does it mean to teach kids how to read text effectively?

Initially, it means making certain that they can decode proficiently; so proficiently that they can decode the words without much conscious attention. With really simple texts (e.g., “Look, Dick, look”), decoding is usually sufficient to enable understanding. With such texts, there isn’t much language demand (in terms of vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, text structure), there isn’t much memory demand (only three words), and there isn’t much conceptual demand either (these ideas are pretty concrete and likely to be within most kids’ experience, so decoding is the main barrier here).

That’s why decoding isn’t enough. Texts are going to place increasing demands on students’ linguistic abilities, memories, conceptual analysis, logic, and knowledge of the world. Those demands—not question types—are the potential barriers to kids’ comprehension.

The teaching of reading comprehension and learning from text should focus on how to make surmount these cognitive, linguistic, and intellectual barriers. Rather than having kids practice answering particular kinds of questions, comprehension instruction should be aimed at teaching students:

• Word meanings and the meaningful parts of words (morphology).
• How to infer word meanings from context and structure.
• How to untangle the complex syntax of sentences.
• How to interpret the cohesive links across a text.
• How to identify and interpret the organizational plan or structure of a text and how to use this organization as a memory aid.
• How to interpret an author’s tone.
• How to use (and not overuse) one’s knowledge to help make sense of a text.
• How to summarize text information effectively.
• How to monitor one’s comprehension—recognizing whether understanding is taking place and taking appropriate action if it is not.
• How to rehearse text information so that it is remembered/learned.
• How to interpret the graphic elements of texts (e.g., illustrations, charts, graphs, tables).
• To develop the reading stamina required for understanding longer texts.
• To recognize what a text says and what it does not.
• How to compare and combine information appropriately from multiple texts.

  My claim isn’t that this list is everything, beyond decoding, that readers need to master in order to comprehend. But the point should be obvious: major attention needs to be spent on reading and making sense of texts rather than upon answering particular types of questions about texts.

Many of the items in this list could be practiced on worksheets and whiteboard exercises. It would be best, however, if they were confronted with extended texts that students are trying to make sense of.

Text choices matter greatly in this kind of teaching. If one was working on tone, for instance, it might be sensible to read a series of texts: starting, perhaps, with some in which the author is explicit about his or her attitudes (the kids would just need to find examples of the explicitly stated viewpoint), followed by other texts with an unstated but easily discerned tone, to texts with more subtle and even ambiguous tones or that communicate tone in different ways.

Comprehension teaching shouldn’t be aimed at ensuring that kids have sufficient practice answering tone questions, but making sure they have had sufficiently thorough and varied experience with the issue of tone in interpreting text meaning. Since different texts communicate tone in different ways and since tone plays a varied role in interpretation (very important in literary and history reading, not so much in science and math), it is critical that kids learn to handle the concept across those different reading situations.

  As Yoda (yeah, the Star Wars' guy) might say: When it comes to teaching comprehension, the questions it is not, the texts it is.

I’ve looked at your framework and am surprised that it doesn’t include oral language. I’m a kindergarten teacher and can’t imagine leaving that out. Am I misunderstanding something?

Shanahan answer:

I feel your pain.

  Yes, you’re correct that my framework focuses on the teaching of phonological awareness, decoding/spelling, vocabulary, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. But not oral language.

  And, like you, I agonize over that omission (if it is one).

  I emphasize PA, phonics, and the rest of those literacy components as the focus of teaching because research shows that teaching those things leads to improvements in literacy. You teach kids to write better and their reading improves. You teach them to read fluently and their comprehension goes up… and so on.

  I don't include oral language in my framework because there aren’t studies showing that direct and explicit teaching of oral language results in improved literacy. At least not with first-language learners. (It’s different with ELLs—teach them oral English and their English literacy improves. For those students I’m a big fan of Claude Goldenberg’s research findings that providing explicit oral English lessons to ELLs is beneficial.)

  Without evidence that teaching oral language improves literacy, I’m unwilling to include it in my framework.

  The reason I agonize over my choice is because so many respected experts include it in their theories of literacy development (at least for young children); see The Prevention of Reading Difficulties (1998) http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED416465.pdf, for example. Also, there is extensive correlational evidence showing a close connection between young children’s oral language development and their later reading comprehension success (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008 http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/upload/publications/55/pdf/NELPReport09.pdf). That is, the kids who are best with language tend to learn to comprehend better than other kids (similar to the ELL finding that kids with the most proficient literacy gain the most from reading comprehension instruction).

