Teacher question:

What is the most effective way to teach summarizing to our most struggling readers? How can we teach them how to summarize both literary and informational texts?

Shanahan response:

Good choice. Of all of the literacy activities that you could have focused on, summarizing is the most powerful for elementary students.

The National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) reviewed more than 200 studies on comprehension strategies and that analysis attributed the largest learning effects to summarizing. More recent reviews focused on kids with learning disabilities (Kim, Lina-Thompson, & Misquitta, 2012; Solis, Ciullo, Vaughn, Pyle, Hassaram, & Leroux, 2012) have been similarly positive, and studies of the payoffs from writing about text have, too (Graham & Hebert, 2010). Summarization instruction is beneficial to a wide range of younger readers.

Not surprising, studies consistently show that retelling performance correlates with the results of standardized reading comprehension tests (Reed & Vaughn, 2010), and all states require, in their educational standards, that kids learn to summarize what they read. For example, the Common Core State Standards require that first-graders learn to “Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson” (literary text) and for third-graders, “Determine the main idea of a text; recount the key details and explain how they support the main idea” (informational text). There are similar summarizing requirements at other grade levels, and in other states.

Summarizing is likely so powerful because it requires readers to consider each of the authors’ propositions and to evaluate what they contribute to the overall meaning of a text. Readers have to weigh each thought and determine how important it is—including attending to how the information is organized. Summarizing captures both language skills and content knowledge (Galloway & Uccelli, 2019), a powerful combination.

Various schemes for dealing with summarization have been proposed and they all improve reading comprehension, according to the research. Probably the most comprehensive of these and the most studied is the plan put forth by the late Ann Brown, and her colleagues (Brown & Day, 1983).

Brown and company reasoned that summarization required six basic steps:

1.       Delete trivial information

2.       Delete redundant information

3.       Substitute superordinate terms for lists

4.       Substitute superordinate terms for series of events

5.       Select a topic sentence

6.       Invent a topic sentence (if the text doesn’t include one)

In other words, delete what isn’t necessary, collect into groups ideas that fit together, and then find or compose a sentence that describes the important ideas that are left.

Most authorities recommend starting with paragraphs or other short informational texts and then increasing the length and complexity of the texts to be summarized as students develop facility.

Deleting tends to be easier than identifying or writing topic sentences or main ideas (Winograd, 1984). Identifying unimportant information, examples, and repetitions will require some practice, but not as much as those more demanding tasks usually do.

Based on what has worked in the studies, I would suggest a “gradual release of responsibility” approach to teaching summarization (Gajria & Salvia, 1992). That means the teacher starts out with a demonstration (or several demonstrations) of how and why to summarize.

The teacher might say something to the students such as:

“Boys and girls, it is valuable to be able to summarize the information that you read about. If you can summarize a text accurately, you’ll be more likely to remember the information and summarizing is an important building block in some school tasks that you’ll learn when you get older—like how to write a term paper. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be teaching you how to summarize and you’ll be practicing this ability every day with various texts. Summarizing is the ability to retell the most important information from a text in a shorter form and in your own words.

“For instance, take this paragraph:

‘You can see some small things with your eyes. With a microscope, however, you can see much smaller details. Think of a butterfly’s wing. You can see it with your eyes. But a microscope can show you small parts of the wing called scales.’

“Let me show you how I would summarize this. First, I’d try to identify the big idea that all the sentences are about. I think the first two sentences capture that big idea because all the sentences are about what you can see with your eyes and what you can see with a microscope.”

I’d then underline those sentences, but I’d have the kids check my claim… reading each sentence to see if it is about that big idea.

You can see some small things with your eyes. With a microscope, however, you can see much smaller details.

“Think of a butterfly’s wing. You can see it with your eyes. But a microscope can show you small parts of the wing called scales.”

Then: “It also helps if we can get rid of the information that is not very important to remember. In this paragraph, these sentences about a butterfly’s wing don’t seem very important. They are just examples of what the microscope allows us to see. Do you think a microscope could let us see other small things, not just butterfly wings? So that is just an example to help me understand what microscopes will allow us to do but isn’t really the point. Let’s cross out that unimportant example.:  

You can see some small things with your eyes. With a microscope, however, you can see much smaller details.                                                                                                            

Think of a butterfly’s wing. You can see it with your eyes. But a microscope can show you small parts of the wing called scales.

Finally: “A good summary of a paragraph should be no more than one sentence long, and it should be in the reader’s own words. Now I must turn these sentences into a single sentence of my own.”

At this point the teacher rereads those two sentences and then removes them from sight. Kids have been found to have trouble translating text into their own words if they can still see the author's (Stein & Kirby, 1992), so it is a good idea to cover it or remove it during writing. Now the teacher writes:     

“Microscopes let you see things so small that you can’t see them with just your eyes.”

At this stage the teacher can compare the original text with the summary, evaluating the effort. This is a good summary because it focuses only on the big idea in the text, it omits the trivial example that was used to illustrate this big idea, it is markedly shorter than the original, and it is in the reader’s own words. Yep, a winner.

Once kids have the idea, the teacher can guide the students’ efforts. I would initially do this in a whole class setting, saving small group work for later. Again, the teacher would provide an explanation of the purpose of the overall process and of each of the steps. The teacher will guide kids to try to identify the main idea, to summarize lists and sequences, and to delete the trivia, always ending up with a single sentence summary of the paragraph.  

As the students make progress the teacher does less and less. Thus, instead of saying, “the next thing that we do is cross out the unimportant information,” the teacher may say, “what do we do next?”

When kids get the hang of this, then have them try the same thing in pairs, with you circulating among the partners to ensure success; and to identify who is ready to fly on their own wings. As students learn to summarize paragraphs successfully, you can raise the stakes and teach them how to apply this skill to more extensive texts.

Some studies suggest teaching kids to ask themselves questions to guide themselves through this process (Malone & Mastropieri, 1992). Thus kids, learn to ask themselves, “What’s the main idea here? What is unimportant and can be deleted? How would I restate the main idea in my own words?” Not a bad idea.

A final thought: I’d suggest using your current science and social studies texts, Weekly Readers, and the informational texts from your core reading program as a source of the paragraphs that you use for these exercises. In other words, use real paragraphs that students have already read or will soon read in your program. That will both show them the value of this ability and will allow them previews/reviews of the content that you are trying to teach.

Of course, summarizing paragraphs from informational texts is only one part of what you asked about. Next week, I’ll describe what research has to say about making that transition to summarizing longer informational texts successfully, as well as how to teach summarization of literary texts.

References

Brown, A. L., & Day, J. D. (1983). Macrorules for summarizing texts: The development of expertise. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 22(1), 1–14. doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(83)80002-4

Gajria, M., & Salvia, J. (1992). The effects of summarization instruction on text comprehension of students with learning disabilities. Exceptional Children, 58(6), 508–516.

https://doi.org/10.1177/001440299205800605

Galloway, E. P., & Uccelli, P. (2019). Examining developmental relations between core academic language skills and reading comprehension for English learners and their peers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(1), 15–31. doi.org/10.1037/edu0000276

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (201). Writing to read: Evidence for how writing can improve reading. New York: Carnegie Corporation.

Kim, W., Linan-Thompson, S., & Misquitta, R. (2012). Critical factors in reading comprehension instruction for students with learning disabilities: A research synthesis. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 27, 66-78. doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5826.2012.00352.x

Malone, L. D., & Mastropieri, M. A. (1992). Reading comprehension instruction: Summarization and self-monitoring training for students with learning disabilities. Exceptional Children, 58(3), 270–279.

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. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Reed D., & Vaughn S. (2010). Reading interventions for older students. In T. A. Glover, & S.  Vaughn (Eds.), The promise of response to intervention: Evaluating current science and practice (pp. 143–186). New York, NY: Guilford.

Solis, M., Ciullo, S., Vaughn, S., Pyle, N., Hassaram, B., & Leroux, A. (2012). Reading comprehension interventions for middle school students with learning disabilities: A synthesis of 30 years of research. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 45(4), 327–340. doi.org/10.1177/0022219411402691

Stein, B. L., & Kirby, J. R. (1992). The effects of text absent and text present conditions on summarization. Journal of Literacy Research, 24, 217-232.

Winograd, P. N. (1984). Strategic difficulties in summarizing texts. Reading Research Quarterly, 19(4), 404–425. doi.org/10.2307/747913

If you would like to listen to Tim Shanahan's podcast on this topic, click this link.

Here is my dilemma.  My administration has decided that if a student has 3 or 4 points of data on an ORF (Oral Reading Fluency) graph that shows they are not making progress then the entire reading intervention program must be changed.  It doesn't matter to them if the student had been making progress for months before in the same program.  I was told by my principal that our school district is being sued because of RTI.  When a student is not making progress as evidenced by the ORF and the reading specialist doesn't change the program then the school district is at risk of being sued.  

The administration has now decided to meet with me every few weeks so they can direct my programming.  They are so set on this program idea.  They want to direct my switch of programs from Leveled Literacy Instruction to Barton to Wilson to Read Naturally to Reading Mastery to My Sidewalks to 100% Solution without thoroughly diagnosing the need of the child or the validity of the program.  They also want the paperwork to reflect that an actual program was changed.  It is a house of cards build on speed of reading. It is expected that all below level readers will reach grade level expectations in a 4-month period of time or else.  If they have their way a kid could be in Wilson for six weeks, then LLI another 6 weeks then Barton.  There would be no continuity of programming. 

Do you know of any research that either supports or negates this idea of the need to change a program after so many points of data on an ORF graph?  What is the RTI law?  

Shanahan responds:

A colleague of mine helped frame this reply given the technical issues that you are raising.

In 2004, the very complex IDEA law was enacted. It includes a Child-Find requirement (schools must “find” students with disabilities) and the push for early interventions due to the growing number of students identified with disabilities, specifically those labeled with Specific Learning Disability (SLD). 

Also, as part of IDEA, students receiving special education services must demonstrate “adequate progress.” Messy situations tend to arise when students with IEPs fail to make progress, which then calls into question the educators’ responses and the effectiveness or appropriateness of the intervention. Parents might raise questions about such efforts or may have hired a really good advocate and be looking for compensatory services, and the district is running scared because no one knows how to respond, especially if there are numerous data points from private evaluations that they can't speak to or refute with their own data. When this kind of thing occurs, there is a long process before a mediation and then a due-process hearing.

It is misleading for the administration to say they are getting “sued because of RtI.” It is more likely that they weren’t responsive to data and that doesn’t mean changing a program. 

Three data points on an ORF graph do give a trend line, and these can be sensitive to incremental learning (but also to other factors that can limit their validity for making growth determinations). Advocates love them, but they are a single piece of data.

What does “growth” mean? What did the team determine as adequate? Any amount of growth? Growth that closes a gap? Accelerated growth? Average growth? Any change on a particular test even if it is within the test’s standard error of measurement and is therefore unreliable (in other words, possibly not growth at all)? Growth on non-linear measures?

Studies on this suggest that 3 weeks or 6 weeks simply aren’t sufficient for determining adequate growth, and slope analysis hasn’t been found to consistently improve outcome predictability (across outcomes, grade levels, levels of performance, etc.). There are no studies validating its sole use in the manner that is becoming so common in schools; so much for the “science of reading.”

My first concern is the rush to judgment that your letter describes. This kind of testing is not so precise and reliable, nor is learning so linear, that it makes sense to arrive at any kind of consequential decisions over such brief periods of time. The law doesn’t call for such quick decision making, nor should it. Given the serious limitations found for short-term slope analysis (those changes from testing to testing), it would be neither pedagogically sound nor ethically reasonable to do so.  

Of course, no one wants to see a flatline or a negative slope, though those aren’t uncommon since learning isn’t a linear process. It is perfectly normal that kids will show no growth for several weeks even when overall progress is fine.

But if there is no apparent growth, then you should ask, “Why?”

I’d want additional data. Data that would depend on the intervention being provided, the grade level of the student, the core instructional materials, and so on, as well as what else is going on in the student's life. (“He was out with the flu for a week.” “She has had a recurrence of seizures.” “His parents are going through a divorce.” “She was out of school because she was at Disney World.”)

The first thing I’d check would be the integrity and fidelity of the intervention. Who’s providing services to the child? What have they been doing? What's going on during core instruction?

I would never ditch an intervention without a really deep dive with the problem-solving team. That’s the kind of aggressiveness RtI was supposed to generate, not the mindless and counterproductive program switching that you describe.

The law says kids must make adequate growth, but it provides no guidance or specific requirement with regard to the number of weeks or data points that are required to determine adequate growth.

No one wants a youngster go months and months without progress, but weekly testing has not been shown to improve intervention delivery or student progress. Eventually the advocates (and the courts) will figure out that responding quickly to unreliable data with no discernible learning payoff for kids isn’t the hallmark of an appropriately responsive school. It’s malpractice.

There is no sense in the flitting among interventions that your letter describes. It reveals a total lack of diagnostic data or rationale. This kind of foolish pedagogy results in “RtI casualties.” We can do better.

Sources

Cho, E., Capin, P., Roberts, G., & Vaughn, S. (2018). Examining predictive validity of oral reading fluency slope in upper elementary grades using quantile regression. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 51(6), 565-577.

Compton, D.L., Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L.S., & Bryant, J.D. (2006). Selecting at-risk readers in first grade for early intervention: A two-year longitudinal study of decision rules and procedures. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(2), 394-409.

Kim, Y.S., Petscher, Y., Schatschneider, C., & Foorman, B. (2010). Does growth in rate in oral reading fluency matter in predicting reading comprehension achievement? Journal of Educational Psychology, 102(3), 652-667.

Tolar, T.D., Barth, A.E., Fletcher, J.M., Francis, D.J., & Vaughn, S. (2014). Predicting reading outcomes with progress monitoring slopes among middle school students. Learning and Individual Differences, 1(30), 46-57.

Van Norman, E.A., & Parker, D.C. (2016). An evaluation of the linearity of curriculum-based measurement of oral reading (CBM-R) progress monitoring data: Ideographic considerations. Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 31(4), 199-207.

Yeo, S., Fearrington, J.Y., & Christ, T.J. (2012). Relation between CBM-R and CBM-mR slopes: An application of latent growth modeling. Assessment for Effective Instruction, 37(3), 147-158.

What are your thoughts on standards-based grading in ELA which is used in many districts? For example, teachers may be required to assign a number 1-4 (4 being mastery) that indicates a student’s proficiency level on each ELA standard. Teachers need to provide evidence to document how they determined the level of mastery. Oftentimes tests are created with items that address particular standards. If students get those items correct, that is evidence of mastery. What do you recommend?

Shanahan response: 

Oh boy… this answer is going make me popular with your district administration!

The honest answer is that this kind of standards-based grading makes no sense at all.

It is simply impossible to reliably or meaningfully measure performance on the individual reading standards. Consequently, I would not encourage teachers to try to do that.

If you doubt me on this, contact your state department of education and ask them why the state reading test doesn’t provide such information.

Or better yet, see if you can get those administrators who are requiring this kind of testing and grading to make the call.

You (or they) will find out that there is a good reason for that omission, and it isn’t that the state education officers never thought of it themselves.

Or, better yet check with the agencies who designed the tests for your state. Call AIR, Educational Testing Service, or ACT, or the folks who designed PARCC and SBAC or any of the other alphabet soup of accountability monitoring.

What you’ll find out is that no one has been able to come up with a valid or reliable way of providing scores for individual reading comprehension “skills” or standards.

Those companies hired the best psychometricians in the world, and have collectively spent billions of dollars designing tests, and haven’t been able to do what your administration wants. And, if those guys can’t, why would you assume that Mrs. Smith in second grade can do it in her spare time?

Studies have repeatedly shown that standardized reading comprehension tests measure a single factor—not a list of skills represented by the various types of question asked.

What should you do instead?

Test kids’ ability to comprehend a text of a target readability level. For instance, in third grade you might test kids with passages at 475L, 600L, 725L, and 850L at each report card marking. What you want to know is whether kids could make sense of such texts through silent reading.

You can still ask questions about these passages based on the “skills” that seem to be represented in your standards—you just can’t score them that way.

What you want to know is whether kids can make sense of such texts with 75% comprehension.

In other words, it’s the passages and text levels that should be your focus, not the question types or individual standards.

If kids can read such passages successfully, they’ll be able to answer your questions. And, if they can’t, then you need to focus on increasing their ability to read such texts. That means teaching things like vocabulary, text structure, and cohesion and having the kids reading texts that are sufficiently challenging—not practicing answering particular types of questions.

Sorry administrators, you’re sending teachers on a fool’s errand. One that will not lead to higher reading achievement, just misleading information for parents and kids and a waste of effort for teachers.

References

ACT. ( 2006 ). Reading between the lines. Iowa City, IA : American College Testing.

Davis , F.B. ( 1944 ). Fundamental factors in comprehension in reading. Psychometrika , 9( 3), 185–197.

Kulesz, P. A., Francis, D. J., Barnes, M. A., & Fletcher, J. M. (2016). The influence of properties of the test and their interactions with reader characteristics on reading comprehension: An explanatory item response study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(8), 1078-1097.

Muijselaar, M. M. L., Swart, N. M., Steenbeek-Planting, E., Droop, M., Verhoeven, L., & de Jong, P. F. (2017). The dimensions of reading comprehension in dutch children: Is differentiation by text and question type necessary? Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(1), 70-83. 

Spearritt , D. ( 1972 ). Identification of subskills of reading comprehension by maximum likelihood factor analysis. Reading Research Quarterly , 8( 1), 92–111 .

Thorndike, R. (1973). Reading as reasoning. Reading Research Quarterly, 9(2), 135-147.

National surveys suggest that middle and high school teachers are increasingly likely to place kids in texts that are relatively easy to read (Rand, 2017; Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); texts that are supposedly at the students’ “instructional levels.”

Teachers ask me all the time how they can be expected to use high school level texts when so few kids in their classes are reading at grade level.

And, yet, high school students often tell me that they hate being placed in what they refer to as the “stupid books.”

That’s where this new study comes in.

This study examined the reading comprehension of 293 ninth graders (Lupo, et al., 2019), who were randomly assigned within classes to easy or challenging versions of the instructional texts.

The students’ reading comprehension on the instructional text was evaluated at the end of each lesson, and general reading comprehension level was tested at the end of the 12-week intervention.

One interesting finding: “Only a small subset of students who read significantly below average, many of whom were identified as English learners, benefited from reading the easier versions.”

In other words, as long as there was instructional support, most of the students were able to make sense of the texts.

The two approaches to instruction support were either Listen-Read-Discuss or KWL; the latter being the most successful of the two in supporting student reading. In other words, neither of these instructional approaches were aimed at providing any kind of targeted support for dealing with the actual variables that were making the challenging texts so difficult (e.g., vocabulary, cohesion, tone).

Nevertheless, except for a small number of particularly struggling second language students, shifting to easier text was not beneficial in terms of increasing student understanding of the instructional texts. Which means there is no good reason, for most students or situations, to shift older students to easier texts to facilitate their reading—as long as you are ready to provide instructional support.

That means not using texts that poorly support content standards.

That means not trying to manage multiple text levels.

That means not stigmatizing or isolating the lower readers.

Why do it if there isn’t an instructional benefit.

Interesting finding 2: These students made some learning gains in general comprehension over the 12-weeks of instruction. They made the same amount of gain whether they worked with the easier or harder texts.

In other words, working with texts that were likely closer to the students’ instructional levels provided no learning advantage. This finding matches with the results found in several elementary grade studies (such comparisons either find no learning benefits due to the use of the easier texts, or that the easier texts actually are a detriment to student learning).  

Gosh. I wish the researchers had asked the kids how they felt about their text placements. Experience tells me the ones with the more challenging text will feel more respected.

Another interesting finding: There was no difference in reading comprehension due to text difficult between even most of the low readers.

But what about the small number of particularly low students (mainly second-language learners) who actually did do better with the easier texts?

The study doesn’t do much with this finding, so my thoughts are just speculation.

For example, I wish they would have identified that small group of students to see what happened to their general reading comprehension over the 12 weeks. It seems likely that such an analysis would be spoiled by small sample size, but it might be interesting just to see what happened with these students.

Also, remember, there was no specific instructional support aimed at the linguistic or conceptual factors that may have been consequential in making sense of these texts. KWL focuses on prior knowledge and Listen-Read-Discuss focuses on decoding. I wouldn’t necessarily expect either of those interventions to be particularly helpful for second-language learners.

Again, man, I wish they would have had a vocabulary intervention, or one aimed at “juicy sentences” (thank you, Lily Wong-Fillmore), or cohesion, or text structure. Those kinds of interventions may have been more successful, but even without that, classes clearly were not hindered by teaching students with complex text.

We have so many opinions on the importance of instructional texts for student learning (e.g., Betts, Fountas & Pinnell, Calkins, Richardson), and attempts to reason from irrelevant studies by analogy (Allington)… but there just aren’t that many direct tests of those claims.

Lupo and company have made a valuable contribution, and one that is entirely consistent with past direct tests of the proposition that easier texts facilitate comprehension and learning. I know it’s easier and I know its popular, but putting kids in text below grade level is a bad idea in most cases.

Reference

Lupo, S. M., Tortorelli, L., Invernizzi, M., Ryoo, J. H. (2019). An exploration of text difficulty and knowledge support on adolescents’ comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(4), 457-479.

I was having so much fun writing these test questions that I considered either putting in for a job at ETS or including a Part II next week... I decided on the latter.

Admittedly, the length was a concern. Breaking it up into two parts seemed most politic: that way the Fair Testing people and Diane Ravitch may not come after me.

Let’s see how you do. The answers are all research-based!

 1.    The ability to decode print to speech is an essential reading skill. True or false.

Yes, indeed, in reading an alphabetic language like English, readers have to read an author’s words, not his or her ideas. Readers may “cheat” at times and try to get to the meaning without the words, such as looking at pictures or guessing from context, but despite such shortcuts and work arounds, an author’s words are of tantamount importance and good readers try to make sense of the words themselves. 

We gain access to their words by recognizing the letters and spelling patterns and conjuring up the pronunciations that they represent. That’s why every theory of reading – from Phil Gough’s “simple view” to Ken Goodman’s “psycholinguistic guessing game” – all include a role for orthographic-phonological processing. 

You can’t be a reader without it so this one is True.

2.    Phonics instruction is essential. True or false?

 This might seem like an overly easy question given the previous item but take a careful look and think about what the word “essential” means. According to my dictionary, something that is essential is “indispensable” or “necessary.”

In other words, the question asks whether kids can learn to read without the support of phonics instruction. And, the answer to that is, “yes, they can,” so that item should have been marked false.

Kids can definitely learn to read without phonics instruction. This has been documented in research studies (Barr, 1975; Biemiller, 1975; Bond & Dykstra, 1975) and there have been periods when popular instructional programs neglected phonics, and children taught with those programs have learned to read.

3.    Phonics istruction is valuable. True or false?

True, true, true! Although it is possible for kids to read without the help of phonics, the research is overwhelming that they do better in learning to read when they receive such teaching (Adams, 1991; Bond & Dykstra, 1965; Chall, 1968; NELP, 2008; NICHD, 2000).

For the life of me I cannot understand why this has ever been controversial or why anyone would be surprised that such teaching helps.

Everyone agrees that kids have to learn to use orthography and phonology in reading (they may disagree on the degree to which they must rely on these, but no one claims kids don’t need to recognize spelling patterns and their relationship to pronunciation).

So, there is this essential thing that everyone needs to learn, and the issue then is, would this be easier to learn on one’s own or would it help if someone showed you how to do it? Duh!

In such cases, teaching usually provides a boost—and according to dozens of experimental studies in this case, this boost improves students’ abilities to read words, to read fluently, to comprehend what they are reading, and so on.

And, while phonics may only be helpful rather than essential for most kids, there are a group of kids for whom phonics seems to be absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, we can’t easily identify who can thrive without phonics and who can’t—just like we can’t tell which kids will get the measles or other horrible diseases.

Phonics is essential to some, useful to most, and does no harm to anyone, and that’s why it is so valuable.

 4.    Systematic phonics is better than informal phonics. True or false?

Some reading gurus have conceded that phonics instruction can help but have claimed that students would be better served by "responsive" phonics teaching rather than by following some commercial or locally-developed program of instruction. They argue that teachers should be diagnostic, providing decoding instruction as kids show a need for it.

I must admit that the vison of such opportunistic, “just in time” teaching is an attractive one. A youngster falters in reading or spelling a word, and voila, an apt mini-lesson springs forth to save the day.

And, then I remember teaching first-grade that way, and what a mess it was.

No wonder the research reports that kids taught phonics systematically (that is, following a planned, sequential program) do better than those taught by those supposedly responsive and individualized approaches (NICHD, 2000).

The evidence is clear on this one: find a good phonics program and follow it diligently.

 5.    Research shows that synthetic phonics instruction beats analytic phonics instruction. True or false?

 “Synthetic phonics programs teach children to convert letters into sounds or phonemes and then blend the sounds to form recognizable words. Analytic phonics avoids having children pronounce sounds in isolation to figure out words. Rather children are taught to analyze letter sound relations once the word is identified” (NICHD, 2000, p. 289).  

Thus, in synthetic phonics, students would be taught to sound each letter in “cat” and then to blend or join together each of these sounds to form a pronunciation: /c/-/a/-/t/.

Alternately, analytic phonics might teach the student to try to use word analogies (like bat and can) to derive a pronunciation or to recognize larger sound units, like onsets and rimes (/c/- /at/).  

I’ve witnessed amazing arguments over this distinction. I’ve lost friends because I was too dense to recognize that synthetic or analytic phonics were clearly the easiest to learn or best to teach or most effective.

And, yet, the research is not quite so certain. For the most part, researchers haven’t conducted research studies that directly compare the effectiveness of these approaches, so we’re left to the correlational results of meta-analyses.

Those analyses find no statistically significant difference between the two. It is certainly possible that one of these would be more effective than the other, but at this point there is no scientific support for such claims.

To me, that means you can make either of these kinds of phonics work well for kids—but you ought not to claim that the reason for picking one over the other is proven effectiveness. That just is not the case.

Personally, I have taught phonics both ways and found both to have some drawbacks at times—making me want to combine them occasionally. I know that is heresy to some and will cost me even more friends but given that research can find no difference in effectiveness I think you should grant me some latitude on this one.

Both analytic and synthetic phonics instruction can be explicit, systematic, and effective. Use whichever one your group of teachers can agree on and teach it well.

I hope you did well on the first five questions, next week we'll see how you do when several other issues in phonics teaching are explored. In the meantime, you might want to bone up on decodable text, invented spelling, sight words, dialect, and any number of other issues. Who knows, maybe there'll be three parts.

Teacher question:

Shanahan response:

When people tell you that you should adopt a model or approach that they like because it is more “effective” you should ask to see their evidence.

I went looking for research on “push in” interventions. There is, of course, a lot of research data showing that various pull out interventions have worked at improving reading achievement. However, I could find only one study on push in interventions and it was carried out 15 years ago. It was very small and preliminary study that did no more than “suggest the possibility” that such an approach could be beneficial. Too little to go on.

(If your colleagues have found any such studies, please send them along).

There seem to be two different versions of push in reading.

