When working with state educational standards are the expectations for the student to be able to accomplish each of the standards with grade level text. Some of us believe that if a fourth-grade student can determine the main idea in a second-grade text that the student has mastered that standard. Please help us settle this argument.

Shanahan response:

Actions like identifying a main idea or summarizing a text or comparing characters’ traits are considered to be skills. Text levels (like fourth-grade text or Level L or 950Lexiles) are degrees of text difficulty or complexity.

Readers have to implement their reading skills within texts of varying levels of complexity.

If a student is able to identify a main idea in a second-grade text, then he is meeting the second-grade standard. Students need to be able to demonstrate that they can make sense of texts in the ways described in the standards, but they have to be able to do this with texts commensurate with their grade levels.

At the end of the year, they’ll be tested on fourth grade, not second grade, texts. And, of course, if they continually are working with texts that are a year or two behind their grade level, when they leave high school they’ll be at a horrible disadvantage.

Teachers get way too wrapped up in the skills that are included in state standards and how to get around having students actually read grade level texts, and don’t pay enough attention to the variations in contexts under which these skills have to be implemented.

The analogy I have long used is weightlifting. There are all kinds of weightlifting skills or, more properly, exercises: squats, pulls, presses, curls, and so on. But those exercises are meaningless unless there is sufficient weight on the bar. Concluding that a weightlifter is doing well because he can successfully execute 15 arm curls would be foolish, because it matters if those curls are done with 5 pounds or 50 pounds of weight.

It’s the same thing with reading. That one can answer lots of different kinds of questions is very nice, as long as the texts are demanding enough to make the questions worth answering.

Several years ago, ACT (the college testing people) figured out that if texts were simple enough, prospective college students could answer any kinds of questions about them, no matter how complicated osubtle the questions. But, if the texts were particularly hard, then even simple questions about them blew the students away. It’s the text, not the skills, that matters most.

Our job as teachers is not to teach kids how to read books they can already read reasonably well (like “instructional level” texts), but to enable them to make sense of texts that they can’t already read.

Focus more attention on how you are going to enable boys and girls to read fourth-grade text successfully than on practicing particular skills with texts that are already relatively easy for them.

Those standards should not be thought of separately from text considerations.

Yes, students are supposed to be able to make causal connections among the ideas in science text. But it matters whether this is being done in text with sufficiently sophisticated language and content. Language and content that matches these students age and grade levels (in terms of content, intellectual development, curiosity, and social needs).

Yes, it matters if students can determine the main idea of s text, but whether the standard says so explicitly or not, students must do this in a wide range of texts. These texts should vary in content, difficulty, length, style, organization, format, explicitness, and so on. Determining the main idea in a newspaper article will be quite a different experience than doing so with a history book. Making sense of the author’s point when the language and content demands are so simple that a 7-year-old can handle them is very different than learning to do this with a text aimed at 9-year-olds. The increases in depth, complexity, and sophistication of language will require more effort, insight, and perseverance.

We need to teach students to make sense of grade level texts. If we don’t, then no matter how skilled students may seem to be, they will not be meeting our educational standards and they won’t be on track for literacy-enriched lives.

I very much like your idea of teaching students to read with grade level books. However, I’ve always taught with guided reading groups, trying to match my students to books that they can already read reasonably well. I don’t know how to go about what you are recommending. Help!

Shanahan responds:

As a primary grade teacher, I, too, always taught reading like that; the same way teachers had taught me so long ago (and the same way teachers usually have taught reading for more than 100 years).

It is hard to change ancient traditions on the basis of research or anything else. It’s even hard to envision how instruction could be different.

But if we’re serious about higher reading achievement – about breaking out of the unremitting mediocrity that sustains current reading levels but never improves them, that keeps children who live in poverty, Black children, immigrant children, and children with disabilities far below the levels of literacy they’ll need to gain the full the benefits of our society – then we must change what we are doing.

Doubling down on current practices might make us comfortable, but its implications for kids are terrible.

I’m happy to hear that you are on board. I hope you represent thousands of teachers willing to make the changes necessary for our kids and for our society.

The first thing we have to do is a change in thinking.

If you think learning to read means reading a series of texts that gradually increase in difficulty, then your job is mainly one of having students practice reading with texts of the appropriate difficulty, occasionally testing to see if you could raise text levels. In that approach, kids learn to read from reading; mainly accumulating word memories (hence, the popularity of word lists, word cards, word walls, and sight word practice).

If you believe those things, you’ll make lots of bad teaching decisions, if the goal is to raise reading levels or close racial, ethnic, and economic gaps.

A better mindset would be to start with the idea that reading is the ability to make sense of text – and that readers have to learn how to negotiate any and all of the features of text that carry meaning. I can list a bunch of those features: decodability, vocabulary (including the ability to make sense of different types of definitions included in texts), syntax, cohesion, text structure, graphics, indexes, tables of context, literary devices, punctuation, the relationship of the information to readers’ prior knowledge, and so on.

Learning to read is learning how to deal with those kinds of text features.

To learn that, one has to have supported opportunities to confront such text features thoughtfully.

Grade level texts or higher (in grades 2-12) are the best choice for this for most students. Those are often the texts that students can’t already read well. The purpose of a reading lesson then is to guide students to make sense of a text that they cannot succeed with on their own and to develop the abilities to deal with such texts.

That’s the mindset part.