  But that doesn’t mean giving kids explicit language teaching would necessarily improve their reading significantly. The kids with the best language tend to have the most educated parents and other helpful resources. Perhaps, it is greater parenting support that matters rather than language that we're picking up on.

  What we need are studies showing that explicit teaching of oral language results in some kind of improvement in literacy. Unfortunately, such studies don’t yet exist.

That’s true of studies in general, and it is true when we are discussing studies of reading to kids.

Don’t get me wrong. I read to kids daily when I taught, and I read a lot to my own children when they were growing up (and these days I read to my grandkids). But as positive as the research on reading to children is, the findings show improvements in oral language not reading. Basically, reading to kids has been found to improve their oral vocabulary, but usually these improvements have been on vocabulary measures not closely related to reading. Do those vocabulary gains transfer to reading? It’s possible, but not yet been proven.

  However, just because I wouldn’t add an oral language component to my framework, doesn’t mean that I think preschool and primary grade teachers should ignore oral language. Oral language should be supported all day long in such classrooms, but within instruction—not as the focus of instruction.

  Recently, colleagues at Mathematica and I conducted a large study (more than 1000 classrooms) of preschool and primary grade teaching. We found that various activities thought to build oral language were related to oral language development and reading comprehension, but many of these activities weren’t especially common.

http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/publications/ies-research-report-exploration-of-instructional-practices-that-foster-language-development-and-comprehension

  Teachers talked a lot in these classrooms (the average was a whopping 13½ minutes of talk per 15-minute instructional segment)… and about 70% of this talk focused on instructional content—as opposed to just giving directions or providing behavioral management. Teachers asked a lot of questions (80% of the segments that could include questions did so), and usually teachers gave kids enough time to answer them (76% of the time they gave 3-5 seconds). And, a lot of those questions (68%) were open-ended, meaning that kids would have an opportunity to give more extended answers. With the exception of the amount of teacher talk (which seems high to me), these are positive supports to children’s language.

  I wish it were all that good. Only 14% of the time were kids encouraged to speak with each other about the academic matter at hand. Two-thirds of the occasions that student interaction was part of the lesson the amount of time devoted to this was less than 4 minutes. Similarly, the various methods adults use to build kids’ language (e.g., expanding on the students’ answers, narrating their own actions or the actions of the students, encouraging open-ended questions); these kinds of things took place only about 4% of the time when they could have been used.

  Given what we now know, if the goal is improved literacy, then the best way to deal with oral language is by dealing with it throughout the school day—within the teaching, not as the focus of the teaching (this is different for ELLs and for kids with serious language disorders). But apparently few teachers know how to support kids language or how to provide such supports.

  Students—even in the earliest grades—need opportunities to talk through academic problems, with teachers and other students. These conversations should be extended at times. Teachers who use think-pair-shares, guided instructional conversations, and who teach kids to participate effectively in group discussions are on the side of the angels.

  I would argue not for changing my framework, but for more study of language development and support. Professional development on language for all preschool and primary grade teachers would make a lot of sense to me. Does your district provide that?

Teacher question: 

I'm a UK teacher; we use read-along here a lot (the teacher or pupils read a text to the whole class while the other pupils follow in their own text). There is a growing concern that this is ineffective for several reasons. Chief at the moment is that reading and listening simultaneously has a higher cognitive load than either independent reading or listening alone. What do you recommend?

Shanahan response:

The practice of having students read-along as you describe is often referred to with what is now a pejorative term, “round robin.” That term originally comes from the UK, so perhaps its pedagogical misuse starts there too (yeah, blame the Brits).

Back in the day, when sailors had a complaint, they’d sign a circular instrument so that no one could tell who signed first. These days anything that operates in a rotational manner may be referred to as round robin, including the practice of reading aloud in turn.

When I was a boy that meant 50 turns, since there were usually about 50 kids in a class. And that reading was really done in turns… thus, if you were the seventh child in the row you knew you were to read the seventh paragraph.

Many American teachers have gotten it into their heads that the problem with this pedagogy was its predictability. Let’s face it. It was the dull child, indeed, who wasn’t counting kids and paragraphs to try to get in some quick practice prior to one’s turn (rather than following along). As a result, they replace the set turns with “popcorn” (in which, the kids pick their friends—or foes—to do the next reading), or by choosing randomly among ice lolly (popsicle) sticks on which are written the kids’ names.

But as your question points out, that isn’t the real problem.

Let’s just say that read-along practice is ubiquitous in the USA as well and that it is not well supported by empirical research.