One is the idea of the teacher who essentially “shadows” certain students providing them with assistance as necessary (e.g., keeping them attentive, adding explanation when needed, closely monitoring student seatwork, etc.). The point of this kind of push-in teacher is to ensure that the struggling students fully participate in and benefit from the regular classroom teaching. (This model seems to be most common with physical handicaps and severe cognitive difficulties, but I’ve seen it with minimal disabilities as well. More on this in a minute,)

Another, version relegates the is the push-in teacher to the role of parallel teaching. This teacher works with a small group of students in their classroom, providing them with alternative instruction. While, the classroom teacher works with the more advantaged small groups, the push-in teacher is dealing with the more challenged teachers. With this approach kids don’t lose time walking down the hall to the intervention teacher, and they don’t suffer the discomfort and disconnect from classmates common with pull-out programs.

I’ve personally only seen any push-in model in practice once in my career… and it was one of the worst observational experiences of my life. The problems were so stark as to be the stuff of goofball comedy.

The push-in teacher instead of helping her charges to better understand and learn from the classroom instruction, seemed to be in competition with the general education teacher. At one point she literally got up and erased what the teacher had written on the chalkboard! Obviously, a horrible example, so horrible that I can’t imagine that it could go any worse in your district. In any event, if you decide to go the push-in route, you’d better make sure the teachers can work well together and that they have a shared vision of what’s needed to advance children’s learning.

For reading instruction, the alternative teaching approach makes the greatest sense. If the classroom teacher is devoting an hour to small group teaching, then each of the three groups might get about 20 minutes of attention per day. With the push in model, perhaps the two more advantaged groups could get 30 minutes each, and the strugglers could receive a full hour of actual teaching. That could be terrific.

With the neediest kids, I usually advise going with approaches that have done especially well in the research studies. Given the dearth of evidence on this approach—and the large amount of positive support for various kinds of pull-out efforts—I’d not argue for push in.My hunch is that if I could pull out a small group and teach them separately, I could do more successful job of teaching these kids effectively and could build better upon the classroom teaching.

However, if your colleague carried the day, I’d insist that the alternative teaching route be taken, and make sure that the children served by the push-in teacher receive substantially more instruction than would usually be possible.

Maybe push in can work even better than pull out, but I will need at least a small amount of research that actually supports this alternative. Until then, I’d recommend using any approach that maximizes the amount of teaching that the children are going to receive.

How much does reading speed matter?  And if it is important, what is the best way to develop it in our learners? I’ve heard that 100 wpm is the minimal speed for comprehension. Is that a real thing? I believe the average speed is 200 wpm. 

Shanahan responds:

I can find no minimal reading or listening speed for comprehension in any of the studies I can lay my hands on. I’m sure there must be a minimal reading speed, but it is certainly considerably slower than 100 wpm. Part of the problem, of course, is that everyone interested in reading rate wants to speed readers up rather than slowing them down, so the lowest acceptable rates haven’t received much attention. (There are many studies in which the researchers artificially hurry things along, but I found none in which they intentionally try to impede reading rate).

I did find a provocative quote in the influential Becoming a Nation of Readers report:

“The corresponding rate for poor readers at this level is 50 to 70 words per minute. According to one group of scholars, this rate is “so slow as to interfere with comprehension even of easy material, and is certainly unlikely to leave much ... capacity free for developing new comprehension abilities.”

The rhetorical move “according to one group of scholars” suggests that the authors of Becoming weren’t too sure of its reliability, and the footnoted citation that they provided was incorrect (it referred to a completely different report). So, that 50-70 words per minute requirement sounds terrific, and yet upon what is it based?

Ron Carver did some interesting experiments with the listening comprehension of adults and he found that listening speeds of 75wpm allowed high levels of comprehension in the various conditions that he studied… and that increases in this speed were not problematic until 150wpm or 225wpm were reached (but different comprehension tasks could tolerate different amounts of speed). Perhaps dropping that speed by a third would muck things up, but he didn’t look at that.

Given that average third graders can read an unfamiliar story aloud at the rate of about 100wcpm, suggests to me that you’re not likely to find many readers (except beginners) at that 50wpm threshold. We tend to read more slowly aloud.

There are theoretical reasons why reading could be too slow to understand…

As Gibson and Levin (1975) explained long ago: “There is a minimal speed of reading below which the syntactical and meaningful relations within a sentence or a larger unit of discourse do not come through. Reading one word at a time, with pauses between, makes it nearly impossible to extract information beyond the word.” (p. 539).

Essentially, short term memory has limited capacity, so as one slows down this capacity starts to get overwhelmed—needing to hold onto words and phrases while waiting for the next information to become available so it can be integrated is problematic for readers. If they go to slow the text stops making sense. And, perhaps, abnormally slow reading would make it difficult to sustain interest and attention, encouraging readers to wander off, mentally and perhaps even physically. (In fact, some supposedly slow readers don’t necessarily read slowly, but their concentration is so poor that they allow their mind to frequently wander away from the text rather than reading.)

I’m not sure that 60 words a minute, however, is slow enough to demonstrate what that problem… as one word per minute would require one to read each word in a second and still have time to pause… perhaps 30 wpm would be more like the key damaging slow reading speed.

But there is one more explanation that needs attention.

When I was in high school, Evelyn Wood speed reading courses were the thing. The idea was that if you read faster, your comprehension would go up too. Famously, President Kennedy had taken such a course, and in those days, people still wanted to be like the President. I enrolled in Evelyn Wood at age 16, and it’s fair to say that it didn’t teach me to read faster as much as it taught me to skim (in other words, you didn’t read the words as much as you scanned them to get some idea what the text might be about). Not surprising to me, later, studies revealed that speed reading lowered comprehension. It didn’t raise it.

Speeding up reading was possible, but reading comprehension declined to a corresponding degree.

These days, in the schools I visit, faster oral reading fluency speeds is an issue. Teachers want their kids to get better DIBELS and AIMSWeb scores, so they encourage faster reading. 

However, I said there is another explanation of especially slow reading. Many readers struggle to read words easily, so most of their cognitive attention is devoted to decoding rather than reading comprehension. It is this divided attention, not the slow speed, that may be the source of the problem.

Thus, my conclusion from all of this, is that reading rate is not an issue to be overly concerned with, and slow reading is not the problem. However, it is a symptom and it often is likely to appear to be implicated in poor comprehension.

Slow reading is a symptom, not a malady.

Instead of trying to teach students to read faster, it is essential to make certain that they are able to decode easily and continuously, and to maintain their concentration.

Originally, the idea of teaching fluency was to use extensive oral reading practice to help young readers to apply their phonics skills serially and more quickly. In many phonics programs, the children decode lots of single words, but trying to decode one word after another while thinking about the ideas reveals their limitations. Such practice was meant to teach the application of phonics, not to replace phonics. Often these slow fluency kids, simply are poor decoders who need explicit teaching of those skills.

And, with students who are able to decode with sufficient speed, but who are particularly slow and low comprehending readers, I think you’ll find that various strategies can help them to keep their heads in the game so that they can process text more quickly. One thing I do when my mind wanders is to try to summarize each paragraph in a sentence or two… before long, I don’t need that crutch.

Average reading speeds have not been measured a lot. Probably the best estimates are from a study by Taylor (1965). He found the following average silent reading rates for reading with comprehension. I don’t think these rates have changed much in that time, so these should give you a good estimate of where average students should be:

College:          280

Grade 12:        250

Grade 11:        237

Grade 10:        224

Grade 9:          214

Grade 8:          204

Grade 7:          195

Grade 6:          185

Grade 5:          173

Grade 4:          158

Grade 3:         138

Grade 2:          115

However, reading rates vary quite a bit. Such rates have large standard deviations (a recent study reported that its fourth-grade subjects had an average rate of 153 wpm—close to the norm listed above—but the standard deviation was 69 words. That means kids at the 35% percentile (a decent level of performance) would only be reading at about 110 words per minute, substantially lower than the mean.

Reading speeds are also going to vary by content and purpose. More demanding texts, for instance, will require that readers slow down to maintain adequate comprehension, while easier texts and lower needs for accuracy should allow faster perusals of the texts.

Not surprisingly mathematicians and scientists read more slowly than folks reading novels for enjoyment!

Bottom line?

Sound reading programs do not make rate itself a goal, any more than physicians make lower temperature a goal when treating strep throat. They recognize that heightened temperature is a result of an infection and treat that directly rather than trying to lower the temperature itself (which could be done rather easily with ice packs and the like).

If you want kids to read faster, try building up their decoding ability and vocabularies, and teaching them comprehension strategies with sufficiently challenging texts.

As frequent readers of this blog know, there is an entire segment of the literacy community that thinks I’m an idiot.

I’ve been married for a long time, so those kinds of judgments don’t usually bother me.

But let’s be honest, we all like to be liked, so another blog about why kids learn less from reading on their own is probably not in my best interest. And, that is not what this blog is going to be about… or at least it is not what I wanted it to be about.

You see, over the holidays a friend posted a chart from a presentation at this year’s Literacy Research Association meeting. It included effect sizes for the impact of student choice on learning. The effect size for the impact of choice on reading motivation was .95 and it appeared to have an even bigger effect on reading achievement (1.20). With big-whomping payoffs like those you’d be foolish to assign books. Let ‘em read what they want to!

My interest was piqued.

I’ve long known that choice matters in motivation. I prefer doing what I want to rather than what others want me to do. I’ve written about the value of choice in teaching, but have pointed out that it didn’t have to be about which book to read—it could be about who to read with, which part of the room to read in, or even which order to fit this reading into the morning schedule.

But these statistics seemed to be saying that book choice is where the big payoff is and if that’s the case, I really missed the boat (in Chicago, missing the boat in January is a cold proposition).

I set out to write a mea culpa, mea maxima culpa kind of blog entry touting kids’ choice over teacher’s choice.

Except that isn’t what I found out when I looked into this.

Twitter indicated those statistics were from John Guthrie, an honest and rigorous researcher. (That meant to me that those statistics could be solid).

But the source was a chapter from a book called Voice of Evidence. It’s a good book, but books aren't usually good sources for research evidence. Chapters are not reviewed and edited as research.

The Guthrie and Humenick chapter aimed to answer the question, “What motivates students to read?” Instead of a traditional qualitative literature review, they reported a meta-analysis. But it wasn't reported like a research study, so you can't tell which studies were included the analysis.

They say that they included 22 experimental studies which offered up 46 effect sizes on student choice and its impact on reading. Based on this analysis they concluded that when kids are allowed to choose what they want to read there are big boosts to reading motivation and learning.

The chapter discussed a few of the meta-analyzed studies to illustrate their conclusions.

These descriptions surprised me. They revealed studies that weren’t so terrific for making this kind of judgment.

For example, one of them (McLoyd, 1979) had children examine 10 books and rate them in terms of interest. They then assigned half the children their first choices and the other half their last choices.

Yep, that’s right.

No one in this study chose anything. Everyone’s book was assigned. They either had to read a book they liked or a book they didn’t like. McLoyd let the kids read for a few minutes and then interrupted them, keeping track of how long they continued reading. The kids who were assigned books they liked read a bit longer than the ones assigned books that they didn’t.

That’s a big confound of choice and interest. That kids spend more time reading books they like than books they don’t isn't that surprising. (Of course this is in contrast to my belief that children spend more time “eating” asparagus than ice cream; but that’s quite another matter).

Another of the studies (Reynolds & Symonds, 2001) also confounded choice and interest to the point where, again, I was stuck concluding that kids would rather learn about something they were interested in, than being assigned stuff they were not. But choice is the issue in this only if you think teachers always assign what kids don’t like.

Another strange choice of a study was that of Lesley Morrow (1992). In this study, students were assigned to one of two treatments. One provided students with instruction and workbook activities from their basal readers. The second provided students with much the same instruction, though abbreviated a bit to open up some time to allow for students to read self-selected books from classroom libraries and to receive additional lessons and activities based on those books.

No question that the free choice group out-performed the comparison group but was that outcome difference due to choice?

The choice group was required to read more and to do more reading lessons. They had access to a classroom library (complete with rocking chairs, felt-boards, and other materials). The children in the choice group all received subscriptions to Highlights magazine so they could read at home (and half of this group received instructional support from their mothers with these library books).

Complex interventions of this type may work, but this kind of study cannot reveal the active ingredients. Was it the extra reading lessons? The increased amount of reading? The Hawthorne effects due to the attractive new libraries added to the classrooms? The magazine subscriptions and increased reading at home? Or was it that the kids got to choose some additional books (to the textbooks)?

Meta-analysis can be terrific but including studies that look at fewer than 10 minutes of reading or that are so confounded that it is impossible to attribute the impact to the variable of interest is sure to undermine its value.

Student text choice likely has some payoff in terms of motivation. But its impact on achievement may be much smaller than these Twitterverse postings would suggest. I’d still be hesitant to make student book choice a big part of my reading instruction.

Why would I be hesitant to have kids select the books?

Kids have to learn to negotiate text complexity. Teachers (and publishers) should be selecting texts that will challenge kids in particular ways.

These challenges might be simple and straightforward: particular vocabulary the kids are unlikely to know, or sentences that have particular kinds of complexity (like passive voice or especially long noun phrases or compound verbs).

Or, they might be structurally or conceptually complex. Stories with multiple protagonists or that include flashbacks, or informational texts that challenge one’s perceptions as science texts sometimes do.

With such texts, teacher can guide students to confront these interpretive problems.

When kids do the picking, it is less certain that their choice will present such confrontations, and even when they do, the teacher would less likely be in position to add the essential teaching that would help the student to transform this confusion into learning.

There is a place for student book choice within reading instruction, but it is much smaller than those Twitter charts may suggest.

There is a good lesson in this for those educators who think they can just take John Hattie’s chart of effect size as the source for school improvement efforts. You cannot interpret effect sizes without some awareness of the original studies included in the analysis. The old adage garbage in, garbage out still applies.

References

Guthrie, J. T., & Humenick, N. M. (2004). Motivating Students to Read: Evidence for Classroom Practices that Increase Reading Motivation and Achievement. In P. McCardle & V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research (pp. 329–354). Paul H Brookes Publishing Co..

McLoyd, V. C. (1979). The effects of extrinsic rewards of differential value on high and low intrinsic interest. Child Development, 50(4), 1010–1019. https://doi.org/10.2307/1129327

Morrow, L. M. (1992). The impact of a literature-based program on literacy achievement, use of literature, and attitudes of children from minority backgrounds. Reading Research Quarterly, 27(3), 250–275. https://doi.org/10.2307/747794

Reynolds, P.L., & Synons, S. (2001). Motivational variables and children's text search. Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(1), 14-22.

Teacher question:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress says that only 37% of 4^th graders are reaching reading proficiency. Why is it so low?

Shanahan response:

Why do so few American kids read well?

There seems to be plenty of blame to go around. Parents? Society? Too much screen time? Poverty? Immigration? You and me?

Lots of possibilities; some truth to each of these explanations. We’re all responsible, none of us are responsible. Yada, yada.

Poverty is a big problem, of course. The correlations between test performance and family income (or family security) are high. Childhood poverty can affect the brain—making it less able to learn (Noble, 2017)—and, SES includes not just income but also parents’ education. Parents who are less likely to read and to read well are less likely to raise children who thrive in school. Poverty also contributes to poor nutrition, school-interrupting illnesses, and stress. There are exceptions, of course, but the patterns are strong. American schools serve a lot of children who live in poverty and that contributes big time to low achievement (high income schools score well, high poverty schools do not).

It is true that children from low income schools have a higher likelihood of struggling in school, but it is also true that some schools manage to address these children’s educational needs better than others. At least some other countries manage to deliver more effective education to their poor kids (Darling-Hammond, 2014).

I suspect that one of the things that makes explanations like poverty or uncaring parents or high screen time so attractive to so many educators is that none of those are problem that we can address.

It’s the equivalent of the waiter who tells you, “Not my table,” when you ask for help and your own waiter has gone missing.

“I could teach these children successfully if they weren’t poor or if dad hadn’t walked out or mom spoke English or if the kids weren’t already so far behind by the time that they reach my class…” Sounds committed and hopeful and positive—if someone would just fix these kids, I’d be able to teach them…. But, obviously, schools can’t “fix” the kids, so the hopefulness deteriorates into so few children reading proficiently.

I have no doubt that those with different expertise than mine should be trying to address issues of poverty and racism and child health and anything else that makes learning harder. But these are the children we have, and they are at our table. Our job is to serve their needs as well as possible. 

What can educators do to raise achievement?

It’s complicated but I think that it has to do with opportunity to learn. We simply don’t spend enough time on those things that make a difference in making kids proficient. Most American elementary schools these days pride themselves on their 90-minute reading blocks… but much of that time gets devoted to things that do little to promote children’s reading ability:  the kids are supposedly reading on their own or doing keep-busy-but-keep-quiet sheets while the teachers are working with other kids.

I’d love it if instead of a 90-minute block, we’d commit to providing 90 minutes of teaching and guided practice to each child each day. That might take more than 90 minutes to accomplish, but it would sure give kids a better chance to become proficient. (The 90-minute block is often a myth anyway; watch closely and you’ll see that reading lessons don’t actually begin at the beginning of the school day and yet those school opening minutes are counted as literacy block time.)

In my schools, I required 120-180 minutes per day of reading and writing instruction. I know that’s a lot, but it is accomplishable in most schools (and if you get rid of test prep and extended specific skills teaching in reading comprehension and other things that don’t enable students to read better, meeting those times can even be easier).

This instructional time should be devoted to explicit teaching and guided practice aimed at developing knowledge of words (including phonemic awareness, phonics, letter names, spelling, morphology, vocabulary); oral reading fluency; reading comprehension; and writing. And, for English learners (and perhaps poverty kids too)—explicit oral language teaching.

Too many American teachers have bought into the idea that kids would be better off reading on their own than working with the teacher because reading is learned by reading. I agree with the idea that reading matters in learning to read, but such reading is better included in the reading lessons than pushed away from the lessons. I’ve argued that at least half of the instructional time (perhaps more) should be spent reading and writing.

That means in a reading comprehension lesson, there will be teacher-led demonstrations and explanations, and guided discussions, and so on—but the kids would be reading throughout these activities. The same is true for decoding instruction; a big chunk of that time should involve the kids in decoding and encoding words.

Second- and third-graders spend too much time working only with books they can already read reasonably well—and that idea has been spreading up the grades. Despite the claims of some educators and marketers, there is no such thing as an instructional level in reading (at least beyond the very beginnings of reading). Teaching kids at their supposed “reading levels” hasn’t been found to facilitate learning, but it does lower the sophistication and complexity of the content and language kids are working with.

I suspect that most teachers do little to support or extend students’ reading stamina. Oh, I know that some are proud that they use books instead of short stories to teach reading, or that many assign extended silent reading. But those tend to be sink-or-swim propositions. To make extended reads successful many teachers walk the kids through the texts round robin-style or have the kids read short sections of text interspersed with discussion or teacher explanation. Kids would be better prepared for tests (and many real reading situations) if there was an intentional regimen of stretching how long they can persist in making sense of texts. For a lot of kids, when they have to read an entire fourth-grade selection silently to answer questions about it as on the NAEP assessment, it doesn’t go so well since they’ve never done anything that demanding before.

Lack of a knowledge-focused curriculum is an important culprit, too. Science and social studies aren’t given enough time in elementary school (and the value of the literature may be suspect, too). We need to provide daily teaching in these other subject areas, and those lessons should include the reading of rich content text. Such texts also should be able to find a place within reading instruction, too. I’m a big fan of including content learning objectives in reading programs.

(Note to Educational Policymakers: This statement is aimed at teachers. But that does not get you off the hook. Providing policies and resources that ensure that teachers have sufficient professional development and support and sufficient amounts of teaching time are on you.)

Nothing very exciting here, right?

If we want to more of our kids to be reading proficient at the levels needed in the 21^st century, it will take a lot of dedicated teaching of the key things that matter in learning. Nothing sexy about it, and yet too few kids get those things and placing blame doesn’t help. Focus like a laser on what works rather than on what you like to do and these kids are likely to do better. 

If you were teaching second-grade what would your schedule look like?

Shanahan response:

This question—in various forms—came up a lot this week in response to last week’s posting. Here is my thinking on this.

I start from the premise that I want kids to get between 120-180 minutes per day of reading/writing instruction. The more challenged the kids are, or the greater the learning gains we are seeking, the more time I will devote to literacy.

Given the ambitious learning goals that we are striving for, I see no way of accomplishing them with fewer than 2 hours per day (or 360 hours per year). And, no matter how great the needs, I can think of no situation where I would devote more than 3 hours per day to these goals because of the importance of math, science, social studies, the arts, etc.

If you look at the various surveys and observational studies reported since the early 1960s, it appears that English language arts (which has long been dominated by reading) usually has received about 90 minutes of attention per day on average. This has worked out to something like 2 hours per day in the primary grades and one in upper elementary—with 90 minutes as the average.

Most schools that I visit these days are proud of their 90-minute reading block. In other words, they’ve institutionalized an average effort. I insist on two to three hours with the idea of ensuring that the average amount of literacy learning increases.

Another basic idea is that students will need instruction in multiple areas: word knowledge, oral reading fluency, writing, and reading comprehension. In some situations, I might be persuaded to add explicit oral language instruction to the mix (and then divide the total into five), but that would not be universal, so let’s not do that here. I would give roughly equal amounts of teaching in each of these four aspects of literacy which means that kids each year would receive about 90 hours of teaching about words, comprehension, fluency, and writing. 

A final basic. I’m purposefully proposing a schedule that is not a “block.” I’m not a big fan of the Reading Block because it can make it very difficult to schedule the complexity of an elementary school day. There is no learning benefit to having reading organized in a block—and often I see kids getting less than the scheduled time because of questionable assumptions about the sanctity of the block.

If your school day begins at 8AM, and your literacy block goes from 8:00-9:30… what are the chances kids will receive 90 minutes of instruction? My bet (and past observations) would say that the first 10 or 15 minutes of the day (and sometimes even more) are not devoted to teaching. Pledge of allegiance, morning announcements, lunch money collection, attendance, pencil sharpening, circle time, and so on are not reading instruction.  

Okay with those basics out of the way, let’s start with a fairly simple scheme.

8:10-9:00        Reading comprehension instruction

9:00-9:15        Oral reading fluency

9:15-10:15      Math

10:15-10:45    Word knowledge

10:45-11:15    Writing

11:15-12:15    Lunch/recess

12:15-12:30    Oral reading fluency

12:30-3:30      [Social studies, science, music, art, physical education, library/computer center]

Let’s take it line by line.

Reading comprehension instruction. Although I said I’d provide equal amounts of instruction for each of the four literacy components, but here I’ve provided almost double the time for comprehension. The reason for this is because the classroom that I’ve imagined is pretty diverse and, while all the children can read, there are big level differences. I thought it best to divide them into two groups today. The extra time will be needed to provide both of the these groups with 30 minutes of instruction.

Some days this might not be necessary. Some days I might schedule it differently. This particular plan would allow me to have the two comprehension groups engaged in some kind of guided reading activity (e.g., Directed Reading Activity, Directed-Reading Thinking Activity, Close Reading, strategy lesson) simultaneously, with me rotating myself across the groups. I might be able to do that in less than double the time, but I certainly can’t do it in 30 minutes.

Approximately half this reading comprehension time would engage the students in text reading—rather than just discussion or explicit instruction from me. Over time, that means kids will be reading a lot under my guidance.

Oral reading fluency. I’ve set aside 30 minutes for fluency teaching, and my thoughts here would be to engage kids in supervised paired-reading practice. There are lots of other choices, but that’s my usual go-to for fluency. That means the whole class would be divided into pairs, they’d be taking turns reading pages to each other and giving feedback to each other, and I’d be moving from pair to pair to help with the feedback, to collect data on student performance, and to keep kids on task.

The tricky move here was dividing this time in two. The reason why you might want to do that is to keep it from getting boring or to engage kids in interval training—practice, take a break, practice some more—which can enhance this kind of skills learning. It also illustrates how flexible my schedule could be.

Math. Are you kidding, Math in the middle of the reading block? Remember, blocks aren’t necessary—research doesn’t find that structure to be any more (or less) effective than this. In this schedule I’m able to address math in the morning. I’ve written before that morning instruction is no more effective than afternoon instruction, so I’m putting my money where my mouth is here. Our math consultant hasn’t read that research and he’s sure that morning teaching is more effective, so I’m willing to keep him happy by providing that math teaching early on, even if it means some of the literacy teaching might have to be provided in the PM.

Word knowledge. This part of the curriculum emphasizes both decoding (e.g., phonics, phonemic awareness, sight words, spelling) and word meaning (including morphology). Although my hunch is that my varied class will be diverse here, too, I think I can provide the needed instruction in 30 minutes (give or take 5-10 minutes).

I could deliver a single phonics lesson—aimed especially at my less advanced readers (which will provide a review for the more advanced ones), or I could deliver two different lessons, one on phonics and one on vocabulary possibly. In either event, the kids will be spending at least half the time decoding words or encoding words, not just listening to me.

Writing. This time would be devoted to teaching writing and includes everything from prewriting, composition, revision, editing, printing/cursive or keyboarding work, and so on. On this day, I’m imagining that all the kids have been working on their compositions and we’d spend the half hour sharing the compositions, receiving revision feedback from peers and me, and perhaps even beginning some light revision. That’s why I put the time here. After the intensity of the phonics work in the previous lesson, I thought the sharing and interaction here would allow more movement and would add some needed variation in activity at this point.

On other days, if the kids were starting to compose, I might have interspersed this with the reading comprehension time—with one group writing and one working with me on comprehension and then reversing. I didn’t think that would work so well with the revision activity so added the extra comprehension time to facilitate my choice.

There are other ways this could be done, as well. Perhaps on Tuesdays my kids have physical education at 10:30, so I might make some different choices and could push more reading into the PM. Or, I might do what many upper grade teachers do which is to teach reading comprehension every other day (alternated with writing), which provides me with a full hour of teaching of writing or comprehension. I don’t like that as much withe 7-year-olds, but with the older kids it can prevent the need for splitting up a chapter or story across two days, and the more extended writing time is welcome, too.

Another variant of this can provide a bit more time elasticity. What if today’s reading comprehension lesson was to be taught to the whole class? That would buy me back 20 minutes. What if that lesson were being taught not with the core reading program, but with the social studies or science book? That also would reduce the amount of time needed to cover the ground of an ambitious elementary curriculum.

The schedule itself can’t show the possibilities of interconnections among these parts either. Perhaps the kids are writing about the text they read for reading comprehension work. The vocabulary that they studied might be connected to that text too, as could the fluency work. Or, maybe the class is working on some kind of project or report and the texts being used for reading comprehension are part of topical text sets. The schedule might look largely the same, but the degree of integration could still be quite high.

This, of course, was a two-hours of instruction schedule; a three-hour schedule would eat up more of the day. What might that look like? Lots of choices there.

One choice might be to simply increase the time devoted to each of these subjects by another 15 minutes (45 minutes per day, instead of 30 for each). That makes it harder to address all the other subjects, but in fact, in most cases it is still very doable.

Another popular approach is to supplement the two-hours of teaching with up to an hour of additional intervention time, which creates reteaching opportunities for some kids.