With that mindset, you can plan effective instruction. And the first thing to do there, is that the teachers need to read the texts before the students do.

I know I’ve gotten in trouble in the past for saying that. There are “experts” out there who tell teachers the opposite, despite the fact that they’ve never expanded our knowledge of reading instruction through their research, nor have they ever successfully raised students’ reading achievement according to public data, especially those kids growing up in poverty. I’ll accept such disdain, if teachers will just read the books first.

Unless you have some idea of what may trip kids up, it will be hard to develop a worthwhile lesson for that text.

Your ability to spot the barriers will improve over time. I often recommend that teachers try to do this together (it’s amazing how much that increases sensitivity). Also, later, when you are teaching these lessons, pay attention to how it turns out. There will be surprises both ways, things that confuse students that you never anticipated, and things they handle that you were sure they couldn’t.  

I can’t, in this space, provide every kind of guidance, but let me provide a couple of examples. For instance, let’s say you think the text is going to be hard for your kids to decode. They might understand it if you read it to them, but they’ll labor so much over the words, you don’t think they’ll get to the meaning.

In such a case, I suggest that you have the students work on their fluency with this text—before a guided reading experience with it. Lots of ways of doing this – paired reading with teacher involvement is my favorite -- but the basic idea is to have students practicing reading the text to resolve the words.

Perhaps you also could spend time during decoding working on figuring out some of the words that you think might be particularly problematic (showing kids how to break them down and sound them out).

If you have students engaged in those kinds of activities, and when the kids come to guided reading group, they’ll be ready to play.

Another possible barrier to understanding is vocabulary. Most instructional programs pick out words they want to teach students, and that’s fine. But in this case the point is to figure out which words will be a block understanding of this text now. Surely, you can understand a text without knowing every word, and some words you shouldn’t need to focus on because the author helpfully defines them or provides supportive context that allows readers to figure them out. Those items are worth planning questions for – to find out if the kids did those things effectively.

If they didn’t, then your teaching needs to focus on that… showing students how to make sense of such a definition or showing them how to use those context clues. If there are words you don’t think the students know, but are the key to meaning, then you have choices: introduce those words before the reading or provide a written glossary. Or, if you are teaching students how to use a dictionary, that might be a fair choice, too.

With most other features of text, I recommend the same approach. Don’t try to head off all the problems but ask questions that will reveal whether the students were blocked or not. I would do this whether my concern was a particularly complicated sentence structure, a subtle cohesive link or a required connection between the prose and a graphic.

A big part of the planning is to ask questions that reveal to you what is preventing success. Historically, we have asked questions aimed at matching theories (e.g., Bloom’s taxonomy) or at providing practice with particular skills (such as asking questions similar to those that will be included on a test), but what we should be doing is figuring out what the kids aren’t figuring out, so that we can teach them to handle that feature of text.

Thus, if a text says,

“To carry out this evaluation, we chose to look at paired cases of countries with serious human rights situations from each region of the world. In addition to the well-publicized “success stories” of international human rights like Chile, South Africa, the Philippines, Poland, and the former Czechoslovakia, we also examine a series of more obscure and apparently intractable cases of human rights violations in such places as Guatemala, Kenya, Uganda, Morocco, Tunisia, and Indonesia.”

my guess is that students will have trouble connecting the “paired cases of countries” with the two lists of countries included in the second sentence. Therefore, I might ask a question about that: How will the researcher pair countries for this research? Or, why would the author pair Guatemala and Chile, according to this text?

If they can answer my questions, I was wrong, and there is nothing more to be done.

But if they don’t get it, then there is teaching to be done.

“The author has introduced the idea that in his study he has ‘paired’ some countries from the same parts of the world. As a reader, I need to figure out on what basis the countries were paired. Read the second sentence and let’s see if we can get information on that.” And so on.

By the end of working with a text in this way, students should be able to read that text with better fluency and comprehension than started with – and those improvements, over time, will transfer to other texts in the future.

In summary, read the texts, identify potential barriers to comprehension, formulate questions that will reveal whether those features really were barriers, and then, if they are, provide guidance/instruction in how to solve that problem. 

If you would like more examples, go to my website, www.shanahanonliteracy.com, click on Publications, click on Powerpoints, and page through to find “Planning Complex Text Instruction”

Good luck.

In graduate school, we are being taught that we should use “hybrid texts” to teach content subjects. As a middle school math teacher, I think this is a horrible idea given our scant resources. Where do you stand on the use of hybrid text?

Shanahan response:

I share your concerns. I think hybrid text or mixed-genre text is an instructional idea that misses the point and leaves kids ill prepared for the future.

Hybrid text is an expository text that includes narrative elements. A widely known example would be the Magic School Bus books. Those books present various social studies or science information in the context of a story.

The basic idea is to make content learning easier by presenting the information in a more friendly way. Kids are more familiar with stories than science texts, and there are lots of reasons to believe that stories are easier to understand – so embedding science content in a story should improve learning and, perhaps, would provide a more enjoyable experience (Bintz & Ciecierski, 2017).

At least, that’s the theory.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but I don’t think that kind of evidence clinches the case for either side in this argument.

For example, in one study, fifth graders were found to have greater confidence with and comprehension of the content presented in narrative portions of a text versus the expository sections (Hung, 2015). Similarly, a study of middle school science found that students learned and remembered more information from texts that had embedded the key science information in the context of discovery stories (Arya & Maul, 2012).