A handful of studies shows deleterious impacts on the reading eye movements of students—that is on the reading of the kids who are trying to follow along (Gilbert, 1940 and 1949), and upon reading comprehension (Anderson & Wilkerson, 1988; Durkin, 1993; Lynch, 1988). The latter seems to be due distracting attention from text meaning; this might be the “cognitive load” issue that you mention.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been and continue to be a big fan of oral reading practice throughout the grades. It is just that oral reading practice should not be a spectator sport. Instead of one child practicing oral reading at a time—with everyone else watching—engaging students in activities like paired reading (in which, taking turns, one student reads aloud and the other listens and helps) are much more effective.

Similarly, the practice of “reading aloud while listening,” having students trying to match an oral reading simultaneously can be effective in building fluency (if the oral model is slow enough), at least at early levels of reading development. But in that practice, everyone is engaged in oral reading, all at the same time.

I oppose round robin reading less because of the supposed harm that it does to reading ability, but because of its lack of support for developing oral reading fluency.

Think of it this way: if every child were given a one-minute opportunity to read to the group everyday—say 30 minutes of read-along, that would provide each child about 3 hours of oral reading practice each year. That modest amount of practice doesn't a good reader make. If instead, the teacher set aside that same amount of time for paired reading, each child would get about 45 hours of practice each year (and reading while listening would provide even more); obviously better choices.

Oral reading practice of that kind needs to include not just reading, but re-reading, and such re-reading is very uncommon in read-alongs. The benefit of all of that reading and rereading is that, for most kids, word recognition and silent reading comprehension tend to improve (NICHD, 2000; Stahl & Kuhn, 2002).

Similarly, it is very reasonable, during reading discussions, to require readers to read some portions of a text aloud—to provide evidence supporting their claims about the text. This kind of activity gives kids practice locating information and using evidence.

But you’re not talking about a regimen of daily oral reading practice or the kind of sporadic reading aloud to prove a point that I just described.

Read-alongs are used to get the group or class through a science book or literature anthology (“soldiering on,” as you might describe it). It tends to be used, less to try to teach, and more for classroom control (teachers are worried about what happens when some kids finish the silent reading before others—so silent reading for comprehension scares them a bit).

Beyond beginning readers (first-year readers are notorious for their inability to read silently), reading comprehension work should take place silently. Not only would I guarantee 30-minutes per day of oral reading practice, but a similar investment in time should be made in reading texts silently to try to understand and learn what they say.

Such reading should be followed by discussion and writing about the texts.

Increasingly, to ensure that everyone is getting it from silent reading, I prefer reading discussions that allow for multiple responses. If you ask a question like, “Who was home when Goldilocks arrived?” instead of having one child blurt out the answer—obscuring the fact that a dozen classmates had not a clue, it is better to either have everybody writing the answer on their whiteboards (so teacher can see who is in the tall grass and can require rereading or provide some other helpful guidance).

Or perhaps the teacher might accept the “nobody” answer aloud from one child, but then require that everyone find the place where that fact is revealed. Again, improving individual monitoring without slowing the proceedings down much.

Oral reading practices that help students to become better readers definitely should have a place in your classrooms. But none of those practices justify the read-alongs that you describe. Your teachers could do much better for their students; it is weak and ineffective pedagogy—and, perhaps, even dangerous to kids’ reading.

Teacher question:

Our schools have recently sent the home reports and parent-teacher meetings have recently taken place. I have heard from quite a few concerned parents that teachers have told them their child is 'struggling with reading' and have recommended reading to the child at least 20 minutes a day. These are parents of children k-2. The recommendation to read to the children frustrates the parents, and me as well, since all of them are already doing this. They are looking for more specifics on what to do. Do you have any insight?

Shanahan response:

Let's face it: As much as teachers complain about a lack of parent support when parents try to help, we tend to elbow them aside and ignore their concerns. No wonder my friend, Chris Lonigan, refers to this advice as the "chicken soup of reading." 

Your question reminds me of my own experience as a parent.

It was parent’s night in my child's first-grade. We were new to the district and the teacher had no idea what I did for a living. Her spiel started out:

“At ______ School, we teach reading scientifically.”

I sat up straight.

For the next 45 minutes, she explained that she was going to be teaching letter sounds and using a basal reader.

Scientific? Not especially. But it sounded reassuring and impressive. She seemed knowledgeable, the program seemed sophisticated, and our kids were going to be well served, apparently. 