At least one school district that I know committed to this two-hour teaching commitment but added an additional 30 minutes a day to try to teach love of reading (e.g., reading to the kids, independent reading, computer games, book club). I’m not a big fan of that because it is not likely to be as effective as teaching, but I’d not oppose it as long as it isn’t stealing the children’s reading instruction. It did give the teachers some additional scheduling flexibility and that’s a plus.

Like any example, this one is limited, but it does highlight a number of key points:

• Amount of instruction needs to be maximized and varied on the basis of student need—down time or activities with low learning payoffs (though sometimes necessary) should be minimized
• Actual amount of instruction is more important than the numbers of minutes scheduled.
• Schedules should be based on the outcomes one is seeking more than on the activities one might want to use for teaching.
• There are many different activities that can be used to accomplish particular learning goals (that is, there is more than one way to teach something). Effectiveness is what matters.
• Literacy instruction should include a lot of oral and silent reading, writing, decoding, spelling. Kids need explicit instruction and guided practice in which they are engaged in trying to do these things. 
• Schedules need to be dynamic and flexible—allowing teachers to better meet the needs of students rather than honoring traditional, but unsubstantiated claims, like kids learn more in the morning or small groups are always better than whole class.
• Integration across the language arts and content areas can have a multiplier effect.

I'm looking for help with information or resources about text types for early readers. We have decodable text, text with high-frequency words, and predictive text. It seems like a reasonable strategy to provide our fragile readers with more opportunities to read these low-complexity texts while we shore up issues with phonological awareness. Many teachers over the years have complained to me, an instructional coach, about a lack of available texts to meet the need of students as they proceed through the year and the text complexity increases. Even with popular curriculum programs, teachers usually have very limited options with beginning reader texts, and it isn't clear how the different types are meant to be used or the benefits of each. Do you have any advice for novice teachers about using different text types with our vulnerable readers? 

Shanahan response:

The role of text in reading instruction has always been a big instructional question for parents and teachers—but it has not drawn the same kind of research interest as many other issues.

Nevertheless, the research does provide clues and it suggests that kids are likely to be best off in classrooms that provide them with a mix of these text types rather than a steady diet of any one of them—nor do I see the progression through these as developmental, with kids graduating from one kind of simplified text to another.

Let’s start with the basic premise that when someone is beginning to learn to read (or to learn almost anything else), the teacher is going to need to ease the way a bit; simplifying the process so the learner can actually engage. Every beginning text scheme that has been tried (e.g., controlled vocabulary readers, predictable texts, decodables, language experience stories, words in color, initial teaching alphabet) is not exactly like the texts that we read because it is a simplification made to allow youngsters to get started.

A second premise is that every scheme to simplify a process and to support beginners is somewhat misleading because the simplification is sure to make some important change to the process they are trying to learn. If a youngster is trying to ride a two-wheeler, training wheels might be a great place to start, but those extra wheels mislead these novices with regard to how to balance when riding.

There is nothing particularly unique about the potential negative impacts of simplifications and supports. Doctors who prescribe crutches are always concerned about potential nerve damage from the crutches and from the muscle atrophy that they might promote. Likewise, social policymakers worry over the role welfare plays in discouraging work. Neither group eschews these supports – they are needed – but they make serious efforts to try to avoid the downsides.

Sadly, advocates of various beginning reading schemes usually appear oblivious to the problems their favorite support systems present to beginning readers. They love the fact that the texts they champion allow kids to read early on. But they ignore the fact that their beginning reading texts—like everyone else’s—differ from the actual universe of texts that we read, and the more these texts diverge the greater the danger that they will be misleading to at least some kids.

Controlled vocabulary readers limit texts to a handful of words that are used repeatedly. New words are added gradually. The major approach to learning these words is memorization. Initially, because they start with so few words, these texts sound very stilted, but as kids memorize more and more words, controlled vocabulary texts sound more and more like language.

For instance, consider this sequence of pages from the old Dick and Jane Readers:

pg. 1:          Dick

pg. 2:          Jane

pg. 3:          Dick and Jane

pg. 4:          Dick and Jane run.

pg. 5:          Jane and Dick run.

pg. 6:         Dick runs.

pg. 7:          Jane runs.

pg. 8:          Run, run, run.

Decodable texts on the other hand try to minimize the numbers of words that students won’t be able to decode. Initially, these texts too sound very artificial since the words they include are limited to very few letters and the same letters over and over. They, too, eventually become more like real language as they proceed.

Here is an example of what is meant by decodable based on the old Linguistic Readers. The idea would be to only introduce such a text once the students had some command of the following phonemes /k/, /m/, /f/. /l/, and the phonogram or word base at.

pg. 1           The cat is fat.

pg. 2:          The mat is flat.

pg. 3:          The fat cat sat on the mat.

Predictable texts start with more natural sounding language right out of the gate, but instead of requiring the novice readers to rely on memorized words or mastered letter sounds, the readers must depend upon repetition, context, and pictures to guess at words.

Here is the beginning of perhaps the most famous of all predictable books, Bill Martin’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear:

pg. 1:          Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you see?

pg. 2:          I see a yellow duck looking at me.

pg. 3:          Yellow duck, yellow duck what do you see?

pg. 4           I see a red bird looking at me.

All of these texts “work” in terms of getting kids started with reading.

However, each has problems. For instance, controlled vocabulary readers tend to steer kids towards guessing at unknown words based upon the words in their memory. Thus, the child who has memorized when, upon confronting unknown words like which or where, will tend to “read” these, too, as when (Barr, 1975; Biemiller, 1970)—not a very efficient strategy with an alphabetic language.

Decodable texts, too, can be problematic as they tend to steer kids away from meaning, and at times even away from real words. Kids who are used to  strong phonics support and decodable texts tend to try to sound words out more than do other kids (Cheatham & Allor, 2012). But when this doesn’t work (and it doesn’t always work), these kids end up producing nonsense words (mispronunciations based on the sounds they know) or they balk and don’t even read words that they can’t decode easily (Barr, 1975; Biemiller, 1978).

And, predictable texts lead kids to read the pictures instead of the words—not a reading approach at all. In fact, studies show that, since the print isn’t really needed to make sense of many predictable books, the kids learn to ignore the words (Ehri, 1992; Whri & Sweet, 1991; Juel, 1991) and to rely mainly on the context—though such use of context is alien to proficient reading.

Which of these texts should you use?

A basic finding in educational psychology is that simplification or making diverse forms consistent for the purposes of teaching speed acquisition. But they also reduce the learners’ abilities to generalize or transfer these skills to the greater complexity of the actual forms that one needs to learn.

For example, it has been found that providing readers with consistent and simple sound-symbol relations speeds their learning—but when you then ask them to read a more diverse orthography such as the one we use in English, then they are less able to make the needed adjustments (Levin, Baum, & Bostwick, 1963; Levin & Watson, 1963).

If the goal is better beginning reading, this relying heavily on any one of these approaches is pretty smart. If, however, the goal is to teach reading—you know, the kind of reading you and I do—then heavy dependence on any one of these schemes is shortsighted.

Personally—based on my own experiences as a primary grade teacher—I would use all of these kinds of text. My thinking then, and my thinking now, is that the way to prevent someone from being hurt by over dependence on a crutch is to employ a variety of crutches; deriving the benefits of each, while trying to minimize potential damages.

It is very reasonable to employ decodable texts. It gives kids a chance to practice their phonics in a favorable text environment—an environment in which there aren’t likely to be many words that can’t be figured out easily.

But those “experts” who claim that kids should only read such texts for some length of time (e.g., 2-3 years) are just making that stuff up. Research is not particularly supportive of such an artificial text regime (Adams, 2009; Jenkins, et al., 2004; Levin, Baum & Bostwick, 1963; Levin & Watson, 1963; Price-Mohr & Price, 2018). “Teaching children to expect one-to-one consistent mapping of letters to sounds is not an effective way to promote transfer to decoding at later stages in learning to read” (Gibson & Levin, 1975, p. 7).

Please don’t misunderstand where that quote comes from; Eleanor Gibson and Harry Levin were big explicit phonics proponents in their day, but they also believed in following the research.

Those who pushback against any who would dare to present anything other than decodables text to kids often complain that anything else is too hard or discouraging to kids. But that’s where those other text simplifications—that have their own problems—come in.

Having young students reading both simple decodable texts along with controlled vocabulary readers keeps them from being overwhelmed by difficulty—but also prevents them from trying to depend upon memory or simple decoding so much that these approaches do damage.

I’m not a big fan of predictable text in this equation, because it discourages kids from looking at the words. However, even these texts are okay for very brief times. In my classrooms, kids worked with these kinds of texts once a week or less—along with the basal readers, linguistic readers, and language experiences stories that made up the lion’s share of their reading. Predictable texts are fun, they allow a level of early success unmatched by the other texts and they do encourage kids to try to keep reading meaningful and fluent; nothing wrong with any of that.

For a long time, I’ve advocated for substantial amounts of instructional time devoted to decoding, fluency, comprehension, and writing. Decodable texts can be an important part of the decoding instruction, but I’d make controlled vocabulary readers the base of my reading comprehension instruction. Predictable texts can be a lot of fun, too, once in a while.

Teacher question:

Prevention of dyslexia and other reading problems should be everyone’s number one priority. Why isn’t there more emphasis on the early identification of reading problems, before they have a chance to ruin children’s lives?

Shanahan response:

In 2018. I was asked to edit an issue of Perspectives of Language and Literacy devoted to this issue. Below is the introduction to that issue and at the end I have included a link so you can follow up on any of the other articles in this issue by an impressive array of scholars who know a lot about the early identification of reading problems.

When I was a young teacher, I taught children with reading problems. Teachers would refer some of their students for evaluation, I would give them a test and decide who I could work with. One youngster that I added to my rolls was a first-grader.

I soon found myself chastised by the district school board for this particular decision.

“Why would you give special reading teaching to a 6-year-old?” I was asked.

In 2018, my decision seems more like “business as usual” than the board’s questions might suggest. These days I would have little to explain for providing extra reading tuition to a first-grader. But why was that so unusual 50 years ago?

The ideology around reading in those days held that students who struggled with beginning reading would eventually outgrow the problem. Low maturity was seen not as something that prevented learning—it simply delayed it. Intervening too early would not help, since the student would still be immature (what 6-year-old isn’t?), and my extra instruction might do harm and was certainly a waste of resources.

The idea of preventing—as opposed to remediating—reading difficulties has been around since the 1930s. However, researchers made little headway with the problem for about 30 years.

The earliest study of the issue that I’m aware of is Chester Bennett’s (1938) An Inquiry into the Genesis of Poor Reading. Bennett’s idea of early identification was to look at second- and third-graders to try to figure out their differentiating characteristics. Given that goal, the study was an abject failure. The author looked at a wide range of characteristics… birth order, speech defects, persistence, physicality, attitude toward school, incidents of crying, fear, headaches, and so on. With the exception of the ordinal birth position and, perhaps, speech defects, the whole list of features was as likely to be the results of reading problems as their cause. The author’s conclusion: researchers should go back to an earlier time in the child’s life. Indeed.

Unfortunately, it was a good long time before researchers took him up on the challenge. Oh, there were small investigations here and there showing that speech problems implicated in reading disability could be detected earlier (Hildreth, 1946), or that using more effective instructional procedures in grade 1 could “prevent” reading problems (Dunklin, 1940; Yoakam, 1943). But there was no concerted effort to develop schemes for predicting who was likely to have difficulty in learning to read—or to develop interventions aimed at disrupting these predictions (rendering the sure failures successful). 

That would change with the landmark contributions of Jansky and deHirsch. Katrina deHirsch was the director of the Pediatric Language Disorder Clinic at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center from 1941 to 1972 and her colleague Jeannette Jansky was a learning disabilities specialist. Their book, Preventing Reading Failure: Prediction, Diagnosis, Intervention (1972) provided a longitudinal analysis of more than 400 kindergarten children, in an effort to try to identify—prior to the onset of formal teaching—who would likely fail at reading. (An earlier, less ambitious version of the book had been published in 1966.) Their data led them to conclude that the best approach to early identification was a quick screener to pinpoint which children would struggle, and then a more extensive battery of diagnostic tests (covering a wide range of physical, cognitive, and perceptual variables) to explore the patterns of competencies that would guide instruction.

That effort was far from the last word on the subject and today, I think it is fair to say, much of their scheme has been superseded. However, at least partly due to that work, there is now a clear mandate to figure out which children are likely to struggle—and to do so prior to the onset of that struggle. Unless reading problems can be prevented, or addressed successfully very early, there are likely to be damaging secondary problems (the students’ reactions and responses to their failures) that can only complicate eventual remediation.

These days we have many more variables available to us— variables that go well beyond anything Jansky and deHirsch could have hoped for, including genetic screenings and various kinds of brain scans. Nevertheless, we are still confronted by many of the same problems that their work uncovered more than 50 years ago: the multivariate nature of reading difficulty, the complication of poor or inadequate teaching, false-negatives in prediction, and so on.

This issue of Perspectives on Language and Literacy provides a decidedly contemporary perspective on the early identification of reading difficulties. Mads Poulsen, a psycholinguist based in Copenhagen, Denmark, provides a thoughtful analysis of the need for accuracy in any early prediction model. Any scheme sensitive enough to reveal all students who will eventually struggle inevitably will result in “false-positives”— the misclassification of students with no need of extra learning support. And, schemes that minimize such misidentification will necessarily miss some of those in need. Professor Poulsen explains why that is and what is required to optimize early identification efforts so that they will have practical value.

In the 1930s “early identification” meant revealing those who had failed to learn to read after only a year or so of instruction. These days by early we tend to mean kindergarten. But what if it were possible to figure out who was going to suffer from reading disability years earlier than this? Recent advances in brain science suggest that this possibility may be more than a science fiction dream. Ola Ozernov-Palchik and John Gabrieli are neuroscientists who use brain imaging to identify the neural structures and functions that underlie reading development. Their work is pertinent to the issue of prediction of dyslexia because they explore neuroanatomy at a variety of ages, including infancy. Most studies of the neurological correlates of reading are conducted with already-struggling readers. From such studies it is impossible to discern which differences predate the failure to learn. Since learning to read changes the brain, there is a real need for pre-instruction neural exploration.

Then we explore a couple of practical pedagogical issues in the early identification of reading difficulty. David Kilpatrick, a clinical psychologist and author of the influential Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties, explores the role of causation in prediction and assessment schemes. His conclusion: once a reading problem emerges it doesn’t matter much what its etiology—since ultimately etiology cannot determine what assessments to use or which instructional interventions will work.

His discussion of the causes of reading problems made me think about the biggest gap in the prediction literature: No matter how incisively we measure those child factors that suggest future failure…such efforts cannot tell us anything about the instructional environment the student will have to learn within and respond to. Linda Siegel is the former Dorothy C. Lam Chair in Special Education and is editor-in-chief of Perspectives. In this issue, she elaborates on this conundrum, providing a case study of early identification and intervention and how it actually can work within the practicalities of a real school.

Finally, Hugh Catts and Yaacov Petscher, experts in the field of learning disabilities (the former a specialist in Speech, Language and Hearing and the latter a psychologist focused on reading), point us toward the future of early identification. They hypothesize that since reading development is undermined by multiple causal deficits, successful early identification schemes will need to be multifactorial in design and they argue for including computer assisted technology, gamification, and longitudinal models in the development of 21st century early identification efforts. This approach may seem to contradict David Kilpatrick’s claims about the current usefulness of causal explanations in the diagnosis and correction of reading difficulties; but remember, Kilpatrick is explaining the current state of the art in the field, while Catts and Petscher are imagining a future when we will surely know more. If they are correct, then it seems likely that early identification in 2030 will be as different from our 2018 concept as our current efforts are from those of the Jansky and deHirsch era.

Buckle your seat belts; it could be a bumpy—but fascinating and rewarding—ride.

Meanwhile, if I were a kindergarten teacher I’d screen my students early in the year to see what they knew about reading…particularly examining their knowledge of letter names and sounds, their phonological awareness, and awareness of print features (the kinds of skills that Kilpatrick describes). My focus would be on knowledge of literacy rather than on underlying causes or correlates. Although Ozernov-Palchik and Gabrieli and Catts and Petscher’s insights are exciting and hopeful, they are not yet user-ready. I’d implement daily lessons aimed at teaching these early literacy skills, monitoring student progress over the first semester. The screening information, although helpful, is not likely to be sufficiently predictive on its own (Poulsen), both because of the imperfections of testing and the variability evident in classroom environments (Siegel). Predictions based on children’s learning success during those early months improve prediction and are sufficiently accurate to allow for the implementation of intensive early interventions aimed at getting such children on track for success. I hope someday that the future research advances heralded in this issue will render my approach hopelessly outdated, but for now it is likely the best we can do.

References

Bennett, C. (1938). An inquiry into the genesis of poor reading. Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Dunklin, H. T. (1940). The prevention of failure in first grade reading. Teachers College Contributions to Education, 802, 1–111.

Hildreth, G. (1946). Speech defects and reading disability. The Elementary School Journal, 46, 326–332.

Jansky, J., & deHirsch, K. (1972). Preventing reading failure: Prediction, diagnosis, intervention. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Yoakam, G. A. (1943). An ounce of prevention in reading difficulties. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 9, 125–131.

https://shanahanonliteracy.com/upload/publications/163/pdf/ed3a5412095be4320e550941575ced4b3682086e.1.pdf

My district instituted a weekly "checkpoint" (a short passage and multiple-choice assessment aligned to our standardized test). Teachers are required to give this, and then break it down by standard in a meeting with a coach. I've argued that these tests are likely not measuring what they think they are. They believe that these can tell teachers whether students are mastering certain standards and questions. We have a large proportion of students below grade level.

I'm concerned that valuable teaching time, focusing on working with complex texts, is going to be spent on testing, and that the nature of the assessments will lead to skills-focused teaching that won't result in better readers. I've been told that "teachers need something" to know how their kids are doing, and this is what strong districts do? They've asked what I would suggest. How would you answer my admin's question about how best to know whether teaching is resulting in learning, particularly for less-experienced teachers?

Shanahan’s response

Man, if I had a nickel ….

I believe that your assessment of the situation is spot on.

It is not possible to reliably or validly assess those individual reading comprehension standards. That’s why the multi-billion-dollar testing companies that are capable of doing amazing things don’t even pretend to do that. With the approach that you describe kids get less instructional time (to accommodate all of the unnecessary testing), and the testing can’t possibly reveal anything specific that the teachers need to know to improve or shape the intensity or quality of their instruction.

The kids’ ability to answer the questions will be due more to the difficulty levels of the texts they are asked to read in the assessments than to the types of questions on the test … that’s why research repeatedly finds that reading comprehension tests measure a single factor — not all the individual factors that the questions or the standards supposedly represent.

This scheme is a time waster. It serves to make administrators feel good because they feel like they are taking positive action and looking rigorous …. But think about it. The most effective doctors aren’t the ones that prescribe placebos! And, that is just what this approach is; it is a sugar pill that will make you think you are really doing something — but, remember, it is just a sugar pill. It has no therapeutic value. (I find the statement that this is what “strong districts do” to be stunning. I assure you that it is not what those districts have high reading achievement.)

Kids’ ability to answer the questions will likely be due to how well they are able to read the particular texts (and the degree of prior knowledge they might have on the topics addressed in those texts). That means such testing should be done less often and should try to identify the difficulty levels of the texts that kids can and can’t handle, rather than on whether they could answer particular kinds of questions.

If administrators don’t believe this, they should look at their own data to see how reliably the kids perform week-to-week on each item type. If something valid was being measured reliably, then those scores should be pretty consistent — main idea ability or key ideas and details ability shouldn’t bounce up and down. They also might want to make readability estimates of the texts that they use and compare these with how the kids perform on the various sets of questions. What they are likely to see there is the same thing that ACT reports with their tests: if the passages are complex, then kids have trouble answering even the most straightforward or supposedly easy questions, and if the passages are relatively easy, they will be able to answer the supposedly hard questions.

I’d suggest that instead of a weekly test, the district provide an assessment two or possibly three times per year. What you want to test for isn’t which comprehension skills they do well on, but what levels of text they can handle. From that, you can make a pretty good estimate of who will be able to do well on the state assessment. And, you’ll know which kids you most need to stretch in terms of helping them develop the abilities to read those more complex texts.

The coaches should be supporting the teachers’ efforts to teach vocabulary effectively, to develop fluency, to extend kids’ reading stamina, to handle complex sentences and subtle or confusing cohesive links, and to make use of texts’ structures, rather than focusing on teaching kids to answer particular kinds of questions.

Why would I avoid the practices that you describe? Because they don’t work. Because they hurt kids by wasting their educational time. Because they make teachers, principals, and other administrators look stupid — since they don’t improve achievement.

Why would I take the approaches described here? Because they work. Because research shows that they work. Because my own personal experience as a district administrator tells me that they work on scale.

I'm surprised this entry hasn't drawn more attention. These days I'm often asked, "How do you teach reading comprehension?" or "Shouldn't we stop teaching reading comprehension and focus on building knowledge?" This topic, teaching text structure, should be a valuable response to those questions. I have added references and some links to additional practical supports for such teaching and have tacked on a new conclusion that provides 10 reasons that reading teachers should focus on text structure. 

Teacher question:

I was wondering what the research says (or if you could point me in the right direction to find it) about explicit instruction for nonfiction text structure. Specifically, English Language Learners.

Shanahan response:

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

I’ve been waiting for this question for almost three years. That’s because there have been several fascinating studies on this topic.

This question focuses attention on an important current controversy: My colleagues Dan Willingham and E.D. Hirsch have made a strong case for focusing heavily on content to support reading comprehension—rather than teaching comprehension.

How much should we focus on reading comprehension instruction? Should we aim to increase kids’ knowledge of the world alone and just assume they’ll be able to apply that knowledge successfully to making sense of text? Are there any reading strategies or meta-knowledge (knowledge about reading or text) worth teaching?

Though you know I usually shy away from controversial positions (fake news?), this one might be worth a dip of my oar.

Educational standards these days heavily emphasize the reading of expository texts or informational texts. The National Assessment (NAEP), college entry exams (SAT, ACT), and all state accountability texts (PARCC, SBAC, and all of the other acronyms) include such passages on their tests, so kids who can’t read such text are up a creek!

The idea that it might be beneficial to teach students how authors organize or structure their texts has long been with us… at least since the publication of The Organization of Prose and Its Effects on Memory by Bonnie Meyer (1975). That wonderful book explored why some ideas are more likely to be remembered than others and reported that text organization played an important role in that process.

That makes sense to me. Many years ago, I myself did a study in which I rearranged a text’s sentence sequence randomly. Surprise! Readers weren’t able to summarize it. The arrangement and linking of ideas make a big difference in understanding and recall.

The question is can you teach students to recognize and use text organization to improve reading comprehension?

In 2016 and 2017, two major meta-analyses of such studies were reported (Hebert, et al., 2016; Pyle, et al.,). They differed a bit in grade levels (the latter including K-1), and methodology, but overall, they had similar conclusions. Teaching text structure improved expository reading comprehension.

Teaching kids to recognize how authors have organized a text and to use this information to guide one’s thinking about the text has proven to be a powerful tool even with younger kids. Recognizing whether an author is describing, comparing, linking causes and effects or problems and solutions, or sequencing steps or events is worthwhile. It reveals the author’s purpose and allows one to focus attention better on the key information—the content.

Joanna Williams and her colleagues in a series of well-designed studies found that it was possible to teach second-graders to identify and use the “compare-contrast” structure and that students could recognize and that it improved their comprehension of such texts. The kids could successfully generalize this ability to comparison texts covering new content, but it didn’t help them with texts with different organizations.

Interestingly, Williams and company monitored the kids learning of content across this study and found this instruction detracted in no way from their learning new content information.

I suspect the reason for this is that thinking about text organization requires that you think about content in specific ways. For instance, when one reads science, the causal explanations tend be particularly important. A reading approach that encourages the reader to try to connect causes and effects is going to focus attention heavily on this key content and how the ideas are related. The same would be true for texts that explore problems and solutions, or comparisons.

The meta-analyses mentioned earlier found that it was effective to teach kids about multiple text structures and that text structure instruction was particularly potent when writing was included in the instruction (and such writing would require students to focus on content in a way that is particularly powerful in increasing content knowledge). Another important feature of such teaching was the use of graphic organizers to illustrate the structures and to guide students to make use of these structures during reading.

And, it helps if this instruction teaches students to watch for “clue words” (e.g., moreover, however, first, second, consequently, because, for this, as a result, likewise, initially). Such words are often stressed these days since they are such a key part of academic language, but text organization instruction requires one to not just know their meanings, but to actively use these words to make sense of an author’s message.

Given all of that, I would definitely devote some instructional time to teaching students to use text organization, both in their reading and writing. This work would entail reading science and social studies content, and I would hold the students accountable both for understanding these major text organization schemes and for the content they were reading about, analyzing, and writing about.

The question also asked about teaching of text structure to English Language Learners. Usually, I’m stuck saying that a particular approach has been found to be effective, but there are not studies of this with second-language learners. That is not the case here. In fact, research shows this approach to be effective not just with native speakers, but with ELLs (Wijekumar, et al., 2018).

For more information on research in this area, I’d recommend that you go to these sites:

http://literacy.io/

https://www.readingrockets.org/article/implementing-text-structure-strategy-your-classroom

https://iowareadingresearch.org/blog/text-structure-mapping

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psyched/201703/teaching-text-structure-improves-reading-comprehension

As for the controversy between content and reading comprehension strategies: Should we teach content or strategies? The answer definitely is, “Yes.”

And here are 10 reasons why:

1. Research has consistently supported the idea of providing this kind of teaching. 

2. This is true even with the most rigorous research designs.

3. The effects sizes for these studies have ranged from moderate to high, meaning there is a good learning payoff from such teaching.

4. Research has been consistent on this for nearly 50 years -- so the value of this kind of teaching is not just a fad.

5. Text structure instruction works across a wide range of grade levels, so whether you teach kindergarten, high school, or any of the grades in between there is good reason to believe this would be beneficial.

6. Text structure instruction has been found to be beneficial with English Learners.

7. Text structure instruction works with students with learning disabilities, too.

8. Given the emphasis on complex text, text structure instruction can be a valuable tool for helping kids to demystify a challenging text.

9. I suspect that text structure is a bit like vocabulary; that is, it is at that Nexus that connects language learning and content knowledge.

10. There are are lot of great resources available for teaching text structure.

References

Bogaerds-Hazenberg, S.T.M.,  Evers-Vermeul, J., &  van den Bergh, H. (2020).  A meta-analysis on the effects of text structure instruction on reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades. Reading Research Quarterly, 1– 28. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.311

Hall-Mills, S. S., & Marante, L. M. (2020). Explicit text structure instruction supports expository text comprehension for adolescents with learning disabilities: A systematic review. Learning Disability Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731948720906490

Hebert, M. Bohaty, J.J., Nelson, J.R., & Brown, J. (2016). The effects of text structure instruction on expository reading comprehension: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(5), 609-629. 

Meyer, B.J.F., & Ray, M.N. (2011). Structure strategy interventions: Increasing reading comprehension of expository text. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 4(1), 127-152.