On the other hand, a study of third and fourth graders found no differences in the ease of reading, comprehension, recall, or text preference among students presented with narrative and expository text (Cervetti, Bravo, Hiebert, Pearson, & Jaynes, 2009).

Where does that leave us?

Sometimes the use of narrative to present content information can facilitate learning.   

Knowledge matters, of course, and anything that makes learning a bit easier is a good thing in my book. However, what might be slightly beneficial in the short run, may be damaging overall. There are many reasons why the use of narrative text and hybrid text to teach math, social studies, and science is not such a great idea.

One of the things that we want students to learn is how to read expository text – particularly the kinds of texts that will allow them to take on science, history, and mathematics. Research has identified several key differences in the reading of such texts and the reading of stories.

Narrative and expository texts have different purposes, structures, levels of difficulty, attractiveness to readers, dependence on prior knowledge, vocabulary, processing requirements, and so on (e.g., Best, Floyd & McNamara, 2008). Students need to learn to negotiate these varied demands.

These differences are the reason why studies show that students can be confused by the use of narrative for expository purposes (Zwaan, 1994). Students may focus on how the children in the story are going to get back from their field trip to outer space rather than on trying to distinguish comets from asteroids. If you are reading a story, it’s the characters and their intentions that matter (Ryuta & Eriko, 2006) – not the random science or social studies facts that may be salted into the story. Good readers align their reading purposes with the genre they are reading. Hybrid texts tend to confuse this issue -- adding an additional processing tier for good readers (“this isn’t really a story, so I need to ignore the story elements here”) while confusing less sophisticated readers (“I worked hard at understanding that story and the teacher didn’t ask me any questions that were relevant to what I read”).

Another problem with this approach is that it misleads students into not studying hard enough. Readers estimate how well they understand a text and increase or reduce effort accordingly. If I think the text is easy, I reduce my effort. Studies show that students are misled by the narrative characteristics of these texts, reducing their effort because they misjudge how well they are doing (Golke, Hagen, & Wittwer, 2019).

My advice? If you want to teach students to read math text, don’t seek a storybook that embeds mathematical facts or operations into a provocative narrative.

Students will learn to read math by reading authentic math text with guidance and instruction from someone who knows how to read such text.

Reading some other kind of text might make it easier, but that won’t help students to prepare for a life of reading the kinds of texts necessary to succeed in STEM fields. And, that is especially important for girls and minorities who tend to end up excluded from these opportunities.   

Learners benefit from clear models. Hybrids just confuse the matter.

References

Arya, D. J., & Maul, A. (2012). The role of the scientific discovery narrative in middle school science education: An experimental study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 1022-1032. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1037/a0028108

Best, R.M., Floyd, R.G., & McNamara, D.S. (2008). Differentiated competencies contributing to children’s comprehension of narratives and expository texts. Reading Psychology, 29, 137-164.

Bintz, W. P., & Ciecierski, L. M. (2017). Hybrid text: An engaging genre to teach content area material across the curriculum. Reading Teacher, 71(1), 61-69. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1002/trtr.1560

Cervetti, G. N., Bravo, M. A., Hiebert, E. H., Pearson, P. D., & Jaynes, C. A. (2009). Text genre and science content: Ease of reading, comprehension, and reader preference. Reading Psychology, 30(6), 487-511. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1080/02702710902733550

Golke, S., Hagen, R., & Wittwer, J. (2019). Lost in narrative? the effect of informative narratives on text comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy. Learning and Instruction, 60, 1-19. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2018.11.003

Hung, Y. (2015). Taiwanese grade-five students reading a chinese science text of mixed sub-genres: A miscue analysis study. Journal of Curriculum and Teaching, 4(1), 30-41. Retrieved from http://proxy.cc.uic.edu/login?url=https://www-proquestcom.proxy.cc.uic.edu/docview/2009555431?accountid=14552

Ryuta, I., & Eriko, K. (2006). How do situation models differ in narrative and expository text? A comparison based on five situational dimensions. Japanese Journal of Educational Psychology, 54(4), 464-475. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.5926/jjep1953.54.4_464

Zwaan, R. A. (1994). Effect of genre expectations on text comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(4), 920-933. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1037

[Over the past two weeks, I’ve received several questions about distance learning and remote instruction. Here is just one example]:  “I may not be face to face with students for the entire year. Any help you can provide will be sincerely appreciated.”

Shanahan’s response

Let’s imagine that you have been asked to help improve reading achievement at a local school. You start out conducting classroom observations to see if you can figure out what could be improved that might make a difference.

There are many things you can look for. I inclined towards the basics: How much reading instruction are the kids getting? Are they being taught all of the key skills and abilities? Are they reading and interacting with the teacher and other kids about what they are reading? In too many classrooms, kids are either taught whole class with little response opportunity or small group with too much time on their own.

Whole class time can be effective if the kids get to participate a lot and the teacher monitors (and responds to) their performances; unfortunately, neither of those things is usually true. The small group time can be effective, too, but it is often outbalanced by what is going on with the rest of the kids. Look at the research on seatwork, centers, and other independent learning activities. They may be keeping kids busy but that isn’t the same as learning.

Recently, I was talking to a middle school teacher who told me about her distance teaching experiences in the spring. “I knew my students really well before the confinement. I was surprised at how they participated in the online lessons. Students who could be depended upon to respond during discussions were much more subdued and quieter. Instead of giving rich answers that would help the other kids, they were giving one- and two-word answers.”