I started to think about what would happen in a few weeks if some of her charges weren’t doing so well (about 20% of kids don’t). It occurred to me that, she would most likely do just what your teachers did: she'd recommend that the parents read to their struggling kids.

The conversation I imagined at the time would go something like this:

Teacher: Johnny is not doing well in reading.

Mom: How can I help? What can we do?

Teacher: Read to Johnny.

Mom: But I do read to Johnny. How can I help? On parent’s night, you told us about the sophisticated scientific way that you teach reading. How can I help with that?

Teacher: A reading program like ours is best left to skilled professionals, Mrs. Jones.

Mom: But I’m a physician (or lawyer or engineer or banker or, well, you get the idea). I can handle it.

Teacher (frustrated): I’m not sure this is taking a helpful turn. Perhaps you could meet with our school principal.

A few things you should know:

1. Research is clear that the vast majority of kids in K-2 who suffer from reading problems will tend to have difficulties with skills like phonemic awareness, decoding, high-frequency words, and oral reading fluency. (There are definitely other important reading skills; those just don’t matter much early on.)
2. Research is also clear that reading to kids—whatever its benefits—has little or no impact on the development of any of these skills that are so prominent in the early grades. (For the most part, reading to kids improves their knowledge of vocabulary word meanings—the lack of which doesn’t disrupt early reading much because such texts only use limited numbers of words and depend heavily on words known to be in kids’ early oral vocabularies).
3. Research on having parents read to school age children has not found positive reading gains to result from the practice.

In other words, your colleagues are prescribing a practice that has not worked in the past, that would not be likely to work given what it can do, and that ignores the actual problems that the kids are likely to be having—so even if effective, reading to the kids would not help them to read better.

What a crazy approach, especially given that research shows parents really can help their children to learn to read and that they often will... if asked, if encouraged, if supported.

I can’t recommend exactly what should be recommended here because that is going to vary, depending on what the kids need. Parents can help with phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, high-frequency words, letters, etc., and we should ask for help with whichever ones are a pressing need at the moment.

Here are a few examples of how parents can really help:

1.     Oral reading fluency. Listen to your child read daily (teachers can provide both the books and the guidance on how to do this). Research has shown that, once kids are reading, it is helpful to read aloud.  to someone. I encourage parents to use the Pause, Prompt, Praise (3P) approach for this activity:                                                                                                                             

Pause: When the child makes a mistake, Pause… give him/her a chance to correct it. Don’t butt in until the child gets to the next punctuation point or where it is obvious that the error isn’t getting fixed. 

Prompt: When a child makes a mistake, you can prompt him/her to sound out the word better (look at that again… sound it out… what if we break the word there?) or to use the meaning (does that make sense?… what should that say?). If the child doesn’t get the word after one prompt, tell the word and keep going. 

 Praise: Praise the child for anything he/she does well (you read that great, you made a mistake, but you fixed it, etc.).

2.     Phonemic awareness. Play word games: For example, I spy with my little eye something that begins with /m/. Recently, while dining with my grandchildren (a prek and a k), I'd say a word, “Big,” and they would try to change just one sound in the word to make a new word (dig, or bib, or bag, etc.). Gosh, that was fun.

3.     High frequency words or letter names. Give parents the 100 most common words (grade 1) or the 300 (second grade). Have the parents quiz the kids in 5 or 10 word/letter sets during commercial breaks of television shows (that would, for a 30-minute show, give the youngster 6 minutes of interval training). 

For more specific examples and free materials for phonics, phonemic awareness, and other skills go to the Resources section of my website, https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/ppt-resources and look at Great Sites for Teachers and Parents. Especially helpful in this regard are Reading Rockets, Balanced Literacy Diet, and Reading Bear. 

There is no good reason not to tell parents the truth about what their children are having trouble with. And, there is no good reason not to provide them with specific activities, materials, and advice on how they can help their kids to succeed.

It only seems fitting that your charitable giving be aligned with your admirable personal and professional efforts on behalf of literacy.

Each year, I have provided a list of international and national (or at least multi-regional charities) that support literacy teaching or provide books to needy populations. I lack the resources to vet all the wonderful local charities that do this kind of work, so I can’t help you there. But I don’t think you’ll have difficulty finding a suitable place for your largesse from this list.

I only include charities that receive a high rating from Charity Navigator. These organizations are open and up-to-date in their financial reporting and, most importantly, are particularly efficient, spending large percentages of your contributions to charitable action rather than management or fundraising.

They need your help.