Pyle, N., Vasquez, A., Lignugaris/Kraft, B., Gillam, S., Reutzel, D., Olszewski, A., . . . Pyle, D. (2017). Effects of expository text structure interventions on comprehension: A meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(4), 469-501.

Roehling, J.V., Hebert, M., Nelson, J.R., & Boharty, J.J. (2017). Text structure strategies for improving expository reading comprehension. Reading Teacher, 71(1), 71-82.

Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving reading comprehension in kindergarten through third grade: A practice guide. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sci­ences, U.S. Department of Education.

Wijekumar, K. (K.), Meyer, B. J. F., & Lei, P. (2017). Web-based text structure strategy instruction improves seventh graders’ content area reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(6), 741–760. 

Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B.J.F., Lei, P., Hernandez, A.C., & August, D.L. (2018). Improving content area reading comprehension of Spanish speaking English Learners in grades 4 and 5 using web-based text structure instruction. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(9), 1969-1996.

Williams, J.P., Kao, J.C., Pao, L.S., Ordynans, J.G., Atkins, J.G., Cheng, R., & DeBonis, D . (2016). Close analysis of texts with structure (CATS): An intervention to teach reading comprehension to at-risk second-graders. Journal of Educational Psychology, 198, 1061-1077.

There is a big argument in my new district over whether or not it is a good idea to teach children to use the three cueing systems. What do you think?  Why don’t you ever write about the cueing systems?

Shanahan’s response:

I don’t write about them because I’m not a fiction writer.

Don’t get me wrong, cueing systems exist, but their value in reading instruction is a magnificent work of the imagination.

How do we read words?

Perhaps we just guess dumbly when we see a word. For example, guess what this word is: Þßàm¤.

Obviously, that can’t be what readers do. There are far too many words for that to work. You would have only about .000002% chance of ever getting a word right. Not great odds.

We can use the same kind of reasoning to reject the idea that readers memorize lots of words and then recognize them during reading, sort of like remembering an old friend’s name on a chance meeting. It is certainly possible to memorize and remember words, but what an amazing feat of memory it would be to master the tens of thousands of words one needs to be a reader.

Clearly, readers must do something more systematic than that.

That’s where the idea of “cueing systems” enters stage left. Cueing systems are the different kinds of information sources that someone might use to cue their reading of the words. 

What kinds of information can readers use to read words?

One can use the pictures, of course. Young children often assume that is what is going on when their parents read to them (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982). They think the adults look at the pictures and make up stories, not even recognizing the print has any role in the process.

Even more advanced kids, able to read some words themselves, may revert to picture-based-guessing when confronted with unknown words. This kind of thing can also be done when there are no pictures. 

            “Mary always loved horses, so she wanted to see the stallion.”

One may not know the word “stallion,” but words like horse, mare, or pony seem like they might do fine.

These kinds of cues are referred to as semantic cues, they are hints to the word meanings.

Another cueing system is the syntactic one.

Readers may be able to discern what part of speech is needed (e.g., noun, verb), and that can narrow the possibilities down, too. For instance, with the sentence, “John was _____ his bicycle,” it seems pretty obvious that the unknown word is a verb. That means it won’t be pedals, handlebars, chain, ring, or gears, but it could be cooking, cleaning, running, swimming, and so on.

If a reader combines this syntactic information (John is taking an action) with the semantic information (it is being done to or with a bicycle), the choices narrow quickly… riding, fixing, washing, painting, destroying, disassembling, trading, selling, buying, etc.

Finally, readers may use the orthographic-phonetic cues, associating sounds with letters to provide a reasonable pronunciation, or simply to narrow the choices. So, with the example above, now that the reader knows this is something John can do to or with his bicycle, knowing that the word begins with an “r” may be a big help in refining the guess.

Any evidence that readers use cueing systems during reading?

Scads of it. As much evidence as Dylan Thomas claims there to be snow in Wales at Christmas. Analyses of oral reading errors (miscues) reveal definite patterns of variation in the information readers may be using.

So much evidence in fact that a theory emerged claiming reading to be a “psycholinguistic guessing game” (Goodman, 1965). The basic premise of this theory is that readers guess words more than reading them. Readers translate the available semantic, syntactic, and orthographic-phonemic information into guesses as they work their way through a text.

The claim is that, since reading is a guessing game, the purpose of reading instruction is to teach kids to make these different kinds of guesses effectively.

This theory is based upon some pretty weak –and certainly evidence-free—suppositions. And, this is where this all seems like a classic work of fiction.

The support for the theory comes from analyses of reading errors, not proficient reading. The assumption is that if someone uses such cues when erring, then that is how they must read correctly, too. Great story; not evidence.

Is there any good reason to believe that teaching kids to do what they do when misreading words is likely to be a successful avenue to reading proficiency?

Let’s imagine a very different pedagogical situation; golf lessons.

The trainers analyze golfers’ errors and discover head movements during muffed swings. They might assume the head movements to be the problem and then train their charges to hold still on the backstroke. Or, they might assume that head movements take place on all swings and set out to teach their students to make better head movements.

That’s a silly analogy, of course.

Golf trainers aren’t that dopey. They wouldn’t just assume that head movements during a golf swing are a good idea. They’d likely do a bit more research into the matter, perhaps watching videos of the Arnold Palmers and Tiger Woods to see if they jerk their heads around while hitting golf balls. If so, they’d quickly discover the successful linksters to be steady-heady guys and would then train their novices to do the same.

Better to emulate the processes of successful golfers than those of the duffers.

Believe it or not, reading researchers aren’t dopes either. They, too, took a look at how proficient readers read, and found that semantic and syntactic cues weren’t their way to success (Stanovich, 2000). Multiple cueing systems for word recognition are simply too cumbersome and slow to be a part of proficient reading (Greene, 2016). Good readers don’t try to guess words with a minimum of orthographic information but look at all the letters when they are reading (Rayner & Pollatsek, 1986). Good readers are the ones who figure out how to use those orthographic-phonemic cues to read (Lonigan, et al., 2018).

Instead of teaching kids to mimic what readers do when they make mistakes, we need to teach them to do what successful readers do.

No doubt, when readers can’t read, they’ll come up with ways of trying to pretend to read. Our job is to teach them to read, not to guide them to pretend better. Cueing systems should be reserved for science fiction, not literacy curriculum.

References

Greene, E. (2016). Recognizing words and reading sentences with microsecond flash displays. PLoS One, 11,(1).

Lonigan, C.J., Burgess, S.R., & Schatschneider, C. (2018). Examining the simple view of reading with elementary school children: Still simple after all these years. Remedial and Special Education, 39(5), 260-273.

Pollatsek, A., Rayner, K., & Balota, D. A. (1986). Inferences about eye movement control from the perceptual span in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 40(2), 123–130. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208192

Stanovich, K.E. (2000). Progress in understanding reading. New York: Guilford Press.

I've been thinking a lot about a response to teachers who only want to teach whole-class novels. When I say whole-class novels, what I see most often is the traditional approach most high school teachers take. Reading at home, lectures, comparative reading (but with very little instructional support). Also, what do you offer as a suggestion for teachers who are willing to rethink their novel practice (so long as they still get to teach novels)?

Shanahan response:

Lyndon Johnson used to talk about “two-handed economists.” He’d ask economists for their advice, and their responses were always, “Well on the one hand… but on the other hand….”

Your question makes me feel like a “two-handed” reading specialist.

There is no research that evaluates the specifics of your question. No one, as far as I can tell, has asked empirical questions like: How effective is novel teaching? How does novel teaching do when compared with other literature instruction? Are there more effective ways to teach novels? 

That leaves me with nothing but opinion; informed opinion one hopes, but I value opinion (even my own) about as much as Emily Post does eating with your elbows on the table.

On the one hand, there are some great novels out there for adolescents, and in my experience English teachers tend to do a pretty good job of selecting the ones to teach (not counting my own too-painful-to-discuss experience with Silas Marner).

When I look at the literature education standards established by most states, I can find few such standards that can’t satisfactorily be addressed through working with one novel or another (and those tend to be items tied to poetry and plays).

Another plus is the possibility that experiences reading novels will help students develop reading stamina. Having to maintain attention for several weeks and sustaining the memory demands required of reading an entire book should be good for kids. There may be no research on this, but it is a possibility.

There is some research (we’re still on the one hand) showing that fifth-graders preferred reading novels to basal reader selections (Smith, 1998). That suggests that there might be some potential motivational benefits, too.

Yeah, there are definitely some reasons for reading novels in the middle school and high school.

And, yet…. I can think of a lot of reasons NOT to read novels. You know, the “other hand.” One of the purposes of an English curriculum is to ensure that students gain a significant relationship with the Western canon (whatever that is). One goal is to make sure that students gain a relationship with a plethora of authors across racial, ethnic, gender, and historical contexts. Let’s be honest… there are only so many novels that kids can read. Excerpts and short stories magnify the possibilities here.

Likewise, while I can introduce metaphor, characterization, plot structure, mood, and so on through novels, I can never provide the breadth of experience possible when exposing students to shorter works. You might have kids introduce characterization through Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but in the same time period, I can easily explore characterization through works by Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, and Tobias Wolfe (and Cormac McCarthy).

Of course, I’ve had this argument with novel-teaching teachers who tell me that I just don’t understand. I’m simply not literary enough for their tastes. They’re certain that I get how to teach phonics and other reading stuff, but they know literature and how to develop a sophisticated reading among adolescents. In other words, if I was truly “woke” I’d get why novels are superior for teaching literature than excerpts ever could be.

I’m more than willing to accept that they’re wise and I’m an idiot, but then I think about some library research that I did. I found that both Robert Frost and Toni Morrison have taught literature. I tracked down their syllabi. They both taught literature using excerpts. I get that these novel-teachers understand literature better than I do, but better than Frost and Morrison? Perhaps they don’t appreciate literature as much as they think they do. (When they can write a novel as good as Beloved, I’ll accept their holier than thou  approach.)

This is one of those times when I think we ought to be splitting differences… balancing the needs for sustained attention and stamina and the possibility of exposing kids to some really great novels against exposing kids to a broader and more varied experience with elements of literature, literary works, and racial, ethnic, and gender sources.

I’d suggest one novel or a couple of novellas each year in high school, balanced against a more aggressive and intentional use of excerpts and shorter works.

Of course, those are issues of curriculum—what we teach. What about how these things are taught?

I only found one actual research study on teaching novels—and that with college students. The study found that students learned more when they read novels in chunks and shared their responses with the professor and other students; that is there was a measurable power in shared response (Courtland, et al, 1998).

Definitely when teachers have kids reading novels—or a series of shorter literary works—there still should be instruction in vocabulary and practice with fluency (if the kids aren’t fully fluent yet). There should be opportunity for teacher lectures, but also for student discussion and writing about the texts (that shared response). The point is both to teach students a particular work or set of literary works, while building an ability and inclination to engage in literary reading in the future.

Often when teachers are unwilling to change, it is less about what is best for kids and more about how much work the change entails. I think you’re more likely to get a teacher to back off of a long-used set of lesson plans by getting a group of teachers to develop the new lessons together… shared response is not only powerful with students.

This is one of those times that being two-handed is a really good idea. Your teachers shouldn’t drop novels, but they definitely should reduce this reliance.

We place children in different kindergarten (or prekindergarten) tracks based upon their performances on a readiness screener—and in consultation with parents. However, our state now has a “Read by Grade Three” law, which requires retention in third grade for students who don’t meet that standard. 

We have several students who are very young, meaning they are barely 5, who scored rather high on our placement test. We also have a group of students that are older and scored low on the same test. We are concerned about both groups. We would really like to know the research behind kindergarten placement and what the best practice is to help us make the best decision. 

Shanahan response:

Many years ago, I was working with two states who were in the throes of school reform. Both worried about boys and girls who start kindergarten underprepared to do well in the primary grades.

To make sure the kids were ready, State A raised the age of kindergarten enrollment by three months—sending a quarter of that year’s cohort home for an extra year.

State B took another approach. They moved the age of entry in the other direction to get the lower achievers into schooling earlier so that they could maximize academic experience.

Which approach is better for kids?

One of my many jobs in education over the years was to do screening for my school district’s kindergarten roundup. We’d test the kids and then recommend whether they were ready to start kindergarten. If kids scored too low, we’d recommend delaying entry until the following year.  

Good idea?

Back in the 1930s researchers and school leaders struggled with these questions, too. Morphett and Washburne (1931) recommended that kids with lower than average mental ages be held back from Grade 1 entry for a year (kindergarten was uncommon in those days). The idea was to avoid teaching kids before they were ready to benefit.

In response, Arthur Gates (1937) challenged that widely accepted delaying scheme. He identified children with even lower mental ages (M&G screened out those who scored below 6.5, while Gates intervened with kids whose mental ages were only 3.5). Gates then proceeded to teach those children to read. His novel idea was to adjust the instruction rather than who got instructed.

How about that?

Over the past couple of decades parents have gotten into the delaying act, too. In fear that their younger or less mature kids will lag behind their norm groups intellectually and socially, have been holding kids out; sending them to kindergarten when they are six instead of five.

And, finally, I’ve been involved in some research on California’s Transitional Pre-Kindergarten program that sounds somewhat similar to what you guys seem to be doing.

What does all that research and experience have to say?

There is no question that there are big differences among 5-year-olds. Research shows that even 2-3-month differences in age can make significant differences in their academic achievement. Throughout kindergarten the relatively older kids tend to score higher in reading and math (though, just like at your school, there are exceptions to this “rule” in both directions—age is only one important variable in differentiating the performance of young children).

These age-based differences tend to persist as late as grade 3, too (Datar, 2006; Lin, Freeman, & Chu, 2009; Oshima & Domaleski, 2006; Yesil-Doyle, 2006). And some studies have found even longer lasting differences; for example, the older students within an age cohort are more likely to enroll in college or to be included on elite teams!

And, there is no question that the kids who are “red-shirted”—that is who start kindergarten later than their age cohort—tend to do better relatively to the age-group they go through school with, at least for a while.
However, that approach still might not make such good educational policy. Someone will always be the youngest or oldest in any cohort. If you hold back your kids for a year to make them older than my kids, then what will keep me from raising your bid, holding my kids back, too. Who will blink first?

Despite those data, it isn’t even clear that the red-shirting works, since almost all the kids who are held back in this way are higher SES kids. In such cases, one suspects more is being done than just delaying kindergarten enrollment. When high SES parents become aware that their kids are behind, they tend to take action. Just holding kids back in a low SES district might not have the same benefits, since those kids would be much less likely to get any special tutoring or other supports while they waited.

Studies of kindergarten delay are not all positive either. One of the better studies (Dagli & Jones, 2013) found no benefit—apart from the kids’ demographic advantages. Other studies have reported similar results (Mendez, Kim, Ferron, & Woods, 2015).

It seems clear to me that delaying schooling so that kids will be more mature and more academically accomplished is not a particularly good idea. Like Arthur Gates, I think the key is teaching—not deferring teaching.

Of course, in your case, you are not asking about delaying school entry—but about whether some kids should go into an academic track kindergarten and others should go into a slower kindergarten environment—more matched to their readiness status. There are examples of making such programs work for children (California’s Transitional Pre-K, for instance, https://www.air.org/resource/transitional-kindergarten-unique-approach-pre-kindergarten-california-it-effective).

But in those instances, the low kids don’t just get a slower initial school experience, but usually receive two years of pre-first-grade instruction (and, with positive results). I certainly can’t oppose that approach—more teaching is almost always better than less teaching, and if you monitor kids’ progress and make it easy for them to move from one of these tracks to the other based on changing needs and situations, then you would be giving more teaching to whomever seemed to need it.

I think It would be wise to consider a very different possibility (though keeping that extra year option open is still attractive). If I tested a bunch of kids and found that they were lagging behind their age-level peers, instead of “softening” or “reducing the academic demands” of their kindergarten year, I’d go in the other direction.

I’d ask how can we best intensify and increase these children’s academic experience?—not how could we provide instruction that would best their match their lack of pre-admission academic progress.

If it is a choice, those lower-performing kids would definitely be tracked into full-day kindergarten rather than half-day kindergarten.

And I would not proceed into reading instruction more slowly either. I’d start this teaching as soon as possible (certainly by the first day of their kindergarten experience). Develop their phonemic awareness and knowledge of letters and sounds, build their language, engage in activities like finger-point reading and invented writing.

The idea of going more slowly with the laggards is based on an unfounded belief that these kids are necessarily lower intellectually or linguistically than their age-matched peers. This is sometimes the case.

However, it is not infrequent that the relatively lower achievers on kindergarten screeners simply haven’t had the environmental support or opportunities to develop literacy skills. (Those opportunities may even be lacking in households that seem to lack for nothing else. When I was doing screenings, I often found advantaged, loving, college educated parents who never taught their kids the letters—“he’s too little”, nor allowed them to work with crayons, scissors, or paste—“too messy.”)

We all want parent involvement, but I’d make it a priority with these late bloomers. What can mom and dad do before Junior starts kindergarten? Do they have books at home? Do they read to their kids? How often? Have they tried teaching their kids to write their names or their ABCs? Would they be willing to? Let’s stimulate and support some action there.

I don’t know what your resource situation looks like, but Frederick Morrison and colleagues did a really cool study here in Chicago a while back. They increased the kindergarten school year by 6 weeks (3 weeks at the beginning of the year and 3 weeks at the end) with amazing reading and math outcomes for the kids—gains so big that I wouldn’t worry about third-grade retention.

If you want the largest number of kids to do well on that third-grade retention test, then resort to the only thing that has consistently improved student achievement. It is not moving kids into a less ambitious instructional track or delaying the onset of academic experience. The only thing that works is teaching.

Use your screeners, parent advice, kids’ ages and whatever else you have to identify those kids who either are slow to develop language and literacy skills by constitution or from living in a non-supportive environment. Then teach the hell out of them. Make sure they get more instruction and more intense instruction than the kids that you aren’t as worried about.

Put kids in the track most appropriate to the amounts of time you think kids might need, and then provide them with so much teaching that they don’t need as much time ayou thought they might need.

Teaching beats tracking every time.

In an effort to streamline the workshop model in our district, I am looking for your stance on focused independent reading and/or any articles that you have written that support the importance of students reading at school with a specific focus in mind rather than "reading just to read"?  

Shanahan response: 

Unfortunately, there aren’t studies of this. People who are claiming that “focused independent reading” works better than having kids just reading on their own are theorizing.

I can tell you that the pattern of studies that I’ve reviewed over the years suggests that efforts to teach reading through kids’ reading practice tend to be most effective when they look the most like explicit instruction.

What I mean by that is that teacher guidance or choice with regard to the texts read, teacher involvement in establishing purposes for reading, and holding kids accountable for comprehension of the material seem to increase the chances of success. Of course, those components aren’t very “reading workshoppy”.

Reading is good, but it is most likely to pay off in more learning than kids can do on their own when someone is making certain that the text delivers a particular reading experience or knowledge for the students, when the kids have a clear idea of what they are working on or trying to accomplish, and when someone makes certain that kids are accomplishing the reading goals and provides reteaching and rereading as needed.  

Kids definitely need to read.

They should read within instruction. That kind of reading has students take on particular kinds of reading challenges and makes sure that they learn to do that successfully.

Students also should read on their own, as part of their own lives. Requiring kids to read for enjoyment at school is neither particularly enjoyable, nor does it provide kids with any opportunity to make decisions about when and why they will read in the spaces they reside and in their daily routines.

Reading workshop as usually conceived is too different from instruction to give kids the added benefit that should come from working with teachers. You can try to tighten up on workshop practices to make them more like teaching, but you might be better off starting with a teaching model and then try to make it more motivational.

Nevertheless, I’m glad you are trying to find ways to make reading workshops effective. In contrast, I heard from a teacher this week who was reprimanded for running extended classroom literature discussions instead of 1- to 3-minute individual conferences.

I guess not everyone wants kids to think deeply about literature. Or understands that you can’t accomplish that in 60 second increments with relatively non-challenging books.

Oh, I know that there are teachers (and authors of popular education books) who claim kids benefit greatly from reading self-selected popular YA literature and that no student should be questioned closely or thoroughly by teachers who have studied and thought deeply about those books.

But they’re wrong. They don’t have research supporting their claims and the research that does exist on such issues suggests that what they have to offer is not particularly potent. Indeed, try to find ways to make your workshops look more like effective teaching. That might just work!

Although the Reading Wars might be over (somewhat), I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve entered the era of Research Wars. What’s a literacy coach to do? 

Shanahan response:

I think you’re onto something. I’ve been seeing the same thing.

Of course, the original “reading wars” back in the 1990s were research wars, too.

In those days, one side argued kids would learn to read best with the least amount of explicit teaching. According to them, kids could learn decoding and how to make sense of text—and pretty much anything else that might be needed—if student motivation were sufficiently high and the tasks and texts were sufficiently authentic. The way to accomplish those suffciencies, according to them, was by exposing kids to high quality literature through big books, little books, independent reading, and writing opportunities. The role of “teaching” in this model was one of observing and responding, following kids’ leads, and providing “just in time” guidance. In other words, the less teaching the better.

The other side argued back that more learning would result from explicit teaching that followed a planned sequence. They supported textbooks, lesson plans, spelling, and phonics instruction. They weren’t exactly against motivation, but then motivation was not particularly manifest in any of their prescriptions either.

Very different views of the world.

But as different as they were, both groups used the same metaphorical (and rhetorical) baseball bat with which to thrash their opponents. The “r” word and “research says” were and have been the lingua franca of both sides in those “wars”.

That was why the federal government stepped into the fray back in the 1990s. Congress asked that a panel be appointed, not to make recommendations on how to teach reading, but to determine just what it was that the research actually had to say about the teaching of reading.

That’s what the National Reading Panel (NRP) was all about. By law the panel could only make determinations of fact.

Basically, the result of their analyses was the conclusion that explicit teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension offered learning advantages to kids.

The reason the panel could determine those particular facts—and not some others—was the decision-making rules that the panel set for themselves.

The panel decided it would only conclude that an instructional approach worked if it were tried out and, as a result, kids did better in some way.

That’s why the panel limited its review to experimental studies; that is, studies that test the effectiveness of particular interventions or instructional efforts in real instructional situations.

Of course, that meant ignoring lots of studies. 

For example, there are many studies that show that better readers read more than poorer readers. Those data are often used as the supporting evidence for schemes that set aside classroom time for kids to read on their own. 

The problem with that evidence, of course, is that it can honestly be interpreted in either direction (a fundamental problem with all correlational studies). Is it that free reading practice leads to better reading or that the best readers simply choose to read more than the poor readers do?

The panel approached this issue by asking the practical instructional question: Do kids read better if they have independent reading time during the school day?

We looked at studies that had provided such support for some kids and not for others and determined that, no matter how valuable reading practice might be, that way of encouraging practice was not particularly effective. 

The NRP report settled things down for a while. The field quieted.

But as you point out, the reading wars seem to be upon us again, with everybody using the “r” word.

In recent days, I’ve been told that

• phonics instruction, though necessary, hasn’t improved reading achievement;
• it’s a bad idea to teach reading in preschool or kindergarten;
• kids learn more reading on their own than working with teachers;
• we need to provide more phonemic awareness instruction than the NRP concluded;
• decodable text is essential;
• morphology instruction can profitably replace phonics instruction in K-1;
• teachers must have extensive training in linguistics if they are to successfully teach phonics;
• comprehension strategy instruction is hurtful;
• synthetic phonics is more effective than analytic phonics;
• kids, if they are to learn to spell, need instruction in etymology;
• reading success requires lots of free reading time during the school day;
• particular “Tier 2 intervention” couldn’t possibly work, despite What Works Clearinghouse conclusions to the contrary… and on and on and on.

Claim after claim after claim, all under the apparent guise (or more accurately, the imaginative or hopeful guise) of science.

Some of these claims seem highly unlikely to me, because existing research has already demonstrated them not to be true. Some of these claims could be right, but we won’t really know until studies are done. Ideas can’t be rejected out-of-hand just because of an absence of determining evidence. Perhaps, someday those claims will be transformed into the kind of research-based ideas that should be incorporated in our teaching.

What can a literacy coach (or the rest of us) do?

Ask a lot of questions.

When someone says, “We will never raise reading achievement until we     (fill in the blank).”You need to ask, “Is there any evidence showing that doing that results in more learning for kids?” If they tell you that some reading guru said it (so it must be true), or about a personal observation of theirs or of some Heinemann author, or of a research study that didn’t actually try it out, then grab your wallet and run.

Even official reports with lots of research input need such scrutiny. Such documents often start out with research-supported assertions but devolve into more questionable claims. It is hard for readers who don’t already know the literature to separate wheat from chaff. Each of the contentions is supported by impressive looking references and citations; only those in the know or who have the time and resources to check it out can tell the difference between those cites of relevant empirical studies and those that are no more than opinion pieces or research only tangentially related to the claim.

As serious—and intense—as these literacy arguments may be, the governance issues may be even more important.

Educators must have ways of adjudicating curricular disputes without setting everyone’s hair on fire. And, school administrators, who too often buy into the shiniest new object, have to be able to protect themselves from bad choices.

When people make claims about what works in reading, they shouldn’t be allowed to win the argument without convincing evidence that their scheme has worked. That means that two measurably-equivalent groups of kids should have been taught—one with the usual approach and one with the “great new idea.” At the end of the day, the great-new-idea group should be successful before we decide that it really is a great idea.

And, because of the diversity of learners and instructional circumstances, more such studies are better than fewer and studies with kids who are like the ones we teach are particularly valuable. Often, something can be made to work in one situation or with a particular group of learners, but the results can’t be replicated anywhere else. If someone tells me third-graders need a particular regime of instruction, I’d be a lot less skeptical if the support study hadn’t been carried out with the Ed Psych subject pool at the local university.

Remember that the kind of research evidence that I’m calling for only guarantees that an approach can be effective; not that it necessarily will be in your hands. Educational research reveals what’s possible, not what will always succeed. Positive research results point us in what should be the most promising directions, but instructional diligence, effort, and wisdom will still be needed if kids are going to be 21^st century literate.

I keep hearing that teachers don’t know the science of reading. But all the teachers that I talk to say that they teach phonics. What’s really going on?

Shanahan response: 

I suspect that both the critics and the teachers are telling you the truth.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a national education inspectorate that monitors classroom trends in the U.S. We all guess what may be happening based on our own narrow experiences. That means you could visit classrooms in your community, and I could in mine, and we might see very different patterns of teaching

But there is more to it than that kind of variation.

However, before we go there, we need to clarify one important point: The “science of reading” includes more than phonics and phonological awareness.

Phonics is certainly an important part of the science of reading, but it’s not the whole thing.

Any real “science of reading” would include all the methods or approaches that have been found, through research, to give kids a learning advantage in reading.

That means oral reading fluency instruction should be part of the science of reading. And, vocabulary and morphology teaching, too. There are also a number of instructional approaches that have been found to boost reading comprehension by teaching thinking strategies or enhancing written language performance (e.g., cohesion, sentence combining/reducing). And, guiding kids to write about text is scientific, as well. 