I went searching for information about this purported student inhibition in the research literature. Nada. I couldn’t find a thing.

So, I started asking other teachers about this to see what their experiences during the confinement had been like. Several told me they had noticed that problem, too. Their kids were quieter, less participatory, seemingly more reticent to join in or speak up.

The kind of inhibited participation these teachers were describing is a real problem. Studies show the importance of discussion and other types of teacher-student and student-student interactions in learning (e.g., Matumara, Garnier, & Spybrook, 2013; Ponitz, Rimm-Kaufman, Grimm, & Kirby, 2009; Barnes & Puccioni, 2017). If a teacher asks a question and the response is nothin’ but crickets, learning is likely to be reduced. Yikes!

Here’s my advice: Learn to use the polling feature of your instructional platform. Polling can be a little cumbersome, but it allows every student to weigh. This is more responsiveness than a teacher can typically elicit during a small group lesson, and the teacher can monitor these responses. “Jimmy, I see you haven’t answered yet.”

For this polling, plan on more questions and different types of questions than usual. Often a teacher will give students a purpose for reading: “In these pages, be sure to find out why Jimmy didn’t want go away to camp.” But the teacher wouldn’t usually follow that information up with a question. Maybe instead of moving right into the reading, it might be wise to poll the kids with a multiple-choice question on that.

         Which of these is our purpose for reading this part of the story?

a.     To find out where Jimmy is going to spend his vacation

b.     To find out if Jimmy goes to camp

c.     To find out why Jimmy doesn’t want to go to camp

d.     To find out why Jimmy wants to go to camp

The reason I would do this is simply to keep the kids’ heads in the game. Normally, that may not be needed when we’re all sitting around a table. But at a distance we need to be hypervigilant about participation. These events in a classroom provide information to the students without encouraging much involvement. I’m suggesting that online it is important to involve while informing. Polling can help with that.

Of course, another possibility would be to not tell the kids a purpose at all, but to slightly reword this question to something like: “Which of these would be the best thing to look for when we read this next section?” That version is less about checking up and more about getting the kids to do more of the work. It can work either way.

Have students read the text silently for this kind of guided reading (except for the youngest kids who can’t yet read silently). By the time, students can read at a high first-grade or early second-grade level, they should at least be able to do whisper reading or mumble reading (maybe not completely silent initially but certainly not needing to enunciate all the words aloud).

Observations reveal that teachers rely way too much on round robin reading when working through a text with a group. And, these kinds of distance learning situations tend to encourage even more of this kind of thing than usual. Resist it. Kids need to learn to read silently for comprehension, even if that means that they may initially need to read something more than once to understand it.

For this silent reading, break the text that is to be read into small pieces. If you are sending books home, then I’m suggesting increasing the number of “stops” that you’d normally have in a group reading activity. If you normally have kids read the whole selection on their own, maybe have them read only 3-4 pages prior to discussion. If it’s usually a few pages, then make it 1 or 2. The reason for this is that the shorter the readings, the lower the variation in the length of time it takes for kids to complete it. You need to keep the group together even more than usual.

Of course, in many schools, books are not being sent home. The students must read the text as projected on the screen. That will certainly limit the lengths of such readings, and teachers can easily follow up these intervals of silent reading with discussion.

While I’m urging greater use of polling, do not satisfy yourself with the poll responses alone. Polling is useful; nevertheless, it doesn’t take the place of real discussion. Not only can you use this method to discover those kids who aren’t paying attention, but it can be a springboard for real discussion or a diagnostic tool for figuring out who isn’t understanding. Follow up a poll with something like: “There is some disagreement here. Some of you said yes, and some said no. Look at the text again and see who can find evidence to support their idea.” Or, “Some of you missed this one. Let’s go back into that paragraph and see if we can figure it out…. Does anybody want to change their answer?”

Poll students not just on the kinds of questions that you have traditionally asked – such as those that fit Bloom’s taxonomy or the questions you came up with to match your state standards. Instead, look over the text ahead of time and watch for things you think might trip kids up: a complicated sentence, a subtle relationship, a key point easily missed, a required inference, a definition that could be arrived at via context, figurative language or an idiomatic expression, an informative and revealing text structure… ask questions that will reveal whether the students grasped these things or whether they need some instructional guidance to negotiate one or another of them.

Amount and quality of interaction affects how much students learn. If you are working in a situation that discourages normal interaction, then adjust your teaching (and take advantage of the affordances of the technology) to try to reinvigorate it. Polling is one of those strategies that can make effective a guided reading lesson delivered at a distance.

Teacher question:

What do you think about “modeling” in literacy instruction?

Shanahan’s reply:

Tyler’s mom sent me the video. It was riveting.

Like many 21^st century parents she had a camera going in the nursery at naptime. And, the camera revealed something pretty cool during an afternoon nap.

Tyler was a toddler. He had started day care recently, the youngest kid there.

Now he was in his crib and supposed to be sleeping. But Tyler had his book and was jabbering away.

He wasn’t pretending to read so much as he was pretending to read to a group of kids. He’d hold up the book with the pictures facing out and, unmistakably, with the rhythm and cadences of an adult reading a picture book to children, he’d babble for each page.

Back in the 1960s, social psychologist, Albert Bandura, pioneered the study of observational learning. He figured out that a great deal of human behavior was learned from… well, from watching what other humans did.