Because of the new website design, I now keep that charities list posted all the time.

This link https://shanahanonliteracy.com/charities will take you to that page and you’ll be able to find out everything you want to know about each of these and to make donations directly to them.

These are the charities that you will find there:

1. Books for Africa
2. First Book
3. Jump Start
4. Reach Out and Read
5. Reading Partners
6. Room to Read
7. United through Reading

 I appreciate all that you do for literacy and hope that you will find a way to help these fine organizations. Thanks for your generosity in the name of Literacy!

I was wondering if you are able to provide me with a clearer understanding of what a “silent Reading and Listening Capacity Test” is all about. 

Shanahan responds:

The whole idea of administering silent reading and listening capacity tests is two-fold. A silent reading test would be used to determine how well a student can comprehend text when reading silently. Typically, such a test would be administered using graded or leveled passages. Thus, if the student could read the fourth-grade passages with 75% or higher comprehension, but could only read the fifth-grade passages with 50% comprehension, we might say something like, “Henry can read at a fourth-grade level.”

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

That depends. It depends on, for instance, on what grade Henry is in. If he is in third-grade but reads like a fourth-grader, you might be impressed and pleased by that performance. But what if Henry is in high school? The inability to handle fourth-grade text would likely be discouraging.

Or, what if Henry were in fifth-grade, but was not very smart (a low IQ)? We might conclude that he is doing great—perhaps not reading quite as well as his classmates, but better than we might have expected.

That’s where a listening capacity test comes in. Such a test is supposed to allow us to evaluate Henry’s capacity to understand—with reading taken out of the equation. Thus, a listening test usually will look like a silent reading comprehension test… a series of graded text passages with some questions about the texts. However, in this case, the teacher reads the material to the student and the student only has to listen (that way decoding problems can’t disrupt comprehension).

Since Henry was able to read and answer questions at the fourth-grade level quite well, there is no reason to test his listening capacity there… we already know he comprehends fourth-grade material just fine, even when he has the task of reading that material himself.

So let’s try his listening at a fifth-grade level… if Henry can understand the fifth-grade texts well (the kinds of texts he wasn’t able to read well), then it seems safe to conclude that Henry’s intellectual capacity to interpret text is higher than his reading ability. And, that means that if you can increase his decoding skills sufficiently, there should be no barrier to his reading more complex texts.

However, while that is kind of reasonable, you must be careful to avoid the opposite inference.

Let’s say, Henry is in fifth-grade and he reads at a fourth-grade level and his listening capacity is that of a fourth grader. That would seem to mean that Henry is doing as well as possible—he reads as well as he listens—so improving his reading skills wouldn’t be expected to help very much.

However, that puts an awful lot of trust in that listening test and it neglects the fact that there are things that you could teach Henry that may improve both his listening and his reading comprehension (things like vocabulary or text structure).

This idea of testing capacity through listening is an old one. We know more about comprehension tests than we did then.

Comprehension is certainly impacted by decoding skills and language (vocabulary, grammar, cohesion), but it also is linked to knowledge. I’ve used terms like fourth- and fifth-grade passages, but what content is appropriate for such tests? If I test reading comprehension with a passage on Adelie penguins and I test listening comprehension with a passage on a story about boys playing basketball, do students do better with one than another because of the skills differences or because they are more familiar with one topic than another?

Comprehension tests—listening or reading—usually employ multiple passages on multiple topics to balance out knowledge differences, but let’s face it, it would be rare that there would be enough passages to truly balance out. That means that when a student’s listening capacity is higher than his/her reading comprehension, it could mean that improvements in decoding skill will lead to the ability to comprehend harder texts. But it also could simply mean that the student was more familiar with the topics of the listening texts than the reading texts.

This comparison of listening and reading is an interesting one, but don’t read (or listen) too much into it.

Hope that helps.

Aren’t “teaching with complex text” and “teaching close reading” really the same idea, just in different words? Some of my teachers are confused by these terms. Some of them, like me, think they are the same idea, while others think they are really two different standards. How can I clarify this for them?

 Shanahan response:

I must admit that the first time this confusion presented itself to me, I was pretty darned surprised.

I was supposed to make two presentations to some California teachers—an AM and a PM talk, and the reading supervisor wanted to know the two titles. I suggested one on close reading and one on teaching kids to read complex text.

Her response: What will you present in the afternoon?

Huh?

That time I had to write something up for her curriculum director before she’d approve. She may have thought I was trying to get away with one talk for the price of two.