Any science of reading would concern itself with the amount of reading instruction provided and there are quality factors that need to be included. For instance, kids learn more when teachers provide clear purposes for the lessons, when there is plenty of interaction among teachers and students, and when teachers explain themselves clearly. Those are just examples, of course; there is even more.

But, with that said, back to your original question.

A reason for the seeming discrepancies in what you’re hearing about teaching has to do with the lack of precision in how we talk about these things. What is phonics instruction and what is a sufficient amount of phonics teaching? How many minutes a day do your teachers teach phonics?

Most primary teachers when asked if they teach phonics are, in my experience, likely to say, “Yes.” However, when I visit some of those classrooms, what they mean by phonics is pretty pale and thin; often no more than marking up a worksheet. Bloodless teaching not likely to help kids to figure out the decoding system.

When teaching the simple sound-symbol correspondences, teachers should make sure the kids can hear those sounds and distinguish them from other sounds; they should make sure kids can recognize these letters within words; they should make sure the kids can sound out unknown words or even nonsense words using those correspondences; and they should be able to read and write words with those elements, too.

Showing kids a spelling pattern and its pronunciation is a necessary step, but it’s not sufficient, if the goal is enabling kids to read and spell. Phonics teaching should provide opportunities to decode and spell words, to sort words, to recognize misspellings, and to gain proficiency in using all this information.

Although the numbers of phonics skills to be taught is usually pretty limited, the amount of phonics instruction kids should be receiving is considerable. Experts usually recommend 20-30 minutes or so of daily phonics instruction in grades K-2 (in other words, about 200 hours of such teaching). That means there is a need for thoroughness and depth; we want mastery, not familiarization.

The teacher who I mentioned earlier, the one who may be doing no more than having kids mark up the daily phonics worksheet, can honestly say she is “teaching phonics,” since those lessons are being dispensed.

But she, if probed, may also honestly admit that she knows nothing of the science of reading (in this case, the nature of the orthographic-phonemic aspects of the English language and the research on effective decoding instruction).

She may even complain, again quite rightly, that she received inadequate preparation at her local university. Her reading class was instructed by someone who thought guessing the words based on the pictures or on context were good ways of reading words (they are not; good readers don’t do it that way), or perhaps they had a philosophy that scorned the value of explicit phonics instruction, despite the research. 

And, the parents?

Those who see their children guessing words and struggling to read, grumble about the injustice of it all. They want more phonics. And, the reading community is as frustrated with those parents as the parents are with them.

Many reading professors simply can’t understand why these moms and dads demand phonics so vociferously when there are other aspects of reading science that are important.

The parents can’t understand why their kids’ teachers don’t know how to teach decoding and providing terrific classroom libraries and free time to read really don’t help those kids who simply can’t read the words. (And, telling them to look at the pictures and guess borders on cruelty).

Now multiply this through the entire system. What I just described about phonics may be true in Mrs. Jones’ first-grade class, but not in Mrs. Smith’s down the hall. It might describe phonics instruction in one school, while in others it is the fluency, or vocabulary, or comprehension instruction that is so strenuously grounded in an ignorance of the knowledge of a science of reading.

We need a substantial commitment to all those things found to benefit kids learning—not just to the ones we may like best.

Here is a link to the PBS segment and the letter is posted in the comments section following the video segment on this site:  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-parents-of-dyslexic-children-are-teaching-schools-about-literacy

I also have provided a link from a response to this letter by Steve Dykstra: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tGmnHW0XpMCC3uYgrr8AqW36web7UnGx/view

These postings have prompted several inquiries this week as to why I didn’t sign the group letter.

I usually don’t sign such letters.

I prefer to speak for myself.

Groupthink requires too many compromises: even if you fully agree with the thoughts being expressed—and in this case, I did not—should you be uneasy about obvious factual errors, the prosaic writing, or the fact that the complaint missed the point of the original report? Or, sadly, that it neglected the anguish and frustration of the parents and kids interviewed by PBS?

I could devote this space to a point-by-point refutation of both the PBS report and my colleagues’ letter, knit-picking every error, insensitivity, vagueness, bias, or pomposity. But I don’t see any real benefit in that kind of exercise.

It’d be better, I hope, to explore some of the issues raised by this futile exchange with as little finger-pointing or score-keeping as possible. After all, parents and teachers may be entertained by such rhetorical food fights, but their situations will not be materially improved by them.

I’ll explore those issues in this and in my next blog entry—too many important issues for a single posting.

Does dyslexia even exist?

Yes, indeed, dyslexia exists.

There is a group of learners who struggle in learning to read not due to any environmental problem or crummy parenting/teaching or low intelligence. There are learners who struggle, not because they aren’t smart and not because they are incapable of other kinds of academic learning. But these individuals, for some organic or developmental reason, can’t master reading without extraordinary effort.

Whatever is disrupting the learning of these kids is within them, not around them.

This malady has been recognized for almost 150 years and it has been identified in multiple languages and cultures.

There have been scads of brain studies showing both organic and processing differences between successful readers and certain struggling readers, and other studies revealing a genetic basis for at least some reading struggles.

I could wade into a useless and possibly damaging—to the interests of struggling readers—debate over whether it is best to use the term dyslexia, specific learning disability, specific learning disorder, reading disability, developmental reading disorder, congenital word blindness, learning difficulty or any other term you might have heard.

But why? What’s the point of that? Who benefits?

Dyslexia is a term used to refer to a “specific deficit in an individual’s ability to perceive or process information efficiently and accurately.” This definition of “specific learning disorder” is drawn from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the American Psychiatric Association (DSM 5) which has long been accepted as the arbiter of such issues, and they use this term interchangeably with dyslexia when it comes to specific deficits of reading (as opposed to math or writing).

This group of struggling learners has been acknowledged, albeit by a variety of terms, for more than a century in medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and education.

I personally don’t use the term dyslexia because I’m unable to diagnose it. I’m not a physician or a psychiatrist and have no access to fMRIs or to maps of kids’ genetic codes. I accept that there are too many children (and adults) who fail to learn to read and that there are a range of reasons for this failure, including processing or developmental factors within the individual.

Can someone be a struggling reader and not be dyslexic?

Yes, not all struggling readers are dyslexic. The PBS report indirectly acknowledged that. It stated that 40% of American kids struggle with reading (based on NAEP statistics), and that 20% of kids suffered from dyslexia (based on what I have no idea—more on this point later). Getting this point depends on a fairly simple inference: at least half of America's reading problem must be due to something else.

One of the problems with any public report of any disorder is that many people start diagnosing the problem themselves. If doctors on Gray’s Anatomy diagnose a brain tumor, the next everyone with a headache calls the doctor. This kind of discussion may convince a lot of parents that their kid has a developmental disorder, when the problem is that junior hasn’t cracked a book all year.

Poverty, lack of sufficient linguistic and academic support in the home, weak teaching and other factors might be a better place to look in many cases.

Who benefits from phonics instruction?  

The PBS report made it sound like phonics instruction was the cure for dyslexia and that if schools would just teach phonics then the problem would be solved. Is phonics really a “silver bullet” for the problems that bedevil dyslexic kids?

Also, it sounded like phonics was mainly for those dyslexic kids. What about everyone else?

Many studies of reading problems have suggested that dyslexia is particularly disruptive of decoding and spelling, and for such children, phonics instruction is definitely beneficial. Many independent studies have shown that children taught phonics systematically and explicitly do marginally better than those who don’t get such instruction. The National Reading Panel found that phonics was beneficial both to the general population and to struggling readers.

Steve Stahl long ago showed that phonics was particularly helpful to kids who were struggling with literacy due to poverty. Obviously, it is not a specifically-targeted or specialized solution.

Interestingly, phonics instruction has been found to exert a bigger impact on the learning of regular kids than on struggling readers. Upon reflection, this shouldn’t be too surprising. According to the DSM 5 manual, dyslexic kids only improve through “extraordinary effort.” That means phonics instruction is good idea for kids who are struggling with decoding—whatever the source of the problem—but it is certainly not a magical cure for the problem.

Another point to consider: According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, when such children’s decoding problems are successfully addressed, the kids often continue to be dogged by other language deficiencies (that may have always been there, but too subtly to be measured; that were late developing; or that resulted from the limits on learning exerted by the original reading disorder).

Those kids in the PBS report apparently started improving when they received phonics instruction. I see nothing surprising in that. I can’t understand why they weren’t receiving phonics throughout the primary grades. However, if all they do for them is provide additional phonics, some of them are likely to get a rude awakening up the road.

Recently, Rick Wagner has identified significant populations of kids who are able to decode reasonably well, but whose reading is disrupted by language deficiencies. As beneficial as quality phonics instruction is for the general population and for strugglers with particular deficiencies in this aspect of their progress, such instruction will be insufficient to address these language needs.

More on related issues next week.

The report was rebuked by a group of reading professors. The fact, that I hadn’t signed on to that protest, provoked comment in this space and on Twitter. Readers wanted to know why I wasn’t part of their protest.

Not interested in joining the melee, I was willing to make a formal state of my take on the various topics at issue. This is the second installment of that explanation that began with last week’s blog entry.

Last week, I considered whether there is such a thing as dyslexia, whether everyone who struggles to learn to read is dyslexic, and whether phonics instruction is a particularly effective or specialized approach for dyslexics.

Here are some issues to consider.

Does a diagnosis of dyslexia suggest a particular instructional treatment?

No, unfortunately, it does not.

Although the PBS report may have implied that if a child is dyslexic then phonics instruction is the only way to go. But the term is often used generically to mean nothing more than “reading problem”.

As one of my colleagues pointed out recently: “Do you know how many neuropsych evals I've seen where the kid's phonological awareness is a STRENGTH compared to their other assessment data and they still have a dyslexia diagnosis????”

The most rigorous and accurate approach to dyslexia diagnosis that I’m aware of is that developed by Ginger Berninger and her team. It includes analysis of genetic alleles, brain structures and functions (fMRI), and eye movements; well beyond the scope of a typical neuropsychological evaluation (and beyond what I have ever been able to do in my professional practice).

As much as I’d like dyslexia to be reserved for those disorders that include disruptions of phonological processing, that as yet is not the case. That means that if a child is described to me as being dyslexic, I still need to test and probe to find out what is likely to be most beneficial instructionally.

Thosee kids that PBS focused on all apparently benefited from the addition of explicit phonics to their instructional regime. That, to me, is prima facie evidence that phonics was a good call in their cases—it worked! That, however, doesn’t mean that is the only or the best response that would make sense in all cases. Berninger, for example, distinguished between dyslexia and oral and written language learning disability; in my understanding, both of those would be classified as developmental learning disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, but my instructional responses to them would be quite different.

When phonics is the solution, is there a particular kind of phonics that works best?

Although the “science of reading” makes it pretty clear decoding is deeply implicated in the reading process and that phonics instruction facilitates such learning, it is largely silent about which approach is best.

Studies that directly compare different phonics programs just don’t exist, and there aren’t enough studies of any particular phonics method to support an informative meta-analysis.

The National Reading Panel (NRP) concluded that explicit phonics was beneficial for kids in both regular classrooms K-2 and for struggling older readers. (Later the National Early Panel broadened this to include preschoolers, too).

NRP found that systematic phonics is best, that is there should be a sequential phonics curriculum to guide teachers’ instruction.

But NRP found no statistically significant difference between synthetic phonics (teaching each orthographic/phonemic element and how to blend these together) and analytic phonics (teaching larger spelling units including syllables and rimes, or word analogies). Proponents of each get pretty heated, despite the fact that there is no evidence that their way is the only way or the best way to help kids to become readers.

The PBS report showed some video of kids being taught phonics by a multisensory approach (involving tactile-kinesthetic responses). Again, such approaches have fervent proponents, but not research evidence that has shown them to be better than any other approaches (nor any worse, I might add).

The best statement about quality phonics instruction that I’ve found is from the International Dyslexia Association. They don’t endorse any particular phonics product, but their instructional principles concerning structured phonics instruction are impeccable and sensible and, until we gain more empirical evidence, I think they should be the standard:        

https://app.box.com/s/21gdk2k1p3bnagdfz1xy0v98j5ytl1wk

But if the term dyslexia doesn’t describe a specific learning problem or fails to lead to any specific diagnosis then isn’t it non-scientific?

Since the dawn of science, it has been accepted practice to identify physical or mental conditions long before we have gained sufficient knowledge to use these categories practically. Cancer was first identified in 1775; and the first effective cancer treatment was found in 1956. Schizophrenia was first identified in 1908 (really 17 years earlier, but there was an all-too-familiar argument over terminology); we’re still figuring out that one more than a century later. There are a large number of physical and mental conditions that, though identified, do not yet allow for a precise prediction of what treatment would be best. Learning disorders is one of those conditions.  

A term like dyslexia is a scientific hypothesis that over time gets described, used to categorize experience, refined, and used to guide scientific exploration. Nothing unscientific about any of that, but currently I wouldn’t trust its diagnostic value (beyond the idea that these kids are really having persistent trouble learning to read).

How many dyslexic kids are there in the U.S.?

Perhaps the best estimate we have is from epidemiological studies conducted by the Mayo Clinic. Their estimate is 20% (the figure that PBS used). That sounds a bit high to me since I’ve heard estimates from 5-35% over the years; though, admittedly, those haven’t seemed as thoroughly grounded as the Mayo numbers. Nevertheless, I suspect many of those kids who struggle in reading do not really have a developmental disorder. In many instances, they just haven’t been taught well and, perhaps, if we take addressing their learning needs seriously, we may refine those estimates downward.

The letter from the reading professors touted the idea that there are lots of ways to teach reading. How can you support phonics if there are so many good alternatives?

I’m not going to pretend to have understood that portion of the complaint to PBS. It was vague and ambiguous. Rather than trying to parse the equivocal and confusing language, let me respond this way.

Yes, indeed, kids can learn to read without phonics instruction. Again, and again, I hear supposed dyslexia “experts” and advocates claim that phonics is essential or that learning to read can’t happen without phonics.

As my granddaughter Emily says with as much skepticism as a 5-year-old can muster: “Come ooooon.”

In other words, this is so obviously not the truth that when it is stated half the people in the room grab their wallets.

I’m a big supporter of phonics instruction. The nuns taught me phonics in the 1950s. It was a late addition to our Grade 1 curriculum, and it helped.

The first book I ever read about reading instruction (in September 1969) was Why Johnny Can’t Read, a pro-phonics polemic. I tutored a struggling reader in Pontiac, Michigan in phonics the next day.

I taught phonics in my first- and third-grade classrooms, though it was not part of the curriculum at the time.

I wrote about the value of phonics when I was still a graduate student—back in the days when that position was not a popular one, and I included phonics measures in my doctoral dissertation.

And, I served proudly on the National Reading Panel on the alphabetics committee that reviewed the research on phonemic awareness and phonics—which found them to be valuable in teaching reading (and I have the stripes to show for it).

But let’s be perfectly honest. There have been entire generations that have learned to read English without phonics instruction. Research studies show that kids who have been taught little more than word memorization have learned to read.

Let’s be careful with our language and circumscribed in our claims. To do this it can help to distinguish phonics, which is a type of instruction, and decoding (which is the ability to read words based on the spellings).

Learning to decode is an essential of reading. If you don’t learn to decode, you won’t learn to read. (There is more to reading than decoding, so decoding is an essential, but not sufficient condition for reading).

Phonics instruction can help kids to figure out how to decode. As such phonics is helpful, but not necessary. That is, it is possible to figure out decoding without explicit instruction in phonics.

Phonics helps many kids to figure out decoding earlier and easier than would be the case without it, and there are kids who would never figure it out without that help (like those kids on PBS). For them, phonics is truly essential.

That sounds pretty straightforward. Some kids need phonics instruction, and some can get by without it. So, all that teachers need to do is identify who will benefit from what and then provide such teaching.

But that’s the crux of the problem. We have no way of sorting out ahead of time who needs phonics, who would gain some benefit, and who would do fine without it.

This is similar to the issues of vaccination. We don’t know which kids are going to be exposed to polio and who is susceptible to it, so we vaccinate everyone.

The PBS report included a teacher who said she hadn’t been trained in such teaching. No excuse for that.

It reported on five kids who received inadequate phonics instruction in the early grades. No excuse for that.

Despite the need for “extraordinary support” for these children, their schools apparently provided no phonics interventions. No excuse for that, either.

The reading experts were not wrong in their claim that kids can learn to read in other ways (e.g., without explicit phonics instruction), but they missed the point that those other ways hadn’t served these children well.

Phonics instruction needs to be a universal element of reading instruction in the primary grades, and primary grade teachers need to know how to teach phonics. That protects the largest number of children.

And those children also need instruction in oral reading fluency, reading comprehension (including both cognitive strategies and language skills like vocabulary, morphology, grammar, cohesion, structure, etc.), and writing. Remember phonics is neither a panacea for all reading problems, nor a sufficient response to the reading needs of all of our children. A science of reading would definitely include phonics because research shows that such instruction is widely beneficial. But that science would require these other elements as well, and for exactly the same reason--empirical research shows their benefits.

I'm a curriculum and instruction supervisor for a smaller district. We feel like we have a pretty firm grasp on assessing and diagnosing when it comes to phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, and comprehension. However, we're struggling with vocabulary. Is there any assessment you would recommend that would give us a feel if a student is approaching standard or at standard for that area?

Shanahan responds:

In recent years, I’ve become concerned about the amount of school testing.

My complaint isn’t with the annual accountability tests (though, those are on overdose, too). No, my grievance is with the many screening and monitoring tests at epidemic levels in our schools.

It is sensible to be aware of student progress. But teachers can only use so much info and testing isn’t the only way to get it.

I oppose, for instance, weekly tests of oral reading fluency—they aren’t accurate enough and fluency growth rates don’t justify it. Testing that 2-4 times per year should be sufficient.

A better plan, perhaps, is to have teachers monitoring performance during daily fluency lessons… five observations per day within a half-hour lesson would provide 9 looks per report card. And, there’d be little need for all that formal testing.

But I digress.

One of the big drawbacks with classroom assessment is that it overemphasizes foundational skills (e.g., phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency). Don’t get me wrong, those are perfectly reasonable things to dipstick and their results really can help us to target instruction.

As sensible as that approach is, it tends to lead teachers to see the kids (and their needs) through the lens of these tests.

If we only monitor progress in foundational skills, then teachers can only see foundational skills. Reading instruction then devolves to that… kids either are “doing fine” with reading (even if they are struggling with language, comprehension, and composing), or they need extra help and that extra help will be aimed at, you guessed it, foundational skills—even if the kiddos need something else.

Teachers come to not even see those other aspects of literacy. After all, the principal isn’t monitoring kids’ success with vocabulary or comprehension. But if we’re talking about foundational skills—the ones regularly tested—then “oh doctor.”

Given all that, your desire to assess vocabulary is a laudable one.

I can find no reliable/valid vocabulary test that can easily be given multiple times per year, that is predictive of kids’ growth in reading, and that provides a good measure of student progress. There are lots of vocabulary measures, but none that fits that bill.

You can use something like the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) which will provide a reasonably good estimate of overall vocabulary performance. But I’m not convinced that those scores would allow you to track student growth in any meaningful way.

That’s not a knock on the PPVT or its rivals. Vocabulary assessments just have not been designed to monitor vocabulary learning in any meaningful way (Pearson, Hiebert, & Kamil, 2007).

Vocabulary growth is just so diffuse. Kids watch a television show and bang they know a new word. The same for talking to a friend on the playground or eating dinner with mom or taking part in a reading lesson. Vocabulary comes from pretty much everywhere (as a boy, I learned “serviette” from the Three Stooges).

Words can get pretty specialized or particular in their use, too. I now have an extensive French vocabulary. If I come across words in that lexicon, I can understand them; that is, I have a good receptive French vocabulary. But, s’il vous plait, don’t ask me what the French word for something is because my expressive vocabulary is embarrassing.

Keeping track of such dispersed and sundry learning is a formidable—and so far an impossible—task.

I think the best you can do is to adopt or create a formal vocabulary curriculum. Decide on a set of words and/or morphemes that the kids in your district will master by a particular grade level. Then teach the heck out of those words.

Vocabulary assessment, in this context, should aim to monitor student progress with the taught vocabulary. These results should correlate reasonably well with students’ overall growth in word learning. Kids who learn the most words from instruction will likely pick up a lot of words from their own reading, and so on.

As with most correlations, there will be kids whose learning isn’t typical.

For example, what about the kids who are smart, but who don’t read much? They may learn most of the taught words, without curating many on their own. Or those, who do read a lot, but aren’t particularly diligent students? They may look like they are making no vocabulary progress, while doing reasonably well on their own. Such exceptions will probably balance out.  

This plan should work reasonably well—as long as the kids don’t already know most of the target words. Screenings of the year’s vocabulary agenda early on should give you a sense of that. Without that information, you could convince yourself that there was a lot of learning going on, when you are only seeing that the students already knew the target words. In such a case, your curriculum is undershooting the kids.

After the first year, you could even check out what growth on your vocabulary instrument would mean. There is no reason why you could not correlate student growth in vocabulary with your state test results.

I would discourage you from trying to do this with a multiple-choice instrument. That adds too many other variables to the assessment.  Just print up a list of the words for the kids to write definitions for. Don't try to get into fine-grained distinctions. The student either understood a word or not. You need to keep both the test design and the scoring simple enough that 3-4 administrations per year would be possible.

Thanks for keeping the attention on language and meaning.

Dr. Shanahan, I know that you don’t support independent reading at school. However, in my graduate program we are learning that research evidence shows that kids who read the most become the best readers. I don’t get why you don’t support this research-based practice.

Shanahan responds:

In grad school my statistics professor had us analyze some research data. It revealed a close connection between the number of school library books and kids’ reading achievement. Makes sense, right? The greater the availability of books, the better the students would read.

Unfortunately, what the data showed was that the more books available, the lower the kids’ reading ability.

There’s a rousing headline for you: Cut school library budgets so kids can learn to read!

Beware of correlations.

Your professor shows you the relationship between amount of student reading and how well students read, and you assume one of the variables must cause the other.

But correlation does not mean causation.

Go to the Buzz Feed website and you can see how increases in ice cream consumption lead to murder, something about which we should all be concerned. Obviously, that’s silly. I eat ice cream all the time and I’ve never killed anyone.

That odd correlation results because ice cream sales and murder are both related to a third variable, outdoor temperatures. As weather gets hotter, people eat more frozen custard and get more violent (the latter two variables have nothing to do with each other, in spite of the high correlation between them).

In my library book data, the weird connection resulted—not because book availability injures reading—but because school libraries at that time were funded on the basis of reading achievement. The poorer a school scored in reading, the more library funding it received.

Poor reading caused library books!

Correlations don’t tell us about causation or about the directions of relationship.

Your professors are absolutely correct that there are a lot of correlational studies showing that the best readers read the most. That’s a fact.

But there are several possible interpretations of this correlation.

1. The more reading practice kids get the more their reading comprehension improves.
2. The kids who can read best will choose to read more than the struggling readers do.
3. Both amount of reading and reading achievement are attributable to some third variable.
4. The relationship is reciprocal—some of the correlation is due to reading ability leading to reading practice, and some results from practice leading to reading ability.

Scientists have long been aware of specious correlation and have worked out ways for sorting out this kind of thing.

The most obvious fix is to test the patterns experimentally. One can, for instance, try to get kids to read more and measure the changes, if any, in their reading comprehension. Or, conversely, we can improve kids’ reading ability, and monitor what happens to the amount of independent reading.

Mostly investigations have usually explored the impact of practice on comprehension outcomes and have not been terribly successful. The results have ranged from no improvement to extremely modest gains (NICHD, 2000).

That doesn’t mean that reading practice can’t improve reading achievement, only that the types of practice evaluated so far haven’t done so. Most such studies have looked at “sustained silent reading" (SSR), the practice of setting aside class time for kids to read self-selected books.

A major flaw in these studies has been a lack of measurement of amount of reading. Schools may provide free reading time, but that doesn’t necessarily increase the amount of reading kids engage in. We may just be trading of one kind of reading for another, and in at least one study, the assigned free reading time apparently discourage kids from reading on their own (Summers & McClelland, 1982).

We not only don’t know if increasing kids’ reading practice leads to more learning, we don’t really know if our methods for increasing kids’ reading practice leads them to practice more.

Increased practice may improve achievement, but it is not clear that we know how to increase practice.

Teachers and publishers often tell me that they have improved on SSR (e.g., by adding reading conferences, quizzes). So far, no one has conducted a study showing, unambiguously, that we can increase kids’ amount of reading, and that those increases, consequently, lead to higher reading comprehension.

Experimental research in other realms suggest that not all practice is equal (Ericsson, 1993). "Deliberate practice" seems to be particularly profitable. That is practice that is purposeful and systematic, requiring focused attention and that is conducted with a specific goal of improving performance. Practicing under the auspices of a coach seems to matter, too.

These sound less like free reading and more like the reading that a teacher assigns.  

Another way to figure this out is to conduct longitudinal studies in which amount of reading practice and reading achievement are each measured multiple times. Instead of correlating those two things with kids at a single time, we can track the influence of each across development. It is possible, for instance, to connect the amount of reading practice fourth-graders engage in with their gains in reading achievement between fourth- and fifth-grade.

Such studies, however, have failed to show a clear connection between earlier reading practice and reading comprehension gains (Aarnoutse & van Leeuwe, 1998). For instance, one of these studies concluded: “Reading achievement at age 10 significantly predicted independent reading at age 11. The alternative path, from independent reading at age 10 to reading achievement at age 11, was not significant.” (Harlaar, Deater- Deckard, Thompson, DeThorne, et al., 2011, p. 2123).

That study was able to attribute differences in both reading achievement and reading practice to genetic influences.

Another of these longitudinal correlational studies concluded that, “the results show that it is children’s reading skills that contribute to their subsequent out-of-school reading habits rather than vice versa: the more competent the children were in sentence comprehension, text reading, and word recognition at the end of first grade, the higher the amount of book and magazine reading.” (Leppanen, Aunola, & Nurmi, 2005, p. 395).

This study did find that reading practice was related to later improvements in word recognition but not enough to affect the kids’ reading comprehension.

Similarly, with older students, Cain and Oakhill (2011) reported that reading practice had positive impacts on vocabulary, but not comprehension, and that practice was more attributable to attainment than the opposite.

An interesting idea from these studies is that practice effects may be exerted through two separate mechanisms: one is the amount of words processed (a true practice effect) and the other is through the exertion of the students’ choice to read (a motivation effect—the aspect of practice thought to be genetically heritable).

If practice effects are divisible in that way, it would mean that it can’t be captured entirely by requiring additional reading at home or school.

My conclusions from all of this?

Increasing students amount of reading may have positive impacts on at least some aspects of reading (e.g., word recognition, fluency, vocabulary). And, over a long enough period of time, it is possible that those foundational improvements would result in improved reading comprehension—though neither experimental nor longitudinal correlational studies have yet found such a connection.

The practice effects that have been found are pretty small, so if they do eventually result in better comprehension, that would likely take a long time, and those effects would probably be even smaller.

The more certain affect, according to these longitudinal correlational studies, is that reading achievement influences desire to read. We still lack experimental evidence of that, however.