That might seem obvious, but it appears to be anything but when one views classroom literacy teaching. One study (Ros, 2009) conducted 170 hours of observation of 20 teachers and found only one example of a teacher modeling her thinking during reading.

Of course, when children observe adults, they do what Tyler did, they imitate or re-create the visible physical behaviors. That’s why it’s so easy for my grand-daughter, Olivia, to brandish her light sword like Princess Leia or move like a ballerina after the Nutcracker. Golfing, batting, vacuuming, fighting and so on all entail lots of imitable physical behaviors.

Reading and writing do, too, but external behaviors aren’t the important part of what we teach about literacy. That’s where mental modeling or metacognitive modeling comes in. Research (e.g., Palincsar, 1986) has supported the idea of using think alouds to reveal to learners what is going on cognitively during reading and writing – an idea long incorporated in direct or explicit instruction (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983; Reutzel, et al., 2013; Rupley & Blair, 2009).

Such cognitive modeling has a place to play in developing print awareness and book reading behaviors (the things Tyler focused on), but it can help with decoding, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension strategies, and writing processes, too. Which is why it’s troubling that modeling is used so rarely and so poorly in literacy teaching.

One ubiquitous example of teachers thinking they are providing a powerful model for student imitation is what is often referred to in lesson plans as “model reading.” You know, a teacher read aloud. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t oppose teachers reading to kids, but if the idea is to improve kids’ reading fluency – as many teachers claim – then it’s poor modeling.

Let’s first quibble over the terms, “models” or “modeling.” Personally, for teaching, I prefer to talk about “demonstrations,” not models. “Model” seems less intentional or insistent than demonstration. Models seem passive to me – you may or may not imitate them. But demos are more about trying to put an idea across to someone – like teaching.   

When I was learning ballroom dancing, my inability to observe and interpret sequential movement was an embarrassment. My teacher would show me what to do, and I’d respond with bizarre moves. She’d then stand next to me, facing the same direction so I’d not need to reverse her movements in my head, and we’d try again, often as clumsily as before. Sometimes it was so bad that she literally got down on hands and knees and moved my feet herself. She wasn’t passively hoping I’d see her movements as a model and try to ape them. No, she was trying to teach me to dance, and demonstration was an important tool in her toolbelt.

Researchers have found that students with dyslexia often have trouble learning sequential actions because of their own difficulties with observation (Menghini, et al., 2011). That suggests the possibility that some kids might struggle to follow your literacy demonstrations as much as I did with the foxtrot.

How can we use demonstrations most effectively to teach reading?

One valuable insight is to tip kids off as to what they are to notice prior to a demonstration (Andrieux & Proteau, 2016). Whether I’m to learn how the letters get connected in handwriting, or how to choose which of my brainstormed topics is the best one to use for my composition, or what happens to the reader’s voice when the sentence ends with a question mark, the demo is likely to be most effective when the observers know what to watch or listen for. (And, general attention matters, too. Don’t get so involved in your demonstration that you don’t notice that the kids are looking out the window. Make sure eyes and ears are focused on the demonstration… it’s called observational learning for a reason).

Another thing that can help is to segment the demonstration into smaller steps. Observational learning can be blocked by cognitive overload. If there is too much information coming in, then there will be too little learning. That’s why so-called “model reading” doesn’t improve student fluency, there is simply too much information for students to be able to remember and transferring such a demonstration to different text will be a bridge too far for many kids.

When I’m showing kids how to read fluently, I limit my demonstrations to a single sentence, and then have the students try to read that same sentence. More than that overburdens their memories. Perhaps you may want to provide an overall model, “Boys and girls, I’m going to read this page or this chapter to you, and I want you to notice how I read it. What do I sound like?” and so on. But, if you want kids to actually try to read like that, now you need to work with smaller segments that the students are going to try themselves, and memory plays a big part in that kind of performance.

The teaching sequence is demonstration, prompt, practice. You demonstrate the process or action that you want students to duplicate, then you put them in a situation in which they can try to do that, and then you provide guidance and support as they practice the behavior. Thus, when a youngster is trying to read the text fluently, and he or she goes chopping through a sentence disfluently, I’ll stop them, demonstrate what that sentence should sound like, and then have them try it themselves.

Many teachers have gotten the idea demonstrations aren’t that important, that it is better for kids to learn by doing. Even when teachers do model for their students, it is often a one-time affair. When teaching comprehension strategies, the teacher may show students how to predict or self-question on day one, but that will be the last demo of that information those kids are going to see. However, a study with ninth graders found that when it came to writing, observation was more effective than learning-by-doing (Couzijn, 1999). Deliberate practice matters, but students often don’t know what to practice and that’s where demonstrations come in.

In my fluency example, it sounded so simple. The student reads a sentence badly, I show him how it should be done, and then he can do it himself. That happens sometimes, but other times, the youngster’s second reading is more like my dancing. I may have to show him again, perhaps telling him what to pay attention to this time or reading only the first clause instead of the whole sentence. Demonstrations and re-demonstrations should be a usual part of your teaching.

Some teachers and parents fear that if kids see or hear something that isn’t correct that the errant info will be permanently imprinted in their brains. That, for instance, puts some off the idea of “invented spelling,” in which kids try to write as well as they can without looking up words in the dictionary or asking others how they are spelled.