Believe it or not, teaching with complex text and teaching close reading are different things, though there are some connections.

Complex text, first: For 70 years, teachers have been admonished for teaching kids with difficult books. The claim has been that there are particular levels of text that kids learn best from—and levels of books from which they can’t learn much at all. Consequently, many students are taught with texts aimed at kids from lower grade levels.

That approach holds kids back. Instead of improving their reading ability, it has simply slowed down their progress and guaranteed that many will never have the opportunity to deal with demanding text—until they leave school.

Don’t get me wrong; the folks who insist on teaching kids at “their reading levels” don’t mean to do harm. They are trying to avoid kids sitting through reading lessons not reading anything because the texts are hard for them.  They divide the reading universe in two: the one where kids read books, albeit books without much challenge; and the other, where kids languish in books they cannot read.

These days many educators are thinking about reading instruction in more nuanced ways. Perhaps there are three categories, not two?

Yes, there are kids who aren’t going to learn much about reading because they are placed in such easy books (books they might be able to “read,” but that are below the students’ intellectual and social levels of development). And, indeed, there are those kids who do more than look at the schoolbooks because of the difficulty that they represent.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Kids can be placed in challenging, complex, difficult text (yes, even frustration level text)—and can be taught how to read and comprehend. By teaching kids how to decode words, figure out vocabulary, discern text structure, conquer complicated grammar, connect subtle cohesive links, or to overcome any other type of textual or linguistic barrier, teachers enable students to read and learn from books that in the past might have been avoided.

The idea of teaching kids to read complex texts involves placing them in texts of sufficient difficulty that there is really something to learn and then providing them with instruction in how to negotiate the challenges that a text may pose so that they do learn.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s classify text challenges into two categories: the linguistic/textual and the thematic/substantive. The former includes things like being able to make sense of how a text is formatted or coming to terms with the meanings of the words; while the latter gets at notions like: the kids don’t know anything about igneous rocks or the text’s theme is elusive or sophisticated (e.g., The Old Man and the Sea for sixth-graders).

What about close reading?

Close reading refers to making sense of a text in a particular way. It is about textual interpretation, and as such it specifies both what the ground rules are for interpreting a text as well as what the interpretive goals may be.

For instance, one of those interpretive rules requires that the interpretations of close readers be based solely on the text. That is, close readers try to interpret what is going on in a text and what it means, without reference to an author’s biography or past works. Some readers may devour the criticism of a text and then read the actual text themselves through the lens of those critics, but that isn’t what we mean by close reading. (Thus, when teaching close reading, teachers try to avoid providing kids with lots of outside information.)

And, in terms of interpretive goals, close readers are interested in how texts communicate their ideas, and not just what those ideas may be. Think of a book like The Three Robbers. It isn’t the language that makes it hard, but the moral ambiguity. Are these good guys or bad? Should they be punished or rewarded? There’s a lot of meat there for contemplation, discussion, and writing…

It is a complex book, but not especially difficult to “comprehend” (kids can usually summarize it just fine). But, it is hard to discern an underlying message and to do so one must study it carefully—reading and rereading… weighing the author’s word choices, analyzing the pictures thoroughly, considering both what is there—and what isn’t.

Close reading is about making sense of those kinds of things depending only on the information the author has provided. That’s why text evidence is so important in close reading. It is unreasonable to claim that Tomi Ungerer is suggesting that the three robbers have seen the error of their ways and regret their earlier actions without pointing to something in the text that reveals such repentance.

Close readers do have to deal with text complexity… but it is the complexity of ideas, symbols, doubleness and so on that is the issue—not the basic complexity of the language or the text formatting.

Thus, complex text and close reading both deal with the idea of kids making sense of texts that may be hard to read and interpret—but they do so in very different ways.

Teaching kids to untangle sentences with embedding so they can comprehend those sentences would be pretty central to comprehending complex language—but its value to close reading is only incidental. And, the same could be said for recognizing that you don’t know the meaning of a word, and then trying to figure it out based on context or with the help of a dictionary. Teaching kids to do those kinds of things should give them access to the ideas in books even when those ideas are expressed in complex ways.

While teaching kids to recognize when an event or object is meant to be a metaphor or that the white hats and black hats in the old cowboy movies were character summaries rather than fashion statements are not so much about language complexity as they are about grasping the deeper meanings of a text through intensive analysis of the ideas in the text.

Text complexity and close reading are related, but different. Teachers need to teach both.  

Thank you for following my blog. I look forward to our continued relationship in the coming year.