Increased practice could lead to some small achievement gains, but that doesn’t mean we know how best to get kids to read more. Swapping one form of school reading for another probably isn’t the answer, especially given that kids exercise no reading choice in that scenario (and given how hard it has been to generate learning from independent reading during the summer when no school reading must be sacrificed to allow it; see Jimmy Kim’s research, for instance).

Bottom line?

Independent reading at school is not a research-based practice.

Use school time to raise reading achievement and find ways to encourage kids to choose to read on their own.

Doug Fisher has had great success in getting inner-city kids to read at home by making texts available, allowing students to choose what they want to read, influencing those choices through teacher book talks, and providing opportunities for kids to share socialy their home reading at school (e.g., book clubs).

That approach, though not yet proven to work by experimental study, intrigues me because it has the possibility of both increasing amount of student reading while encouraging students to choose to read on their own (according to the research, that dual approach should be a real plus).

And, it would be doing this while preserving the maximum amount of teaching; an approach more consistent with research findings that show achievement to have a bigger impact on practice, than the opposite.

Doug estimates that his students get 15 extra days of teaching each year this way (e.g., since 30 minutes of free reading per day across a 180-day school year displaces that much instruction or deliberate practice).

Now please let me enjoy my ice cream in peace.

I know you get a lot of pushback from teachers when you say that we should teach with complex text. But I agree with you. I don’t like all the testing and teaching kids in so many different books. This might surprise you, but I wonder why you don’t emphasize teaching complex text with children in kindergarten and first-grade?

Shanahan responds:

Many states have adopted educational standards that emphasize teaching students to read texts at particular levels of difficulty.

This approach was long eschewed in fear that it would frustrate students. The claim has been that if kids were taught from texts beyond their instructional level (in other words texts that they couldn’t already read with 95% oral reading accuracy and 75% comprehension) that learning wasn’t possible. 

Research has repeatedly shown that not to be the case, however, and states have finally set text level targets that students should try to reach. 

However, no state has set such text requirements in grades K-1.

One of the reasons for this wise omission is because beginning readers need to learn to decode.

Recently I asked my three-year-old grand-daughter why she couldn’t read, and her response was, “I don’t know the words.”

That in a nutshell is the beginning reader’s greatest task…. figuring out how to the read the words.

According to the National Reading Panel and the National Early Literacy Panel, explicit phonics instruction is a big help in surmounting that hurdle. But research also suggests the importance of the words in those early reading books. Texts that include lots of word repetition, spelling redundancy, and conceptual familiarity appear to be facilitative of “code cracking” progress.

Ramping up text difficulty in Kindergarten and Grade 1 would mainly mean using rarer words, repeating them less often, and obscuring the consistency of their spelling patterns. That means making the texts more difficult to read (lower comprehension) AND impeding student learning progress (slowing the students’ grasp of decoding).

Research shows a different pattern with second-graders. Making instructional texts more challenging does interfere with comprehension. But—and here is the important point—it doesn’t make those books harder to learn from. In fact, studies show just the opposite. The increased difficulty provides greater opportunities to learn.

Educators have long confounded the role text plays in comprehension and in learning to read.

They’ve assumed that students needed to comprehend texts easily if they were to learn to read from them. Research has not supported that idea.

Comprehensibility and “learnabilty” are different concepts, at least when it comes to reading in Grades 2 and up.

It makes great sense for students to comprehend the texts they are working with at school, but such comprehensibility is not the starting point. In order to learn from text, one doesn’t have to start out comprehending. Comprehension does not have to happen without diligent effort and support.

It would be shrewder to think of instructional level not as the “price of admission” but as our instructional goal. That means we could work with texts that students cannot read comprehension well, but by the time we finish they’d be able to read them with at least 95% accuracy and 75% comprehension. 

We should treat beginning readers differently that we do older readers when it comes to beginning text.

By all means, read wonderfully complex books with sophisticated vocabulary to kids in kindergarten and grade one, but keep the words familiar, simple, and repetitive with the books they are to read themselves.

Sending kids to second grade with solid decoding skills and rich oral vocabularies will give them the foundation they’ll need to be able to learn from books that are beyond their instructional level when they are no longer beginners.

Voilà, I just walked the talk: I just provided a summary of last week’s blog entry.

This week let’s focus on summarization with longer informational texts and stories. Being able to summarize paragraphs is a useful skill in itself (e.g., identifying the author’s point, paraphrasing, jettisoning the trivial and repetitive) and being able to summarize short portions of text contributes to longer summaries, too.

But there is at least one important difference with longer summaries.

That difference has to do with the role of text structure. While paragraphs may have a structure (for instance, some instructional programs claim that the first sentences of paragraphs are topic sentences), there is really not a consistent pattern to this organization. Paragraphs may or may not have a topic sentence, and when they do, they are as likely to introduce the paragraph as to end it or to be placed somewhere in between. Structure usually plays little, if any, role in summarizing paragraphs. It’s as useless as “diet water.”

But take an essay, chapter, story, or novel and how an author arranges the information becomes a key factor in the summarization game!

Summarizing Stories

When it comes to stories, research shows that plot structure or story grammar is an important factor in memory. Readers come to realize that there are structures that repeat from story to story, which can be used to help remember the story.

These structural elements include setting (time and place), characters, the problem confronting a character, his/her attempts to solve the problem, the consequences of those attempts, as well as the psychological information that captures the characters’ motivations for dealing with the problem and his/her reactions to those outcomes. Usually stories have a point, so theme matters, too.

There are scads of studies showing that story grammar instruction improves kids’ reading comprehension (NICHD, 2000). Teaching kids to anticipate those structural elements when reading and to use those structures to recall the story later really helps.

And those structural elements? They become the skeleton of the story summary.

This tool is useful with longer and more complicated stories, too. Those texts might have the character confronting multiple problems across several episodes (in other words, the structure repeats itself), or they might have multiple characters each facing their own problems (in which case the same structure is instantiated multiple times simultaneously).

Summarizing Informational Texts

Of course, there are structural elements in expository or argumentative texts as well, though this terrain isn’t quite as reliable. Some of the structures that have been identified for these texts include enumeration, comparison, problem/ solution, and cause and effect.

These structures are used by authors, but it is a rare text that only uses one or another of these.

More often authors in the course of explaining or describing a phenomenon will end up using all of these tools at one time or another.

For example, an encyclopedia entry on alligators might enumerate a list of facts about alligators telling about their zoological classification, size, weight, color, life span, habitat, behaviors, diet, reproduction, and anatomy. The overall structure of such a text is an enumeration or list of facts.

However, even within such a list, an author might choose to compare alligators with crocodiles, to explain why they are found in warm climates (cause and effect), or what tropical communities do to protect themselves from alligators (problem/solution).

That nested complexity can make it difficult to use those general text structures as useful summarization tools with longer informational texts.

Accordingly, most schemes for summarizing longer texts have readers using the text’s headings and subheadings as the bones of the summary (e.g., Taylor & Beach, 1984). Readers summarize each paragraph under a particular subheading and then try to compose an overall statement of the key ideas and details included there. In other words, summarizing the collection of summaries.

To keep these statements sufficiently brief, it can help to use schemes like GIST (Cunningham, 1982). The students work through the sections of a text, summarizing each paragraph as described, and come up with a summary statement of no more than 20 words. That might seem a bit artificial, but it really helps students to paraphrase rather than quote.

Additional Considerations

1. What I’ve described in these two entries is clunkier and more painstaking than how I usually summarize. But teaching a novice to do something is usually more thoroughgoing than proficient practice. Keep in mind, however, that the goal is to get kids to the point where they can provide a summary quickly, easily, and accurately without filling out story maps, or writing one sentence summaries for each paragraph. Those are tools or way stations; they are not the destination!
2. Teach kids to use summarization as a learning strategy. For instance, comprehension and recall improve if you stop and summarize repeatedly along the way (NICHD, 2000). This kind of ongoing summarizing while reading requires the reader to actively engage the text content, encourages continuing clarification, and increases the chances a reader will remember and use key information presented early on by the author.
3. Focus on the content of these texts and summaries and not just on the summarization skill. Summarizing should focus on texts the content of which you hope the students will master. Structural summarization leads to more learning than typical question-answering regimes (Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987). Why waste this effort on information that we don’t value? Have kids review their work product from these lessons over time, coming back to these summaries again and again for review so that this knowledge is both acquired and maintained.  

Teacher question:

I teach fourth-grade social studies at my school, and I have an ongoing argument with our reading coach. Perhaps you can help me. She says that the way I teach is bad, but it works, and I see no reason to change. My students take turns reading paragraphs aloud and when each one finishes then I ask them questions or explain what the book said. I like it because the students are attentive and when I do have them try to read the book silently, they don’t get it. Can you help me with the reading coach?

Shanahan’s response:

You know, when I became a teacher, the professors were telling us that, too. They told us that what they called “round robin reading” was a horrible practice and that only bad teachers used it.

In fact, I agreed with their judgment. I could remember such turn-taking reading when I was a boy. Our teachers were pretty harsh, so when a student made a mistake or read the wrong sentences, it was terribly embarrassing.

We were supposedly paying attention when the other kids read, but what we were really doing was counting sentence so that we could practice a bit and miss out on the embarrassment.

That, of course, didn’t always work.

One day, I thought I’d figured out which lines I was supposed to read, and I would have if the kid before me hadn’t screwed up. The teacher rapidly assigned that kid’s part to me and I wasn’t even sure where to start.

I looked dumber than usual!

No, I was not a big fan of round robin reading. The professors were right. Round robin was bad.

Then I became a third-grade teacher, and I had my own social studies book to teach.

And, I bet you can guess what I did. I used round-robin reading. I used because it kept the kids on task, I could be sure they read the text, and frankly, I didn’t know what else to do. Sound familiar, right?

Nevertheless, I still agree with your reading coach. I was wrong and, respectfully, I suspect that you are, too. As are literally thousands of teachers—they were telling me not to do it 50 years ago, but these days round robin appears to still be de rigueur (Ash, et al., 2009), and it will be 50 years from now if we don’t end it ourselves.

What does all that mean? Simply that while I sympathize with you, I think there are better ways to go in terms of teaching social studies and teaching reading.

By grade four, kids should be doing most of their reading for comprehension silently, not orally. Studies have long shown that 9-year-olds comprehend better reading aloud than silently but you have to start somewhere. I’d encourage you to try.

Last year I was working with a group of middle-school kids. I assigned some pages in their social studies book and, just like you, when we reached the discussion, it was evident that they had blown off the reading. I guess I could have gone back to oral reading—I would have all those years ago. But this time I went the other way. I told the kids how disappointed I was and gave them a second chance. On that go round, they did the reading—perhaps not perfectly, but they did the reading and that is a start.

Talk to your kids about the importance of silent reading, tell them why you want them to get some practice in doing it, and that they are going to have learn to read social studies and science and the books from other subjects silently.

Initially, keep the text segments brief—maybe a paragraph each, just as you were doing with your round robin reading. That will allow you to question the kids about the content and you’ll be able to tell how they are doing. When they have trouble with it, have them read it again. (You will be teaching social studies, reading, and persistence).

If they still have trouble, have them read a sentence at a time and question them intensively. For example, here is a sentence from a fourth-grade social studies text:

In the Middle Ages, monasteries and convents had libraries.

Where were the libraries?

What is a monastery?

What is a convent?

What is a library?

When were the libraries in the monasteries and convents?

Once the kids start having some success, move the goal. If they can read single sentences silently with comprehension, then have them try paragraphs. If they can handle single paragraphs, then try assigning 2 or 3. Keep stretching them out.

Recently, I was speaking to some teachers about the teaching of oral reading fluency (that is teaching kids to read text aloud with accuracy and with appropriate speed and expression). Research shows that teaching kids to read text fluently has a positive impact on reading comprehension.

The teachers wanted to know if they could use round robin to support fluency development.

The fluency instruction that has worked does require that the kids do oral reading, and round robin reading is certainly oral.

But there are some problems that would have bothered my old professors.

One thing I should point out is that kids get to do very little reading in your social studies lessons. The only kids who are really reading is the sweaty-palmed ones who are reading aloud (the other kids aren’t really following along).

Let’s face it, in a 30-minute social studies lesson, each kid would typically get to read a minute or less. That means social studies would add fewer than three hours of reading time per year—not enough to help the kids.

What if, instead of that, you had the kids read sections of the text aloud to each other (partner reading) and then discuss and answer your questions? You should circulate among the partners making sure that they are reading well and when they are not, they need to reread; such repeated reading is effective in promoting fluency.

The reading part of social studies can be done quite effectively either silently — giving kids great reading comprehension practice; and it can be done orally using partner reading and repeated reading (and this can be supplemented with some occasional reading while listening, that is chorally reading the material along with you (I’d lead off with that, and then turn the kids loose on it, either silently or aloud).

When I talk to middle school and high school social studies teachers, they tell me the worst barrier to their success is the fact that their students often struggle to read social studies texts. They, too, fall into the trap of round robin reading (because the kids don’t act out and they can be sure they cover the material that way). Sounds familiar right?

Why not help them out?

Start teaching your kids to read social studies now. Instead of finding a way around that goal with round robin reading that gives kids way too little practice and not exactly the right kind of practice, let’s plunge kids into reading and rereading their social studies silently and orally in an effort to try to figure out the content.

My regards to your reading coach.

When measuring oral reading fluency by, say, having kids read a grade-level text for one minute, I take note of speed and accuracy.  

1. Should I also measure expression? I certainly know expression is part of fluent reading, but isn’t a kid trying to read fast and accurate not really able to read with perfect expression? For example, they might take nice pauses and commas and question marks but slow down their words per minute score.

2. Should I also measure retell? Keep in mind my concerns in my first question. Plus, fluency and comprehension seem like they would be difficult to measure simultaneously on just a one-minute passage. Why? a kid could just give me a lot of fluff in his retell, and a kid with a lower WPM score wouldn’t have read many details to retell. 

Shanahan responds:

From the beginning, educators have emphasized accuracy and speed when evaluating oral reading (Starch, 1915). The prosody or expression of this tested reading may be weighed, but only subjectively as an additional quality factor.

Over the years, o the relative prominence of accuracy (e.g., Betts, 1940) and speed (Good & Kaminski, 1996) in oral reading ratings has varied, but expression has always been the red-haired stepchild.

You are absolutely correct: if kids are putting a premium on speed, then careful attention to expression will only slow them down. And yet, there is no reason for you to focus on speed alone. As a teacher, your interest should be in their oral reading fluency, which is a different thing altogether.

If my Uber-driver estimates time to destination (10 miles away) at 5 minutes, he might be telling the truth. His car really may go 120 miles per hour. But his estimate is of no use to me, since I’m not only want to arrive soon, but safely, too.

Fluency matters because of its relationship to reading comprehension, and its predictive and determining power are quashed when you ignore any of its essential parts (Valencia, et al., 2010). This is especially true when this disregard encourages kids to read in a peculiar fashion.

We simply don’t care how fast kids can say the words, we want to know how fluently they can translate print to meaningful oral language.

In a word, yes, indeed, it is a good idea to measure oral reading expression or prosody!

A rich body of research evidence for this is accumulating (Daane, et al., 2005; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008; Paige, et al., 2014; Pinnell, et al., 1995; Rasinski, et al., 2009; Valencia, et al., 2010; Veenendial, et al., 2019; Whalley & Hansen, 2006).

So how to best measure expression?

First, 1-minute reads aren’t best. Research shows that 3-minute reads do a markedly better job in predicting comprehension scores (Valencia, et al., 2010). Even tests like DIBELS accomplish their high reliabilities by combining the results of multiple 1-minute reads.

Second, tell students that they’ll be questioned after the oral reading. You want to evaluate fluency in a comprehension-oriented milieu not a speed-oriented one. (I like basketball players who are quick to the hoop, but this needs to be controlled speed—speed checked by the need to score and not to foul).

Third, definitely keep track of student accuracy (marking errors) and reading rate (words correct per minute).

But also, evaluate expression. There are many ways to do this. In my schools I encouraged  use of the NAEP rubric developed by Gay Su Pinnell and her colleagues (Pinnell, et al., 1995):

1 – Student reads word-by-word. Occasional 2-word or 3-word phrases may occur—but infrequently and they don’t preserve meaningful syntax.

2 - Reads primarily in 2-word phrases with some 3- or 4-word groupings. Some word-by-word reading. Word groupings unrelated to context of sentence or passage.

            3 - Primarily in 3- or 4-word phrases (with some smaller groupings, too). Majority of phrasing seems meaning appropriate and preserves syntax of the text.  Little or no expressive interpretation.

  4 - Reads primarily in larger, meaningful phrases. Although some regressions, repetitions, and deviations from text may occur, these don’t detract from the meaning or language of the text. Some expressive interpretation.

The hardest distinction here tends to be between the 2 and 3 ratings. The key to making that decision accurately is to focus less on the numbers of words between pauses and more on how meaningful or syntactically correct the groupings are.

For instance, look at these pause patterns:

  “Tell me /about it,”/ said Lucas, shaking his /head /sadly./

“Tell me about it,”/ said Lucas, /shaking his head sadly./

The first I’d rate a 2, and the second a 3. The first rendition doesn’t consistently rely on the text’s punctuation, and the pauses don’t reflect an attempt to preserve meaning as much as, a need for extra time to figure out one word or another.

The second version does a better job of conveying the author’s meaning and punctuation. If you didn’t have that text before you, you’d easily grasp its meaning from the oral presentation alone. (If it hadn’t been read so monotonously—which is not marked here, it would have been a 4).  

There is a more recent scheme (Benjamin, et al., 2013), the Comprehension and Oral Reading Fluency Scale (CORFS), that I like, too, but I haven’t used that one myself. It, too, is a 4-point rubric focusing on the appropriateness and lengths of pauses and their relationship to meaning and syntax.

Research shows that these rubrics are reasonably easy to use, reliable, closely related to reading comprehension, reflective of objective measures of prosody (such as spectrographic analyses), and that they add useful information beyond accuracy and speed (Benjamin, 2013; Pinnell, et al., 1996; Smith & Paige, 2019; Wang, et al., 2019).

Like you, I don’t invest a great deal of faith in those oral reading retellings or responses to questions. And by Grade 2, I’m more interested in the kids’ silent reading comprehension anyway.

Nevertheless, always tell students that you will follow up their oral reading assessments with a question of some kind or a retelling—even if you don’t intend to use that information for assessment purposes.

Kids read differently if they are trying to understand a text than if they are just putting on an oral reading show. You want to know how accurately, how appropriate the rate, and how meaningful the expression the oral reading is—in a context in which kids are trying to understand text. (I will depend on retellings of silent readings at most grade levels to evaluate that aspect of their reading.)

Here is the second half of the Great American Phonics Quiz.  Good luck.

6.    Lack of adequate phonics instruction is likely the reason why so many American students are failing to become proficient readers. True or false?

Recently, I received an angry note from a gentleman concerning the dearth of phonics and the low reading proficiency rates on NAEP. He was frustrated by an American education system that, in his opinion, had been unresponsive to these “facts.”

We went back and forth and at some point, he relaxed and started asking me questions. It turns out he was a dentist and what he knew about these topics he picked up from Twitter chatter and other “authoritative” sources.

My guess is that if we did a better job of teaching phonics it would be unlikely to increase the numbers of proficient readers very much. In other words, I think this item is “false.”

Since 1971, fourth-grade reading scores in the U.S. have fluctuated, and these fluctuations have tended to be upwards during pro-phonics periods and downwards when phonics has been on the outs in American schools.

I suspect that this pattern is not coincidental.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, fourth-grade scores steadily advanced. Then, America’s schools fell in love with “whole language,” and discouraged phonics and spelling instruction; fourth-graders did worse in reading than at any time during these 50 years! In the ’90s, many states adopted phonics requirements and the feds added to this in the early 2000s… both of those efforts witnessed climbing reading scores.

That suggests that phonics can make a significant contribution to early learning success.

However, no matter how heavy the emphasis has been on phonics, fourth-grade reading proficiency rates have never come close to being universal for young children.

The benefits of phonics instruction—as with any other advantageous instructional approach—are marginal. Instructional studies consistently find that adding phonics improves achievement, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who get phonics does great and all the other kids fail. There are real benefits and yet they are much more limited than my dentist assumed.

And what of eighth-grade reading scores during these on-again off-again emphases on phonics?

Apparently, those advantaged fourth-graders never reach eighth-grade. Adolescent reading levels haven’t budged whether or not we’ve been teaching phonics.

Phonics can give kids a better reading start, but they also need instruction in fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing—and they need to gain lots of knowledge about our social and natural worlds—if they are to become fully literate.

A stronger emphasis on phonics is likely a necessary element in achieving full reading proficiency, but it is far from a sufficient one.

7.    There is a particular instructional sequence that should be adhered to when teaching phonics. True or false?

 In the previous quiz, I said kids did best when teachers followed a specific sequence of instruction. Teachers shouldn’t be trying to guess what phonic elements and spelling patterns to teach.

So, what is the best sequence, and why don’t school districts simply adopt programs that teach that sequence?

While research reveals the value of a set instructional phonics sequence, no particular sequence has been found to outperform any other. In other words, schools should adhere to a phonics sequence, but which sequence they adopt doesn’t seem to matter much.

Over a long career, I’ve seen some harmful sequences, but these incidents are atypical. For instance, I remember a couple of programs with very different sequences (one starting with vowels and the other consonants). Not necessarily a big deal, but I saw a school allow teachers to use either program. Some of the kids never were taught vowels and others never got many consonants. That’s pretty dopey. Teachers in a school should work with the same sequence, whichever one it may be.

There is no particular instructional sequence that needs to be followed (so this item is false), but you do need to adhere to a planned instructional sequence, and I bet teachers tend to teach these skills more thoroughly when they are following a program.

8.    Kids should learn to read some number of words before phonics instruction is introduced. True or false?

This is one that I was told when I went into teaching. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, but then I heard someone making this claim more recently.

I can’t find any research pursuing this question, though it is evident from the dozens of studies of phonics instruction (NICHD, 2000), particularly those done with preschoolers (NELP, 2008), that kids can make great progress with phonics without mastering any words prior to the onset of phonics teaching. This one is definitely false.

I’m not against having kids memorize some words, but I agree with the National Research Council (1998), that the amount of attention to this should be pretty limited. They recommended about 20 words in kindergarten (including the child’s name)—along with their phonics, and I have long recommended 100 high frequency words in grade 1… though again with phonics playing an important role in that.    

Teaching a few words in addition to phonics can allow kids to make a faster transition into reading (hence, the 20 kindergarten words) or can facilitate fluency (those high frequency words that are exceptions to the usual spelling/pronunciation patterns, like the, done, and have). But don’t wait for kids to learn such words before introducing phonics.

 9.    Phonics instruction should include writing or spelling activities. True or false?

This one is true, and we’ve known it to be true for a long time.

There are examples of successful phonics program that don’t include dictation, spelling, or writing, but programs with this element seem to do a bit better.

Back in the 1960s, Jeanne Chall concluded that such writing and spelling activities were beneficial. And, more recently, the National Reading Panel (NRP) wrote:

“Methods that teach children to manipulate phonemes with letters are more effective than methods limiting manipulation to spoken units. Teaching children to segment phonemes in words and represent them with letters is the equivalent of invented spelling instruction.” (NICHD, 2000, p. 2-41)

Several of the phonics studies the NRP reviewed had a spelling or writing dimension, too.

I checked with What Works Clearinghouse, and of the 16 programs that had clear evidence showing effectiveness in promoting decoding ability, at least 9 of those included writing and/or spelling activities.

10.    Decodable text is an essential part of phonics instruction. True or false?

The term “decodable text” refers to having students read texts that they can fully or almost full decode based only upon the phonics skills taught up to that point in time.

These days many reading authorities promote decodable text as an important part of phonics instruction. And, the idea is an attractive one. You teach decoding skills and then you give the kids practice in implementing these skills.

However, research has not been especially supportive of this idea. Studies that have evaluated the impact of different levels of decodability have found no learning benefits, and none of the major research reviews of phonics instruction have even pondered about the value of such text.  

Not only hasn’t decodable text improved kids’ reading achievement—or even their decoding ability, but there are reasons to be concerned about its potential for overuse.

English is a phonemically and orthographically complex language. Even within syllables, readers have to be able to consider alternative pronunciations for particular spellings. Studies have shown that the patterns evident in beginning reading materials have long range impacts on later decoding ability, and when those instructional patterns are inconsistent with the statistical properties of English it can lead to systematic and persistent reading and spelling error.

A noted educational psychologist pointed out to me that these findings are consistent with cognitive research on massed versus distributed practice. By massing practice (that is, making sure there is a lot of practice with the already-taught skills), performance appears to improve rapidly. However, more enduring learning results from distributed practice (that is practicing with less consistent text).

Practicing with decodable text early on might be useful, but it is important to shift quickly to texts that provide less consistent practice.

I think the best way to do that is to have young children reading a more diverse set of texts (such as traditional controlled vocabulary readers or language experience stories) along the way.

Decodable texts suggest which spelling patterns are worth paying attention to, and the less decodable texts keep kids honest in applying these skills and start them on the road to statistical learning, so they can figure out how best to weigh the comparative value of the various patterns they are learning.

This one is false.

I saw you speak recently and in your definition of reading comprehension you used the term “affordance.” How would you define affordance as you use it concerning text?  

Shanahan responds:

Usually, I’d just shoot off a quick email explanation with a question like this.

However, in this case, the question affords me the opportunity to explain why so much “reading comprehension instruction” is wrongheaded and why it fails to accomplish its goals of improving reading achievement.

I believe that standardized reading comprehension testing has warped and distorted our conception of reading comprehension.

Instead of focusing on how to enable kids to make sense of the ideas expressed in text, we’ve tended to emphasize how to answer particular kinds of questions. That treats reading less as a process for gaining or constructing ideas based on information provided by an author through text and more about exploring Bloom’s taxonomy, Question-Answer-Relationships (QAR), or some supposed set of reading skills based upon state standards.

Let’s be clear: reading comprehension is not the ability to answer particular kinds of questions.

Reading comprehension is the ability to make sense of ideas expressed in text—the ability to negotiate the linguistic and conceptual barriers or affordances of a text.

In answer to your question, the term affordance, as used here, is drawn from the work of Eleanor Gibson, a great psychologist who studied perception during the 1950s-1970s. 

According to Gibson, an affordance is a resource or support that the environment offers an animal; the animal in turn must possess the capabilities to perceive it and use it. Thus, the availability of coconuts may be an environmental affordance because coconuts can be a valuable source of safe-to-drink water—but to take advantage of this affordance, animals must develop the skill of breaking or piercing the thick coconut shells.

In the environment created by a text, an affordance is any resource or support the text offers to readers that can help to facilitate communication or understanding. Thus, an author might: 

• organize a list of points with bullets so they stand out as a series or so that their unity or parallelism may be more obvious;
• choose to use “prolix” (instead of “wordy” or “verbose”) to emphasize specifically that the speech being described was not just long, but unnecessarily long; 
• contrast two meanings of the word “dedicate” to convey a particular substantive point (as Lincoln does in his Gettysburg Address); or
• invert the grammar of a sentence to highlight a particular portion of a message, such as with the following: So strange was the situation that I couldn't sleep. (Shifting emphasis from the loss of sleep to the peculiarity of the situation).