However, when it comes to observational learning, research has shown repeatedly that expert models aren’t as powerful as the opportunity to contrast expert and flawed models (Rohbanfard & Proeau, 2011). Thus, having kids comparing their spelling attempts with the correct spellings can help, as can having them compare audiotapes of their oral reading with an expert model. When I demonstrate oral reading fluency, I sometimes give flawed examples myself, reading too fast or too slow, skipping words, mispronouncing, droning on in a monotone and the like. The kids will tell me what’s wrong with my demonstration… “It’s too bumpy,” they point out when I pause too long between words.

Research is clear that observational learning is valuable and that there are ways teachers can use demonstration more effectively than others. Coaching can improve modeling (Davis, et al., 2018), unfortunately, not all teachers have expert coaches available to help them improve their teaching quality.

If you want to get good at demonstrations, rehearse! I know demonstrating can appear easy, but practicing can really help. Rehearsal will help you to reduce unnecessary information, prevent confusion, and divide the task up sensibly. It can help identify what students should be told to watch for.

Demonstration fits into reading instruction in lots of places. I’ve already given several oral reading fluency examples. But demonstrations are appropriate for other aspects of literacy instruction, too. For example, 

1.     Print awareness and concepts of print

When teachers read aloud big books, they can demonstrate directionality, return sweeps at the ends of lines, or what happens at the end of a page. Pointing to the words may give kids a clue as to what is being read and can helps kids develop concept of word.

2.     Decoding

Often, we teach phonemes and spelling patterns, but without sufficient guided application in sounding out words. Studies have shown that teaching kids to “blend” improves the effectiveness of phonics teaching (Pflaum, 1980), and I suspect at least part of this benefit is from the decoding demo it provides. Demonstrations can show children what good readers do when stuck on an unknown word (and, no, it isn’t look at the picture and guess).

3.     Comprehension strategies

Research shows that teaching students to summarize, self-question, bring prior knowledge to bear, visualize, and so on are beneficial. Studies also show that “gradual release of responsibility” is a particularly effective way to teach (Shanahan, et al., 2010). In this approach, a teacher demonstrates the mental moves she is going to make during reading, then gradually has the students imitate these moves; the “I do it, we do it, you do it” approach.

4.     Writing processes

Teacher demonstrations can play a big role in teaching kids how to plan their writing, how to draft, revise, and edit.

Demonstrations should be a regular occurrence in your teaching. Try to make those demonstrations as powerful and effective as you can.

I’m a big phonics promoter. Recently, someone challenged me saying that the fact that Reading First didn’t work shows that emphasizing phonics is a bad idea. Can you help?

Shanahan replies: 

In 2001, the President and the U.S. Congress agreed on the creation of a $5 billion program to enhance reading instruction K-3 in especially low performing Title I schools. That program was called Reading First. Every state got a portion of the funds based on their poverty statistics and there was a list of schools and school districts that were eligible for this money based on reading performance on their state tests (3^rd grade scores). The grants were sizable, often hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional funding only for use in K-3.

This money had to be spent on four things:

(1) professional development for teachers that emphasized phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension;

(2) core reading program adoptions – purchases of programs that were consistent with the research in terms of teaching those 5 things;

(3) an assessment system (typically DIBELS) to screen kids at the beginning of the year and to test them periodically throughout the year to monitor their progress; and

(4) intervention programs aimed at teaching the struggling students those 5 things identified as necessary by those assessments.

Three-quarters (75%) of the money was to be distributed to these underperforming schools to do these things. The other 25% of the money was to be used by the states themselves to incent all of their other schools to do these things, too, but with their own budgets. Simultaneously, Title I nationally encouraged, incented, and mandated certain changes in all Title I schools (including those with no Reading First money). Reading First was the Bush administration’s attempt to codify and implement the findings of the National Reading Panel, the work of which had been conducted under the Clinton administration.

Finally, the U.S. Department of Education was required to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of Reading First. 

I was a member of the National Reading Panel and served as a consultant on both of the later implementation and the evaluation studies.

The implementation studies revealed that Reading First schools spent a small amount of additional time teaching reading than other Title I schools (it was a statistically significant difference, but not necessarily a pedagogically meaningful one – the $5 billion led to less than 10 more minutes of reading instruction per day). Early on Reading First schools emphasized phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency vocabulary, and comprehension more than did the non-Reading First schools, but over time the implementation differences shrunk (which makes sense given that states were trying to get everyone else to do what Reading First schools were doing):

“The Implementation Evaluation found that RF teachers reported using instructional practices emphasized by the Reading First Program. It also found that, over time, teachers in other schools increasingly reported using similar practices, and that while significant differences reported between the two types of schools persisted, the differences diminished between 2004–05 and 2006–07” (Gamse, et al., 2011, p. x, https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/other/reading-first-implementation-study/report.pdf)

The outcome evaluation found the following:

• “Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on amount of instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) in grades one and two.
• Reading First produced positive and statistically significant impacts on multiple practices that are promoted by the program, including professional development in scientifically based reading instruction (SBRI), support from full-time reading coaches, amount of reading instruction, and supports available for struggling readers.
• Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two or three.
• Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on decoding among first grade students tested in one school year (spring 2007). The impact was equivalent to an effect size of 0.17 standard deviations” (Gamse, 2008, pp. xv-xvi, https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pdf/20094038.pdf)

In any event, there were several schools in the evaluation that were doing better under this regime, and some of the state studies (like Pennsylvania, Bean, et al., 2010) showed extensive improvement in early reading achievement, including comprehension, as a result of Reading First.

Unfortunately, in addition to these limited learning outcomes, there was a scandal in the administration of the program (particular instructional products were favored by the Department of Education, a big ethical no-no) and the U.S. invaded Iraq, undermining President Bush’s popularity. When it came time to reauthorize this expensive program, there was no political will among Democrats to support the President on anything, and there was no Congressional support for aligning oneself with a scandal and limited outcomes. 

The implementation study itself shows that by the time the outcome evaluations were being measured, there were few practical differences between Reading First and non-Reading First schools, which should not be that surprising given that the states had spent $1 billion trying to make that happen.

I documented that on my website at the time https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/explaining-the-reading-first-impact-study-new-districts-added, listing some school districts (and even states) that had mandated that all of their schools follow the Reading First practices, using the same programs and trainers, etc. For instance, Florida implemented Reading First statewide (using federal money where it was available and Florida tax dollars where it was not) – they made clear gains during that period. The same can be said about the Bureau of Indian Affairs; they did Reading First in all of their schools and had clear improvements.

Researchers worry about this kind of thing (as it might lead to what they refer to as a Type II error) because it means the study isn’t comparing different programs. If everyone is treated with pretty much the same antibiotic regime, then the experimental group shouldn’t outperform the controls, no matter how effective that regime may be (and, then penicillin is out the window). 

I shared this information years ago with some European researchers and told them how the comparison group had been intentionally contaminated by the Reading First policy. They told me that under those circumstances the only possible way you could meaningfully evaluate the program would be to see what happened nationwide in reading achievement over that period. In fact, those years were the the last ones that saw NAEP improvement for our fourth graders. Reading achievement improved significantly during those years and has languished nationwide since its demise.

I would have loved to see follow up studies on those school districts that had been so successful with Reading First as opposed to those who were not. For example, in Chicago we received substantial Reading First money and purchased the Reading First approved programs, but the district told the schools that received the programs that they didn’t have to use them. They often were never even taken out of the boxes!

Now, back to your question. Does the demise of Reading First suggest that a heavy emphasis on phonics instruction is likely to be ineffective?

Since Reading First was not a phonics program, but an overall instructional improvement effort (including phonics)…

And since Reading First did not lead to much more instructional emphasis on phonics (or any other aspect of instruction) than in the comparison schools…

And since Reading First did not lead to any consistent or meaningful superiority in decoding skills…

And since Reading First (and the associated instructional efforts) led to clear national improvements in primary reading achievement according to NAEP…

The idea that the Reading First experience showed the futility of phonics is dopey.

I noticed it because the columnist, Jay Matthews, quoted from this blog.

The column did a good job of surfacing the disagreements, but what really caught my eye was the comments section. More than 50 readers had weighed in – defending phonics or trying to clothesline it.

As a longtime phonics advocate, I was especially sensitive to the illogical arguments against decoding instruction. They were mostly the same arguments I’ve heard for the last 50 years of my career.

I might think these to be illogical arguments, but they appear to be persuasive to someone or they wouldn’t keep getting repeated. That’s the thing about logically fallacious arguments – they sound a lot like logically reasonable ones. That’s particularly true for people who may not have a depth of knowledge on the topic, like a first-time mom whose kids are just reaching phonics age, or the experienced high school teacher who knows education, but is not well-versed on decoding.

This posting considers five of these claims.

 1.     Phonics is inherently boring.   

This argument against teaching phonics is both wrong and inane. The inane part is that it suggests that we shouldn’t teach whatever students might not like.

“In my experience, kids don’t like long division so let’s not bother with that anymore in math class.” Musicians no longer need to play scales, and basketball players no longer need to shoot free throws, and… well, you get the idea. The argument is: don’t teach anything that kids might find boring, no matter what the implications.

I have no problem with teachers and curriculum designers who fear phonics might be dull, so they try to juice it up a bit – making the it more energetic and fun in some way. But omitting an important part of the curriculum because it might not be fun? That’s silly.

Of course, phonics instruction can be dull. But, so can fluency instruction, vocabulary, guided reading, workshop conferencing… and, there goes literacy.

Kobe Bryant wrote, “Why do you think I’m the best player in the world? Because I never ever get bored with the basics.”

Great musicians will tell you the same thing about playing scales. They became great because they learned to manage or overcome their boredom, and teachers and coaches should try both to instill a respect for foundational skills and to make an effort to keep it interesting.

This advice is especially important for teachers who, themselves, may find phonics to be boring. Don’t communicate that to your students about phonics or anything else that you teach. Enthusiasm is contagious, so buck it up.

In any event, there is nothing inherently boring in phonics, phonics isn’t boring to everyone, and good teachers find ways to liven up what may be, for some, dull ground to cover.

2.     English spelling is too inconsistent for phonics to make sense.

I’m surprised that this claim continues to be made. Extensive computer analysis has shown that English, while being complex, is not nearly as inconsistent as is often claimed (Hannah, Hodges, & Rudorf, 1966; Kessler & Treiman, 2003; Venezky, 1967, 1970). One must pay attention to syllable boundaries, letter positions, and morphological information, but English spelling and its relationship to pronunciation is systematic and quite consistent overall.

The argument that it is pointless to teach decoding because of the chaotic nature of English spelling loses its persuasiveness when the language turns out to be not particularly chaotic. It may have made sense for the George Bernard Shaws and Theodore Roosevelts to seek English spelling reform, but in the 2020s to ignore the consistency identified in extensive empirical analyses of the language is foolish.