Basically, all the choices of diction, grammatical structure, cohesive linkage, organization, and other ways that the author chooses to present ideas are the “affordances” of a text.

But readers—as in the coconut metaphor—must have the capacity to recognize and exploit these affordances.   

Reading instruction has, for too long, ignored the need to teach kids how to make sense of texts—how to take advantage of the linguistic and conceptual affordances provided by the author and to get around and over the barriers that may prevent this sensemaking.

When teaching myself to read French, the most obvious initial barriers were the words themselves. Not so much their pronunciation, but what they meant. A simple declarative sentence like the following can convey valuable information, and yet, if a reader lacks an understanding of the words’ meanings, this sentence will be a barrier to comprehension rather than the affordance the author intended.

Je suis froide ce matin.

What did I do to negotiate these barriers? Initially, I depended heavily on the dictionary which helps to some extent given that I often already understood the underlying concepts. In this case, a straight translation of the words into English was pretty effective: I am cold this morning.

However, someone proficient in French would quickly recognize that my word-for-word translation misses a key idea: the fact that the speaker is female (in French, the spelling of adjectives reveals gender—if the writer had used froid, it would have been a boy). The dictionary helped me climb over some of those barriers to meaning – but, in this case, additional grammatical insight was needed.

We do try to help students use and negotiate some of these lexical affordances and barriers. We usually try to expand kids’ vocabularies so that authors’ word choices will facilitate communication rather than hindering it. And, we do teach kids how to use dictionaries, morphology, and context to figure out word meanings when there is a mismatch (though I think we could do a much better job of each).

We invest considerably less with sentence grammar in terms of comprehension, and the same can be said about several other linguistic and conceptual features (e.g., cohesion, discourse structure, tone, graphics).

In classrooms, we often try to prevent students’ lack of “prior knowledge” from being a barrier (by providing copious amounts of presumably relevant information before reading), but we do comparatively little to train students to recognize and take advantage of the affordances provided by authors who are rarely complete idiots about their readers’ probable awareness of the subject.

An easy example of this neglect is how science text is usually handled. In K-12 schools, science text tends to be heavily devoted to explaining concepts, which typically requires a good deal of definition. Instead of teaching kids how to recognize and use these explicit definitions and examples (and what to do with these when the content is unfamiliar), we define the terms for them before they confront these words in text.

In other words, instead of teaching kids how to scale these lexical barriers and to take advantage of these affordances, we try to remove the barriers themselves—which, ultimately, limits what kids can learn about reading comprehension.

The same can be said for much of the use of “leveled readers.” Teaching reading with texts that kids can already comprehend pretty well is more aimed at preventing possible miscomprehension in the short run, than in exposing kids to the complexities of text so that actual teaching can take place.

Instead of making sure that certain kinds of questions are asked about text, we should be teaching students how to read and interpret text—taking advantage of the affordances and negotiating the barriers. We’re getting it wrong because we’re teaching the wrong stuff!

This blog entry was met by a great deal of controversy with some teachers agreeing with me and others arguing that you can deeply engage a text even if you haven't read it. Of course, since this was released we have been immersed in a COVID crisis that has greatly reduced the amount of reading instruction that children are receiving. The reading conference method might seem more useful to some in this unfortunate climate. We definitely want to encourage kids to replace some of that lost schooling with independent reading but it is essential that teachers and parents find ways to guide students' reading efforts so that they take on books that are sufficiently challenging and that they receive sufficient guidance so they don't miss important and subtle content and craft considerations. I hope this re-issue encourages responses from teachers who may have found some ways of accomplishing that in our seriously disrupted educational system). 

Teacher question:

I saw you make a presentation recently, and I was surprised to hear that you did not like the conferencing that is provided in Readers Workshop. That is the method that our district requires. Isn’t it research-based?

Shanahan responds:

No, it definitely is not research based.

I can’t find a single study that supports its use.

I can’t even find any study that supports programs that include this approach.

Of course, a lack of research support for a particular method doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Perhaps the technique has never been studied, or if it was investigated maybe the study had some important flaw.

I don’t think that’s the problem here, though. I think it is just a bad idea.

Readers Workshop is an approach that seems to have emerged from Writers Workshop. I’m more sympathetic to the latter than to the former. Although there are important connections between reading and writing, that does not mean that they should to be taught in the same way—and in this case, the workshop method is not particularly supportive of reading.

There was a similar approach recommended for beginning readers back in the 1950s referred to as “individualized reading” (thank you, Jeannette Veatch), but this modern version doesn’t seem to be closely aligned with that.

Basically, readers workshop provides extensive collections of books, emphasizes student choices of what will be read, limits students’ reading to texts that can be read easily by them, requires that the students spend extensive time reading these books, provides explicit teaching through mini-lessons, and monitors and supports reading comprehension development through one-on-one teacher-student conferences.

There are various problems with this approach, but, to me, the most egregious ones are the heavy emphasis on texts that the kids can already read well, and the remarkably weak support provided for making sense of text.

Last week I defined reading “as making sense of text by negotiating the linguistic and conceptual affordances and barriers to meaning.”

By that definition, high quality reading comprehension instruction would introduce students to texts that they could not already read easily or well, and would provide some kind of guidance or support to help them negotiate the text or content features that might be tripping up their sense making.

Of course, easy books are important in this Readers Workshop since the kids will be doing so much of the reading on their own, and with so little teacher support. Hard to imagine many students reading hard books on their own for 80 minutes per day (40 minutes during the workshop and another 40 at home in the evening)—though those amounts of reading are surely admirable.

The lack of teacher support strikes me as, well, bizarre.

Awhile back I got in a Twitter fight with some teachers who were claiming that they were able to get kids to do ambitious, sophisticated close readings of challenging texts through their one-on-one conferences that typically take 1-3 minutes.

Don’t get me wrong, discussions of books can be very powerful stimulants of reading comprehension and learning. Research has certainly shown that to be the case (Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009).

But it highly improbable that a 1-minute discussion of a text is going to help a student develop some deep insight to meaning, to grasp some subtlety expressed idea, to gain purchase on a concept like symbolism or allusion, or to learn how to deftly connect prose and graphics.

My hunch is that teachers who think such brief exchanges are effective are those who have not been fortunate enough to engage in deep discussions of books.

Even more disturbing was that my Twitter compatriots were not only certain that these brief text conversations were potent teaching tools, but that they didn’t have to know the books the kids were reading.

I thought that was kind of crazy, but then I recently read Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study for third grade. It’s one thing to say something dopey on Twitter (who hasn’t done that?), but to write it in a book takes some real forethought.

On page 52, teachers are given advice on how they can fake it when they haven’t actually read the book. Calkins and company are concerned that teachers might “feel insecure” having to confer about unknown books. They make no mention of the instructional value of reading guidance from a teacher who couldn’t possibly know what the student is dealing with, but we certainly wouldn’t want uncomfortable teachers.  

Yes, if you’d read the book you might know that the confusing thing is that two of the characters are really similar, or that the most important idea is that the changes in the setting are reflective of the changes in the characters, or perhaps it’s the comparison of two science concepts.

But since you haven’t read it, you can’t help with or emphasize any of that.

And, yet, according to Calkins and company you can conduct a probing interrogation like, “Can you tell me a bit about the main character?”

Little Johnny is fighting his way through Moby Dick, and the teacher’s one-minute conference might go something like this:

Teacher: Johnny what are you reading?

Johnny: Moby Dick.

T: How’s it going?

J: Good.

T: What can you tell me about the main character?

J: He’s a whale.

T: What have you learned about him?

J: He’s white.

T: Is the main character the narrator?

J: Sure. Moby tells the story.

The fact that little Johnny isn’t really understanding Moby Dick could easily be lost on a teacher who herself hasn’t read the text.

This illustration is silly, of course. First, no kid in Readers Workshop is likely to decide to take on Melville, even in high school. Second, no teacher is going to let a kid take on Moby Dick because its Lexile level will likely be beyond their supposed “instructional levels.”

Nevertheless, the point is a fair one: Kids learn more from texts when they are engaged in discussions of those texts (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Murphy, et al., 2009), but the discussions that have been studied are led by teachers who have read the texts and who are going to help the students to develop a coherent understanding of them. 

There are wonderful research-based guides out there that provide direction for leading such discussions based on teacher knowledge of the text (Dwyer, Kelcy, Berebitsky, & Carlisle, 2016; Kucan & Palincsar, 2018). But, then what else would you expect from the research community? They couldn’t possibly understand the depths of comprehension that can be stimulated by teachers without any real knowledge of a text.

Of course, teachers who follow textbooks can fall into the same trap. They convince themselves that because the textbook editor has read the story and provided some questions that they don’t have to read it, too. You know them, the “We’ll learn this simultaneously” crowd.

This is like those supposedly “driverless cars.” The car might do most of the driving, but there has to be a human holding the steering wheel and paying attention. No matter how good the textbook program, teacher still need to read the texts to be adequately prepared to guide kids’ reading when it needs guiding.

Next week’s blog entry will focus on why effective math teachers don’t need to know anything about mathematics?

Teacher question:

What’s the best way to teach and have students master vocabulary?

Shanahan response:

My original reaction to this question was not exactly what I’d label a model of helpfulness.

The question was asked by someone new to my blog and I started to send him a note telling him I’d written about that several times already and if he searched my website, he’d find an answer to his question.

But I had second thoughts and decided to be a bit more accommodating. I still didn’t intend to write a blog entry. I figured it would be generous to identify some specific links from the site, so he wouldn’t have to search it himself.

I was surprised when I was unable to find much of an answer to this very reasonable pedagogical question. I’ve written about vocabulary a bit and have linked some vocabulary resources on my site. But there is no clear statement of what works in vocabulary teaching. Let’s remedy that now.

First some preliminaries.

I’ve learned over the years that all words are not equal.

For instance, some words are more useful than others. Knowing the meaning of “obloquy” likely pays off less often than knowing “shame.”

Readers need to know the words that authors use. You only have so much time, be sure to invest it in teaching words that will open the most doors to understanding for your students.

Another implication is that some words are learned more easily than others. I’ve taught myself to read French, a language I do not speak (though these days I’m even trying that). With some unknown words, looking them up in the dictionary seems sufficient to make them my words ever. But there are also slippery words that I’ve looked up dozens of times with success.

Teachers need to recognize—and be patient—with this great unevenness—not just across kids, but in each student’s experience.

A second preliminary is the distinction between vocabulary and concept. Vocabulary refers to the labels that we associate with particular concepts or ideas, while the concepts are those ideas that the words refer to.

A word like “shimmer” will be easily learned by kids who have seen light waver, but more effort will be required for those who do not. If it is a lack of vocabulary, much of this work can be done verbally, but if it is a lack of concept, then words alone probably won’t be enough.

A final preliminary thought is that much vocabulary is learned without formal teaching. We gain words from conversation, observation, television/media use, reading, and so on. We learn so many words like that that some scholars have scoffed at the value of explicit teaching. Nevertheless, research shows that teaching vocabulary can measurably improve reading comprehension—if we teach the right words well enough.

Effective vocabulary teaching has some key principles.

1.     Focus on rich meanings, not just dictionary definitions.

Too often vocabulary instruction is no more than kids copying definitions from the dictionary. But researchers have identified a number of instructional approaches that outdo any learning that may accrue from copying definitions.

One of those key principles is that students work with more extensive or complex definitions or explanations of word meanings. Encourage the encyclopedia explanation over the dictionary meanings.

When I teach vocabulary, I often have the kids engage in trying to provide several different versions of a word’s definition.

1. Dictionary definition
2. Synonyms for the word
3. Antonyms (if there are any)
4. Part of speech
5. Classification (what semantic group does it belong to, like tools or ways of talking)
6. Comparison (it is like____, but different because______)
7. Real-life examples
8. Graphic version (drawings, pictures, representations)
9. Acting it out

By the time you’ve come up with nine different explanations of a word you are more likely to remember it (and, of course, we can do more than just these nine if we want to get into analogies, part-whole relationships, and the like).

2.     Emphasize the connections among words.

Many vocabulary programs introduce words by category, such as focusing on words from health and medicine or about transportation, including some that have research showing that they can be effective. However, direct research specifically on this aspect of teaching, suggest that word learning goes slower and without evident later advantage from the extra work that mastering these words entails needed to master these sets of words.

And, yet, evidence reveals that the lexicons in our heads are organized in various networks, not like dictionaries. When you remember a word, you draw from memory a plethora of related ideas—attributes, functions, and synonyms related to that word.

Start thinking diesel trucks and words like wheel, tire, dump truck, gasoline, and highway will not be far behind.

There are circumstances in which it is necessary to simultaneously introduce collections of closely related words that may require fine or subtle distinctions, such as when kids are learning about the structure of cells or atoms. I’ll give that a pass, since such introductions are likely to be accompanied by a much deeper dive into the underlying concepts in such cases.

I also think it is quite reasonable when teaching words to get kids thinking about words about that concept that they may already have mastered. Linking a new word to a concept, is very different than trying to learn and link a whole collection of words.  

I would avoid introducing together plethora, dearth, scarcity, cornucopia, shortage, plenty, sufficient, abundant, and liberal as some programs do. Collect such words over time as they are learned and then later you can have kids comparing the ideas or fitting them into continuum or network.

One teacher I know has her students classifying the vocabulary each week in bulletin board folders, and when a folder accumulates several related words, they revisit them as a set.

3.     Promote usage of the words.

It is not enough that kids study word meanings, but they have to learn to use these words in their reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Instruction should create opportunities for kids to use words in all of these ways.

For instance, that rich vocabulary assignment that was described earlier can be done by groups of kids working together to come up with those multiple definitions. That kind of cooperation requires that kids talk with each other about the words. Additionally, I often assign small numbers of words to each group and then have them get together to teach each other the words that their groups studied… more speaking and listening.

One might reward kids for using the studied vocabulary in their writing—or that can be required in various ways.

Isabel Beck and Moddy McKeown came up with the idea of “word wizards,” which gave kids extra points in vocabulary if they could bring in evidence that they had confronted or used the words of interest. Kids get very turned on if they run across some of the vocabulary when watching television or playing their favorite computer game.

4.     Review is important.

It can be hard to retain vocabulary if you don’t get a lot of opportunity to use it. We may teach vocabulary because certain words were prominent in the texts, we were reading this week, but then kids might not see them for a long time.

There are many ways to deal with vocabulary, such as having one day a week when you only work with words that have been taught (and supposedly learned) in the past—or perhaps entire weeks might be devoted to this throughout the year.

I’m a fan of including words from past weeks on vocabulary quizzes and for the use of vocabulary notebooks to help punch up kids’ writing during revision.

Another way of ensuring the words stick, is to see how many additional words students can construct morphologically, adding prefixes or suffixes or altering parts of speech and so on. I’ve written about some of the important work being done on morphology by Peter and Jeffrey Bowers before (and you can search for that on my site or on Google).

5.     Involve students in identifying some of the words to be studied.

I noted earlier that much vocabulary learning is incidental and, therefore, largely out of the province of schools. However, not all kids are equally good at such learning and even for those who it is easier, it can still be a tough slog requiring many experiences with a word to get it to stick.

One thing that we can do to help develop a “word consciousness” among our students is to involve them in identifying unknown words from their own reading—and to include these in your classroom curriculum. When readers get used to noticing their lack of knowledge of particular words, they will be more likely to try to resolve those gaps when reading. Kids will also be more motivated if they have some say so over the curriculum as well.

What does it mean that something has research support? I’ve been a teacher for years and I’ve taught hundreds of children to read. Now I’m being told that in our district we are expected to teach in some new way that has research behind it. I like how I teach reading and I don’t want to change. Why should I?

Shanahan response:

I suspect that there are a lot of teachers who agree with you. Someone like me claims that a particular approach is essential, but they see learning proceeding well without this supposedly indispensable element.

Why trust some researcher who doesn’t even know your kids, when you can trust your own eyes?

First, it’s important to know what we mean when we say that research shows that a teaching approach “works.” It does NOT mean this approach supports learning and nothing else does. It means that when such comparisons have taken place, this particular approach showed marginal benefits.

That there is some improvement at the margin doesn’t mean that all the kids in the experimental group prospered and that all the kids in the comparison group languished. It simply means that the average level of performance differed for the two groups.

You might have noticed that I used the term comparison group rather than control group. We don’t usually have “control groups” in reading studies as it would be unethical to withhold reading instruction from anyone. Any instructional approach will likely increase learning a bit, so learning will always be evident in both groups.

In this case, the kids getting phonics outperformed the kids who didn’t. Maybe many of the phonics-taught kids did a bit better than the comparison kids. Or, maybe some kids in each group failed to learn to read, but there were fewer of these outright failures when phonics was part of the instruction.

In any event, the outcome of these studies isn’t that the phonics kids learn, and the non-phonics kids don’t. It isn’t black and white like that, just whiter shades of gray. Essentially, following the research means trying to alter the students’ probabilities of success.

Second, in considering whether you should follow the research, it helps if you understand the concept of “opportunity cost.”

Let’s say you have been teaching reading for 10 years, and your kids are learning, their test scores are pretty similar to those obtained by your colleagues, the parents have seemed happy with your services, and your principals have given you positive evaluations.

Obviously, what you are doing is working. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?

That sounds so good, but it ignores what I referred to as opportunity cost. That you have been teaching reading as you have deprived you of the opportunity to see what might have happened if you’d taught reading in some other way.  

That’s where research comes in. Researchers will try to arrange their studies in such a way that it becomes possible to evaluate how your business as usual approach does against some other approach. And, that’s where we might see that as well as your kids have been doing, they could have done better if they had been taught a bit differently.

In other words, your self-satisfaction with the way you are teaching may not be justified, at least when scrutinized against alternatives. No teacher can ever know what her kids are missing from staying with the current approach that seems so satisfying.

Third, the kind of research I’ve been alluding to focuses on particular outcomes, most often reading achievement, but other outcomes, too (e.g., reading interest, motivation). Teachers sometimes may sound like “science deniers” because they don’t share a commitment to the goals of the research.

The researcher worries about how many words correct per minute the kids can read, whether the kids can decode a list of nonsense words, or how many multiple-choice questions were answered on a standardized comprehension test. The teacher may have other criteria in mind.

I myself come across this one frequently. I’ll write about research proving that Method A obtains better learning results than Method B, and I’m inundated with missives from Method B advocates who are certain that if I visited their classroom, I’d change my mind.

These teachers aren’t idiots, they just have different goals than the ones espoused by the researchers.

I’m trying to get kids to the highest literacy levels possible. The teachers may want that, too, but they may value a feel-good classroom environment even more. That’s why they are so sure that if I saw how great their classroom is, then I’d prefer their approach to the purportedly more effective one.

Teachers often tell me that they need to do it their way, because they are teaching “love of reading.” That their state lacks a “love of reading” standard, or that their approach hasn’t been found to foster any especial fondness for reading, or that love of reading depends heavily on how well the kids can read doesn’t seem to faze them.

We can pile research study upon research study at these teachers’ feet, but no matter how high the stack gets they’ll never be persuaded since it ignores their personal goals.

Finally, educators usually know very little about research—its methods, its reasoning, its ethics. Even at Research I universities, Colleges of Education provide a dearth of research training for teachers and principals. It is hard to trust in something that you don’t understand.

Teachers often confide their sense that “research can prove anything,” both revealing their deep suspicions of the unreliability of research findings and the lack of trustworthiness of researchers.

Of course, researchers themselves are quite concerned about those reliability problems. That’s why, for instance, most of us don’t make recommendations for practice based upon single studies. We’ve learned to look for an average effect across bodies of research to ensure a scope and consistency of findings.

If a study says the XYZ Reading Program gets great results, that’s one thing; but if 38 or 51 studies say it does, then I’m on board. That’s the reason why reports like those of the National Reading Panel, the National Early Literacy Panel, or John Hattie’s compendium of meta-analyses get so much play… one more study is unlikely to disrupt their results since these results are already based on so many data. It’s that consistency that we trust in.

Another benefit of that meta-analytic approach to thinking about research findings is that it allows us to know not only that an approach worked—that is, had a positive effect on learning—but it can allow us to see who the approach worked with or under what circumstances it has worked.  

The “it worked or didn’t” school of thought apparent in many school districts tends to obscure the level of detail teachers need to apply the research results successfully—and that detail, frankly, would give teachers greater confidence that the research was worth following. If, in the research studies, 30 minutes a day of fluency instruction improved achievement, then requiring fluency instruction, but with no specific guidance as to dosage or text type is likely to fail.

The teacher who has kids read aloud one easy page of text for fluency practice is honoring the research finding (fluency instruction is effective) but is not following the particular instructional practices that led to that finding.

The benefits of following the research should be marginally improved reading achievement.  Research is the only tool we have that allows us to determine the kinds of teaching most likely to advantage our students’ learning; commonsense and past experience are useless before such questions. It is easy enough for a teacher to wave off higher achievement as a laudable goal—"these kids seem to read well to me”—but technology and changes in how we work and interact socially demand higher levels of literacy than in the past if our students are to fully participate in the benefits of our society. More knowledge about how research is done and how it is evaluated would go a long way towards helping teachers trust that research can really help them to do better.

I hope you’ll be able to successfully make the changes your district is asking for. If done well, it could lead to better achievement for your boys and girls.

I know phonics should be taught explicitly and we have looked through several sources to determine the patterns to teach in first grade. I have been pouring through leveled texts and have found a high concentration of blends, digraphs, long vowel/silent 'e', and predictable vowel teams in text as low as levels 4 and 6. We are not teaching these patterns until well into the year, but expect our incoming first graders to read Level 3/4. 

We are usually about 10 weeks into the year before even starting blends. At that point the text level expectation is around an 8. So, we keep flagging kids for more phonics intervention based on a text level riddled with phonetic patterns we have not even come close to addressing. I am personally having issues with us teaching phonics patterns so far behind our text level expectation and then providing interventions for students without first providing instruction.

Our building data suggest that most of our first-graders are well beyond phonemic awareness and CVC patterns when they start first-grade. Is it really a good idea to spend our first 10 weeks of the year addressing these skills with the whole class? I have nothing against review, but 10 weeks out of 38 seems like a lot of time.

Shanahan responds:

There are really two questions here… one about how much review is appropriate and the other is about how well texts need match the decoding skills being taught.

I’ll answer the easy one first, and the interesting one next.

If kids can demonstrate that they have a good grasp of a skill, occasional brief reviews would make good sense—but not 50 days!

Carol Connors research is most apt here (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004). Basically, she and her colleagues found that if kids are lacking phonics skills and you explicitly teach them phonics skills, they do better. But if they are already relatively strong in phonics—as your boys and girls evidently are from your testing data—then they can make great progress (even in decoding), by being engaged in other more independent and meaning-oriented/reading-oriented activities.

That suggests to me that you have two legitimate options—depending on local teacher knowledge and management skills.

One reasonable choice would be the one I think your letter implies… there is no good reason to hold these kids back with regard to the explicit phonics instruction. Divide the groups in two and teach PA and CVCs to the lower level decoders and get on with blends and digraphs and complex vowel patterns with the more advanced decoders. Very reasonable approach and one very much in line with research on early readers (NELP, 2008).

A second possibility would be to stay with the current phonics instruction regime, but simply exempt the kids who have already developed the skills that are being taught. The ed exempt kids would do more comprehension, fluency, and writing work—while their classmates are  still working out those earlier developing phonics skills. (One of the cool things Connor and company found was that the kids with the relatively stronger phonics ability continued to make gains in their decoding ability). When the low decoders catch up, you can reunite the whole class for the next tier of phonics instruction.

What you don’t want to do is what you are doing now—wasting 10 weeks of instructional time that could be better spent for significant numbers of kids.

The second part of your question is, to me, the more interesting of the two. Should we allow/require kids to read texts that have spelling patterns that we haven’t yet explicitly taught?

It seems so logical that we would teach a particular sequence of phonics skills and that students would then simply apply these to the words with the spelling patterns that matched the skills already taught. And, it would make great sense to do this if decoding were that simple and that actual reading was just an application of “sounding out” abilities.

What is really going on in early reading is much more complex and wonderful than that.

Fortunately, the decoding system that readers must gain control of is much more complex and dynamic than even good phonics instruction may suggest. We don’t teach decoding as much as we provide useful cues to students that help them to figure out this aspect of reading.

That’s why no particular phonics sequence has proven to be superior to any other (NICHD, 2000). One might expect important learning differences due to the order in which the phonic elements and spelling patterns are taught or to the specific correspondences or patterns that are included in this instruction. But that isn’t the case.

That’s why kids with more advanced first-grade decoding abilities increase their decoding competency faster when working with text than from explicit phonics instruction (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004) and why the spelling patterns in the texts children read can have a bigger impact on their phonics development than the explicit teaching sequence (Guthrie & Seifert, 1977), and why word repetition in these early texts can be more potent (Mesmer, Cunningham, & Hiebert, 2012).

That’s why studies have found no particular learning benefit from limiting young children’s reading to decodable texts alone (Jenkins, Peyton, Sanders, & Vadasy, 2004), why constraining texts to match immediate pedagogical goals may have long-term, negative, unintended consequences for students’ word reading abilities (Venezky & Johnson, 1973), and why research supports developing a “mental set for diversity” rather than a “mental set for consistency” in young readers (Gibson & Levin, 1975).

That’s why descriptions of children’s actual decoding development are so much more complex than a typical phonics curriculum (Ehri, 2014).  
Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here.

1. Explicit phonics instruction is important. Research is overwhelmingly clear that such teaching increases the chances that kids will develop these complex word reading abilities. I certainly wouldn’t delay such instruction until the skills being taught would match well with the available texts.
2. We want beginning reading texts to be reasonably simple for kids to read—and amounts of repetition along with relatively easy decodability are valuable keys to ensuring such simplicity (much better than those schemes that encourage kids to guess at words or to rely on the pictures to figure out the words or that are so highly predictable that looking at the words isn’t required).
3. But as reasonable as it is to provide kids with some reading practice with texts that employ the specific phonic skills being taught, these decoding instruction/text reading connections can be a bit looser than that… having kids reading both decodable texts and controlled vocabulary readers, for instance.

Obviously, the situation you describe cannot be adequately analyzed at this far remove. It is certainly possible that the decoding demands of the texts could be too demanding given these students’ decoding abilities… or it could be, that though those texts use some spelling patterns the kids haven’t yet had the opportunity to study, they still may provide a sufficient amount of support (through tools like frequent repetition of some of these harder words) that would provide a perfectly adequate learning context.

My advice: watch how well the kids do with the texts rather than trying to achieve a particular level of decodability. If the kids are struggling with those early texts, consider finding something a bit more decodable for those initial readings or experiment with accelerating the introduction of new phonic elements a bit. Perhaps a more rapidly paced curriculum would do the trick.

I’m not worried that kids who have only been taught the CVC pattern will confront CVCe words in their texts.

But am concerned if they are struggling to read those texts with a reasonable degree of fluency. It would certainly be possible to find more decodable texts, but it would also be possible to use texts that do a better job of limiting the proportions of new words that are introduced and that increase the amount of word repetition (http://textproject.org/).

We teach phonics… and kids learn to decode. Those aren’t exactly the same thing. Like with all complex learning there is usually not a simple one-to-one relationship between what we teach and what the learner has to actually do to implement or imply that knowledge. Phonics instruction reveals to kids that there is a system and that they need to pay attention to it. Such instruction cues them in on what some particularly useful patterns may be (good morphology instruction does the same thing). The sole use of texts that match the decodabilty skills already taught tend to be too much of a good thing. They give kids what is probably useful practice with the skills learned, but they likely discourage young readers from noticing other patterns.

That’s why it is so important that we not overly constrain the decodabilty of the texts that young children read, and why I recommend using a combination of both highly decodable texts and controlled vocabulary readers. We want kids actively looking to see spelling patterns, including ones that have not been taught.

References

Connor, C.M., Morrison, F. J., & Katch, L. (2004). Beyond the reading wars: Exploring the effect of child-instruction interactions on growth in early reading. Scientific Studies in Reading, 8(4), 305-336.

Ehri, L.C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 6-21.

Guthrie, J.T., & Seifert, M. (1977). Letter-sound complexity in learning to identify words. Journal of Educational Psychology, 69(6), 686-696.

Jenkins, J. R., Peyton, J. A., Sanders, E. A., & Vadasy, P. F. (2004). Effects of reading decodable texts in supplemental first-grade tutoring. Scientific Studies of Reading, 8(1), 53-85.

Mesmer, H. A., Cunningham, J. W., & Hiebert, E. H. (2012). Toward a theoretical model of text complexity for the early grades: Learning from the past, anticipating the future. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(3), 235-258.

Venezky, R. L., & Johnson, D. (1973). Development of two letter-sound patterns in grades one and three. Journal of Educational Psychology, 64(1), 109-115.

What does research say about early literacy and when to begin? I am aware that kids may reach the stage of development where they're ready for reading at different times. What does the research say about the "window" for when a kid can learn to read? What are the consequences if they haven't started reading past that time? 

Shanahan response:

Oh, fun. The kind of question that generates strong scholarly (sounding) opinion, with no real data to go on.

The advocates on both sides will bloviate about windows of opportunity, developmentally-appropriate practice, potential harms of early or later starts, and how kids in Finland are doing.

Despite the impressive citations that show up in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, or in various blogs, the truth is that there is no definitive research on this issue.

The meager handful of supposedly direct comparisons between starting earlier versus later are so ham-handed that I’m surprised they were even published.

One example is a longitudinal study that followed kids for six years… after either a dose of academically- or play-focused preschool. The research claimed that the kids taught early ended up with lower later achievement (https://ecrp.illinois.edu/v4n1/marcon.html).

That sounds horrible, until you look closely at the analysis and it becomes evident that the comparisons were questionable and the statistics specious (https://ecrp.illinois.edu/v5n1/lonigan.html). More of the play-group kids were retained along the way, so the final comparison—the one that finally found the difference the researcher was seeking—wasn’t between the same samples as at the beginning. The researcher’s response to this criticism suggests that the samples weren’t actually equivalent at the start either, further highlighting that this study couldn’t possibly reveal whether early teaching was helpful, hurtful, or not an issue at all.

I can provide examples going in the other direction, too. Since graduate school I have been told that young children are especially able learners and that the earlier we start teaching the better the odds that we’ll catch kids during that “portal of receptivity” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/windows-of-opportunity-part-1_b_57c937cee4b06c750dd984b1).

The evidence behind that argument seems mainly to be based on the fact that from about 18 months to 5-years-of-age children learn an amazing amount of vocabulary; and that so-called vocabulary spurt is a real one. However, the idea that everything or even everything involving language is learned easily during those years is where the leap of faith comes in.

Reading development certainly does depend upon vocabulary, but there is much more to learning reading, and there is no convincing evidence that four-year-olds will learn to read more quickly or easily than would be the case a year or three later. Just because youngsters learn spoken words really fast, doesn’t mean that they are able to perceive the sounds within words (phonological awareness), or that they'll be able to master the names and sounds of the letters (the beginnings of decoding) especially easily.

When I argue for teaching reading to young children, my claim is not that we need to take advantage of a particularly beneficial time period when kids are most attuned to learning. (Though when I put forth such advice, I usually hear from those who, based on Finland’s educational attainment, claim that starting at 7-years-old is the magic ingredient to literacy success… an argument that neglects a few other differences between Finland and the English-speaking world, including homogeneity of population, relatively high economic advantage, formidable linguistic differences, and the fact that, according to the Finnish government, most of their children learn to read prior to entering school at age 7).

English reading can be challenging so I encourage as early a start as possible (and, no, research reveals no harm in this).

Starting early increases the amount of time available for kids to learn. Often kids enter kindergarten or first-grade with the expectation that they are to learn to read that year. Spreading this expectation across 3-4 years can reduce pressure and anxiety.

This also means that it is possible to successfully teach older students to read. We often hear the statistics that show that early reading problems persist. But these problems don’t persist because we missed some magical window of learning opportunity, but because we are not doing the things that will allow older students to succeed.

My advice, if you are a parent or caregiver, start introducing your children to literacy once they are born—reading to them, talking to them, singing to them, showing them how to write their names, writing down their stories, teaching the alphabet and letter sounds, playing with language sounds (e.g., “K-K-K-Katie”), and so on.

Of course, young children have brief attention spans. But that’s one of the benefits of starting so early—you can take advantage of 20 seconds here, 3 minutes there, over a long period which can make a big learning difference.

If you are a preschool, kindergarten, or first-grade teacher, begin teaching reading once you meet the children…

Give kids as long a timeline as possible and don’t worry about an optimum time to teach reading. There isn’t one.

The reason for starting early isn’t to capture some magic window of neuronal plasticity, but to make the window as big as possible. If teaching early identifies a youngster who struggles to learn reading, then we will have more years to address this youngster’s needs. The later we wait, the smaller that window of opportunity. We want kids to have the maximum opportunity to learn.

We hear a lot about “developmental appropriateness” these days, and this concept is used to dismiss the early teaching of reading—"don't teach reading until it is developmentally appropriate."

If that is what you are hearing I suggest reading the National Association of Educators of Young Children’s draft policy on this matter:                                                                                                   “From infancy through age 8, proactively building children’s conceptual and factual knowledge, including academic vocabulary, is essential because knowledge is the primary driver of comprehension. The more children (and adults) know, the better their listening comprehension and, later, reading comprehension. Therefore, by building knowledge of the world in early childhood, educators are laying the foundation that is critical for all future learning (How People Learn I and II). The idea that young children are not ready for academic subject matter is a misunderstanding of DAP; particularly in grades 1-3, almost all subject matter can be taught in ways that are meaningful and engaging for each child (citations).”

https://www.naeyc.org/sites/default/files/globally-shared/downloads/PDFs/get-involved/leadership/initial_public_draft_dap_2019.pdf

Developmental appropriateness has more to do with how we might teach something successfully than with what we teach. Keeping lessons brief and lively makes great sense with young children (and it doesn’t hurt the older ones either). Teaching phonemic awareness with songs and chants is a great idea, and it can be fun to play games built around letters and sounds. Introducing reading and writing through play areas set up like post offices, restaurants, libraries, and the like are all developmentally appropriate for the youngest of our preschoolers.

Start teaching reading from the time you have kids available to teach, and pay attention to how they respond to this instruction—both in terms of how well they are learning what you are teaching, and how happy and invested they seem to be. If you haven't started yet, don't feel guilty, just get going.

I've attached a Student Work Analysis tool that we are using. I have read that you oppose attempts to grade students on the individual reading standards. Although this tool is not used for grading students, it is a standard-by-standard analysis of the students’ work, and I wonder what you think of it? [The form that was included provided spaces for teachers to analyze student success with each of their state’s math standards].

Shanahan response: 

In the blog entry that you refer to, I spoke specifically about evaluating reading comprehension standards (not math or even the more foundational or skills-oriented decoding, vocabulary, or morphology).

A common error in reading education is to treat reading comprehension as if it were a skill or a collection of discrete skills.

Skills tend to be highly repeatable things…

Many of the items listed as comprehension skills are not particularly repeatable.  All these standards or question types aimed at main idea, central message, key details, supporting details, inferencing, application, tone, comparison, purpose, etc. are fine, but none is repeatable in real reading situations.

Each of these actions is unique or at least high particularized. Each time these instances occur they are in completely different contexts. To execute them, it requires different steps from instance to instance.

Not only does each text have its own main ideas, but because the expression of each text is so different, what it takes to locate, identify, or construct a main idea will vary greatly from text to text. Contrast this with forming the appropriate phoneme for sh or ph, computing the product of 3 X 3, or defining photosynthesis.

Another problem is that these supposed comprehension skills aren’t individually measurable.

My point isn’t that teachers can’t ask questions that would require students to figure out particular things about a text—of course they can—but performance on such questions is startlingly unreliable. Today, Johnny might answer the tone question like a champ, but tomorrow he won’t—since that is a different story, and the author revealed tone in a totally different way.

Also, comprehension questions asked about a particular text aren’t independent of each other (and item independence is imperative in assessment). The reason, little Johnny struggled with tone on the day after wasn’t because he forgot what he knew about tone, nor even because tone was handled more subtly in text two… but because his reading was deeply affected by that text’s more challenging vocabulary, complex sentences, or complicated time sequence—none of which are specifically tone issues.

That means that when teachers try to suss out how well Johnny can meet Standard 6 by asking tone questions, his answers will reveal how well he could make sense of tone in one particular text, but it won’t likely be indicative of how well he’ll handle tone on any other. (Not at all what one would expect to see with math, decoding, or vocabulary assessments).

Reading comprehension is so affected by the readers’ prior knowledge of the subject matter being read about and the language used to express those ideas (e.g., vocabulary, sentence structure, cohesion, text organization, literary devices, graphics), that focusing one’s attention on which kinds of question the kids could answer is a fool’s errand.

If I were trying to assess reading comprehension information to determine who might need more help, the kind of help to provide, or who I should worry about concerning the end of year testing, then I wouldn’t hesitate to ask questions that seemed to reflect the standards… but the information I’d use for assessment would ignore how well the kids could answer particular types of questions.

My interest would be in how well students did with particular types of texts.

Keep track of their overall comprehension with different types of text. I’d record the following information:

1. How the student did on each overall text (the percentage of questions answered correctly, or an estimate of the percentage of key information the student could include in a summary).
2. The topics of the texts (with, perhaps, some rating of each child’s familiarity with those topics).
3. An estimate of the text difficulty (in terms of Lexiles or another readability estimate).
4. The lengths of the texts (in numbers of words, preferably).
5. Whether the text was Literary (narrative or poetry), or Informational (expository or argumentative).

Thus, a student record may look something like this:

 Over time, you’ll get some sense that junior does great with texts that are lower than 500L, but not so well with texts that are harder than 550L (unless they’re about robots).

Or, perhaps over the report card marking period you may notice a difference in performance on the the literary or informational texts (which you can see in my example above). But you also need to notice that the informational texts were relatively harder here, so it isn’t certain that the student would struggle more with content than literature (though one might make an effort to sort this out to see if there is a consistent pattern). Likewise the student seemed to be able to handle silent reading demands with the shorter texts, but comprehension tended to fall off with the longer texts. That may lead me to try to do more to build stamina with this student.

And so on.

Basically, the information that you are collecting should describe how well the student does with particular types of texts (in terms of discourse types, length, topic familiarity, and difficulty), rather than trying to figure out which comprehension skills the individual question responses may reveal.

If a student does well with many of the passages, then he or she will likely do well with the comprehension standards—as long as these weekly dipsticks are reflective of the difficulty, lengths, and types of texts that will appear on the end-of-year tests.  

And, If students perform poorly with many of the passages, then their performance on all question types will be affected.

Some of my ELA teachers have been talking about dyslexia fonts lately. Is there any merit to this?

Shanahan response:

This question takes me back to graduate school. I was fascinated with print and its impact on reading.

That led me to study the work of a psychologist named Miles Tinker. He published scads of research and reviews of research on the impacts of print on reading and learning to read and on print itself (his 1963 book, Legibility of Print, is still a standard work).

Tinker made me a skeptic concerning the supposed benefits of print design alterations, eye movement training, and the like. He provided several summaries of each decade of research on these issues—always with the same conclusions—most print features made little difference in reading or ease of reading, and none facilitated learning to read.

That isn’t to say that he didn’t identify any print features that mattered—it is just that much of what he found out has become standard practice. Tinker helped standardize line lengths, identified type sizes that were too small to accommodate successful reading, and so on. We now live in a digital age, so many of those earlier studies are being replicated with regard to reading on the Internet or designing effective PowerPoint slides.

The idea that those with dyslexia might benefit from a special type font suggests that dyslexia is mainly a visual problem—an idea that has largely been rejected in the scientific community. The notion is that some fonts would be easier to read and would be particularly preferred by readers having trouble getting the print to stand still.  

My Tinkerian response: “Oh, here we go again.”

Nevertheless, I conducted a quick search of the literature and here is what I found:

Over the past decade or so, three new fonts have appeared (Open Dyslexia, Dyslexie, and Read Regular), all claiming—without any empirical evidence—to somehow aid dyslexic readers.

Since then there have been 8 studies into the value of these fonts.

Most of the studies found no improvement in reading rate, accuracy, or eye fixations (Duranovic, et al., 2018; Kuster, et al., 2018; Rello & Baeza-Yates, 2013; Wery & Diliberto, 2017). The studies even found that dyslexics—children and adults—preferred reading standard fonts to the special ones (Harley, et al., 2016; Kuster, et al., 2018; Wery & Diliberto, 2017).

Only one study reported a benefit of any kind—the dyslexic students in this study read faster (Marinus, et al., 2016). This benefit apparently came, not from the font design, but from the spacing within and between words. The researchers increased the spacings in the standard fonts and the same effect was seen. Masulli (2018) likewise found that larger spacings improved the reading speed of dyslexics—but that effect was apparent with non-dyslexic readers, as well.

Reading faster is a good thing, of course, as long as reading comprehension is maintained. Unfortunately, these studies didn’t look at that.

If you think I’m being overly skeptical, then consider the results of one final study (French, et al., 2013). French and colleagues found that the harder to read fonts engendered deeper processing of the texts and improved learning from texts for the dyslexics. Helping dyslexics to make their processing quicker and shallower is a reasonable thing to do if your goal is faster completion of reading tasks. However, if the goal is to increase learning from text, then these new font technologies are a really bad idea.

Oh, and by the way, although some tout these new fonts for teaching purposes—there is no font that has ever been found to make learning to read any easier or more effective.

I know the media loves these kinds of “innovations.” They are sexy and fun to write about. But a century of research has shown that there are no lenses, eye movement trainings, fonts, special printing techniques, alphabets, or musical supports that improve reading or learning to read.

If you to increase reading abilities—of dyslexic or non-dyslexic readers—there is only one route that consistently delivers: You have to do the hard work of teaching students to read!

Please tell your ELA teacher: Fuggedaboutit!

References

Duranovic, M., Senka, S., & Babic-Gavric, B. (2018). Influence of increased spacing and font type on the reading ability of dyslexic children. Annals of Dyslexia, 68: 218-228.

French, M. M. J., Blood, A., Bright, N. D., Futak, D., et al. (2013). Changing fonts in education: How the benefits vary with ability and dyslexia. Journal of Educational Research, 106(4) 301-304.

Harley, L., Kline, K., Bell, C., Baranak, A., et al., (2015). Designing usable voting systems for voters with hidden barriers: A pilot study. International Journal of Human-Computer Interactions, 32: 103-118.

Kuster, S. M., van Weerdenburg, M., Gompel, M., & Bosman, A. M. T.  (2018). Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 68, 25-42.

Marinus, E., Mostard, M., Segers, E.., Schubert, T. M., Madelaine, A., & Wheldall, K. (2016). A special font for people with dyslexia: Does it work and, if so, why? Dyslexia, 22: 233-244.

Masulli, F., Galluccio, M., Gerard, C., Peyre, H., et al., (2018). Effect of different fonts sizes and spaces between words on eye movement performance: An eye tracker study in dyslexic and non-dyslexic children. Vision Research, 153, 24-29.

Rello, L., & Baeza-Yates, R. (2013). Good fonts for dyslexia. Assets. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2513447

Wery, J. J., & Diliberto, J. A. (2017). The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic,on reading rate and accuracy. Annals of Dyslexia, 67, 114-127.

I started getting emails questioning me on whether I supported the fluency ideas that my friend Tim Rasinski was advocating. These messages seemed to fall into two categories: those who were honestly horrified that Tim would offer something beyond what they believed to be part of the “science of reading” and those who hoped to bait me into publicly taking a rhetorical swing at Tim’s claims.

I found out Tim had been on Amplify’s Science of Reading podcast (probably why I was being contacted so much), and that he had argued for using techniques like “assisted reading” and “repeated reading” to support children’s fluency growth. Apparently, some listeners thought his recommendations to be contradictory of what Emily Hansford has labeled the “science of reading.”

Then, the International Literacy Association issued a position paper on “Children Experiencing Reading Difficulties” (Wixson, et al., 2019). This document seems to have emerged from the PBS kerfuffle from earlier this year, when some of the same scholars who produced it denied the existence of dyslexia and denigrated the concerns of parents whose kids weren’t receiving phonics instruction. This more conciliatory effort calls for a comprehensive approach to reading instruction that emphasizes phonemic awareness, phonics, reading comprehension, and writing—along with attention to language and the development of executive control. (The efforts to appease the science of reading community only go so far in this document—one can easily come away thinking that the major problem facing kids who experience reading difficulties is that they will receive too much phonics teaching or that some (unnamed) individual is promoting a “phonics only agenda.”)

Tone problems aside, I’m certainly sympathetic to efforts aimed at healing the great divides in our field, and I’ve long argued for comprehensive approaches to reading instruction myself—maintaining that such lists of instructional desiderata include approximate amounts of instruction that should be devoted to each (that way, one can more easily weed out those who seemingly support phonics, but who would spend no more than a few minutes a day on it; or those champions of writing, who may address it only two or three time per school year).

Nevertheless, I was surprised that given the substantial body of research around oral reading fluency instruction and its benefits, that it failed to the make the ILA cut in their notion of a comprehensive program of instruction. Especially given the recent research on its importance (O’Reilly, et al., 2019; Sabatini, et al., 2018), as well as the substantial case made for such teaching by the National Reading Panel (NRP) (NICHD, 2000) and in independent reviews (e.g., Kuhn & Stahl, 2002).  

Essentially, the phonics-firsters and those warning us of the potential toxicity of phonics teaching both seem to have written off explicit fluency instruction. Under the circumstances, I suspect proponents of fluency teaching would like a Thanksgiving do-over… they, perhaps, have less to be thankful for than they might have thought.

Why do I support oral reading fluency instruction?

I chaired the NRP sub-panel that reviewed the research on fluency teaching, and our summary of that research concluded that such teachhing was beneficial to their reading development by a wide range of measures. Kids who received fluency instruction simply read better than those who did not. These outcomes were obtained with children in regular classrooms (Grades 1-4) and with struggling readers (Grades 1-12). Later, as director of reading for the Chicago Public Schools, I mandated that our kids get a substantial amount of fluency teaching (about 30 minutes per day), along with similar expenditures on decoding, comprehension, and writing. That recipe led to significantly higher reading achievement for our 437,000 students.

If you want to advocate for a science of reading, it seems that would require one to pay attention to the scientific research findings on various approaches to teaching reading. After all, those who promote explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction usually rely heavily on the research base provided by the NRP; why not use the whole report? And, likewise, for those who claim to take a comprehensive view of reading instruction, why leave out such a heavily researched element? Fluency instruction has been more thoroughly studied than the promising, but still speculative, “executive control” variables noted in the ILA document (and, those variables haven’t been shown to have as big an impact on reading progress either).

I think one of the problems with oral reading fluency is that it isn’t a pure variable. It is a mash up of decoding and comprehension—and it is developmental to boot, meaning that it’s nature changes over time.

As Professor Rasinski noted in the Amplify podcast, with the youngest children, say those in kindergarten, oral reading fluency is more about developing a concept of word—learning how speech maps onto print—than about anything that seems particularly fluency oriented. Children have to learn how print and language come together; that is, how phonemes, syllables, and words are represented on a page and what those punctuation points and white spaces are all about. Darrell Morris (e.g., 1993) has long argued that concept of word plays a critical role in early phonemic awareness development and the importance of early fingerpoint reading has clearly been demonstrated (Uhry, 2002).

Later, oral reading fluency instructions aids decoding development. Carol Chomsky (178) identified second graders who, despite high phonics knowledge, were struggling readers. She thought these kids needed some teaching that would show them how to apply their phonics skills. She engaged the kids in repeated reading activities, and they blossomed as readers. Later studies found that such teaching benefited kids without reading problems, too (NICHD, 2000).

These days we know a bit more about decoding development and what it entails. It appears that fluency instruction probably helps with those memory changes supported by decoding instruction.

As Chomsky posited, fluency work is likely most helpful at what Linnea Ehri has described as the consolidation or automaticity stages of decoding development (e.g., Ehri & Wilce, 1985). Kids aren’t memorizing sight words as much as they are developing an understanding how to use phonetic/orthographic cues in word reading. They are building the cognitive architecture that allows one to learn to respond appropriately to words on the basis of minimal exposure or experience (fast mapping), such as when kids get to the point where they appear to memorize words with no more than a single exposure (Carey & Bartlett, 1978)—or statistical learning (Seidenberg, 2018).

Joe Torgesen and colleagues decided that the major impact of repeated reading on struggling readers is that they were mastering specific words from the activity (Rashotte, 1985)—which seems reasonable, no one really knows what specifically is being stored in memory when children learn to decode.

Not surprisingly, there is a particularly strong relationship between oral reading fluency and reading comprehension during the primary grades (Sabatini, et al., 2018). However, for many students oral reading fluency practice continues to help in the consolidation of decoding skills beyond that point (O’Reilly, et al., 2019), and it also starts to morph into an activity that helps to support prosody development which is more directly implicated in reading comprehension (Breznitz, 2006). No wonder the latest ETS policy guide recommends attention to fluency as a foundational reading skill well beyond the primary grades (O’Reilly, et al., 2019).

Why teach fluency? Because at different points in a reader’s development it makes important contributions to understanding how print works, to consolidating and automizing decoding skills, and to helping readers to figure out how to go from print to prosody. But, basically, the reason I support it is because there are a substantial number of reasonably persuasive studies showing that such instruction enhances reading achievement—the only reason any instructional routine should be adopted.

One last point. I know some teachers are concerned about this emphasis on oral reading. A small bit of research shows that silent reading – when sufficiently scaffolded – can also support fluency. That makes sense, but I make sure kids get do a lot of silent reading, too, during comprehension instruction, in work with texts throughout the curriculum, and during authentic independent reading (when kids choose to read, not when teachers require such practice). Studies show oral reading fluency instruction translates to improved silent reading ability (Kuhn & Schwanenflugel, 2018). (I usually recommend 30 minutes of scaffolded partner reading, which means each student gets about 15 minutes of daily oral reading practice).  

Serious efforts to improve reading achievement will, indeed, be comprehensive and based on the science of reading. Given that, oral reading fluency instruction deserves greater respect than was manifest this week. Reading war combatants: a pox on both your houses.  

We’ll soon be back to providing the best research-based literacy information possible, but for now, let’s remember all the ways that we can contribute to promoting literacy. Be generous and have a wondrous and literate holiday.

Links to these 6 worthy charities are on my website year round: https://shanahanonliteracy.com/charities

Books for Africa.  Founded in 1988, Books for Africa (BFA) collects, sorts, ships, and distributes books to children in Africa. Our goal is to end the book famine in Africa. Books donated by publishers, schools, libraries, individuals, and organizations are sorted and packed by volunteers who carefully choose books that are age and subject appropriate. We send good books, enough books for a whole class to use. Since 1988, Books For Africa has shipped more than 41 million books to every African country. They are on once-empty library shelves, in classrooms in rural schools, and in the hands of children who have never before held a book. Each book will be read over and over again. When the books arrive, they go to those who need them most: children who are hungry to read, hungry to learn, hungry to explore the world in ways that only books make possible.

Children's Literacy Initiative.  Children's Literacy Initiative works with educators to transform instruction so that children can become powerful readers, writers and thinkers. CLI envisions a nation where every child has the power of literacy and the opportunity for a lifetime of success. CLI works with teachers to transform literacy instruction in public, charter, and parochial schools to ensure that students can read on grade level. Building a teacher’s instructional expertise impacts student learning over the course of a teacher’s career. CLI’s accomplishes this through a program centered around coaching, workshops, and books. - CLI provides job-embedded, content-focused coaching, both one-on-one and in small groups in the classroom. Coaches provide demonstrations and feedback that help teachers incorporate effective literacy practices into their daily work with students. - CLI delivers workshops and seminars to build teachers’ knowledge of literacy content and pedagogy. CLI’s strategic goal is to increase its project scope by 55% to reach 110,000 students by the 2020-2021 school year. 

Ferst Readers. Ferst Readers' mission is to strengthen communities by providing quality books and literacy resources for children and their families to use at home during the earliest stages of development. Ferst Readers addresses the growing concern of children from low-income communities entering kindergarten without basic literacy skills and school readiness, a preventable problem with far-reaching impacts. The recipe for early school success is simple: start school with strong language and literacy skills. Ferst Readers' recipe for encouraging literacy development is even simpler: ensure that children have age-appropriate books in their home and provide parents with literacy resources that reinforce the importance of early learning and encourage them to read frequently with their children. By mailing a new book every month to enrolled children, birth to five, Ferst Readers is committed to providing early learning opportunities with the hope of breaking the cycle of poverty and illiteracy.

Reach Out and Read. Founded in 1989, Reach Out and Read gives young children a foundation for success by incorporating books into pediatric care and encouraging families to read aloud together. Our objective is to improve emergent literacy and social-emotional health during the span of rapid brain development between birth and age five, particularly in economically disadvantaged families who are at risk for adverse outcomes. We partner with pediatric medical providers who incorporate our evidence-based model into standard well-child visits, educating parents on the importance of daily shared reading and giving developmentally-appropriate new books to children. Families served by Reach Out and Read read together more often, and their children enter kindergarten with larger vocabularies and stronger language skills, better prepared to achieve their potential. Over 32,000 medical providers at 6,000 clinical locations participate in Reach Out and Read, serving 4.8 million children and families annually.

Reading Partners. Founded in 1999, the mission of Reading Partners is to help children become lifelong readers by empowering communities to provide individualized instruction with measurable results. Reading Partners is dedicated to transforming struggling young readers into confident readers who are excited about learning. We do this by focusing on children from low-income communities; giving one-on-one instruction at the student's reading level; recruiting and training community volunteers to work with children; partnering with high-need elementary schools to offer free services on the school campus; and providing a way for volunteers to give a small amount of their time to make a huge difference in a child's life.

Room to Read. Room to Read believes that World Change Starts with Educated Children. We envision a world in which all children can pursue a quality education that enables them to reach their full potential and contribute to their community and the world. Room to Read seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations and governments, we develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children, and support girls to complete secondary school with the relevant life skills to succeed in school and beyond.

 
May you all have a more literate New Year!