3.     I learned to read without phonics.

Some of the complaints against phonics were based on personal experience. It is not uncommon that a parent or teacher remembers learning to read without phonics, so any insistence on phonics seems them narrow and pig-headed (“just like an educator to insist things be done in a particular way even if it makes no difference”). This argument is also put forth this week by Barbara Murchison, the director of the educator excellence and equity division of the California department education in Education Week (https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/01/30/advocates-for-science-based-reading-instruction-worry-california.html).

I’ve written about this before. There is no question that it is possible to learn to read without explicit phonics instruction. I’ll concede that.

The problem with this argument is that it proceeds on the assumption that the outcomes are discrete rather continuous. It isn’t that phonics leads to learning and other approaches do not. The differences are at the margins. They are statistical. The groups of kids taught with phonics score higher in reading on average or have fewer out-and-out failures.

In such cases, the anti-phonics person points out the kids who learned with little or no phonics, and the pro-phonics person points out the higher achievement and lowered incidence of failure. They’re both right, but that it is possible to learn to read without phonics ignores the value that such instruction adds for the overall population and the kids on the margins. Writing them off because some kids can learn without phonics is illogical (and a little mean, too).

4.     We all learn in different ways.

In some ways this is a corollary of the previous argument. The folks proposing this recognize the complexity and individuality of human beings. There’s a reason Baskin & Robbins doesn’t tout one flavor. We’re all different, we all like different things, different strokes for different folks, you say potato and I say… well, you get it.

This is a very appealing argument. You learn one way, I learn another, and if schools would simply vary their instruction to address the learning needs, styles, and tastes of everybody, we’d all be happier. Hell, that’s democracy! Viva, diversity!

And, we poor phonics idiots only have phonics to offer.

While that might seem like a bad trade, again, I turn to the research. Studies of reading show that anyone who learns to read English – no matter how they are taught – must master decoding (Barr, 1972; Biemiller, 1974), and brain studies show an incredible consistency in how this takes place in proficient readers (Dehaene, 2009).

Basically, research says that as readers, we aren’t that diverse. We all process text in pretty much the same way. It makes greater sense to teach someone something they need to learn, rather than teaching them something else hoping they’ll figure it out.  

What that means is that, whether or not we teach phonics, is not a matter of learning style or taste, but effectiveness.

5.     There is more to reading than phonics.

Great argument. I used to try this one with my father when as a boy I didn’t want to eat my vegetables. “Dad, there is more to nutrition than just veggies. I’m eating my meat and drinking my milk.”

Dad wasn’t impressed with that tactic, and you shouldn’t be either.

My claim correct, you won’t be healthy if you only eat vegetables, but it was a distraction more than a real argument. Afterall, Dad was pro-protein and pro-calcium, too. The only reason he was so stridently insistent on the vegetables, was because I was hiding them under the edge of my plate instead of eating them – and when he challenged that practice, I made it sound like the argument was about who was most committed to a balanced diet, not whether I needed to eat my green beans.

I fear that we are engaged in that same dance step today. Someone isn’t including phonics instruction, and when anyone challenges that omission, the response emphasizes the importance of teaching reading comprehension or writing. “Please don’t notice the good things that we aren’t giving kids, just notice the other good things we are.”

As you can see, those five arguments against phonics, when considered carefully, hold no water.

And, what of the arguments for phonics?

I can think of only one: the only reason that I can think of for teaching phonics explicitly in the primary grades is because a large number of independent studies with a variety of approaches and methods have consistently found that providing such instruction to children gives them a clear advantage in learning to read. They, as a group, do better; we lose fewer kids off the lower end.

That’s the only reason, and it ain’t made of straw.

I read your recent article on teaching with complex text in Perspectives in Language and Literacy and I agree with you. But I also read the IES Practice Guide that said that we should make sure kids are reading texts at instructional and independent levels (on page 33). Who’s right?

Shanahan responds:

Uh oh, don’t want to get into a food fight with those guys. Fortunately, I don’t think there is any real disagreement here at all, but I can see why you might think so – the IES guide emphasized one issue and I another, and neither of us coordinated that information in any way that would make it fit neatly together.

Let me try to help.

Here are the four claims that you need to think about:

1.     Students should be expected to read connected text daily.

I didn’t make this point often enough, but the IES practice guide did. It’s an important idea, and I agree with it. As the practice guide explains, such reading exposes students to different learning opportunities than word reading does, and there is at least some evidence supporting the idea that it is beneficial.

Once children can read (here I’m talking really about really low levels of text reading — reading the simplest books or language experience charts), I can’t think of any reason why we wouldn’t have them reading text every single day. I think the IES authors made this explicit because they have seen classrooms where kids are either memorizing sight words or learning letter sounds and spelling patterns, with nary a text to be found. I, too, have sat through first grade reading lessons in which no child reads more than one or two words. Yikes!

Unfortunately, that is not unique to beginning reading. Try shadowing a ninth grader through a day of school and you might be surprised at how little connected reading is expected there. Secondary teachers often work around text rather than through it – telling kids what they need to know with little concern for whether students can use the text for learning. Some teachers think they’re addressing this problem by assigning “independent reading” and then weakly monitoring this and doing nothing to help kids to make sense of texts that are currently beyond their reach.  

Have kids read text everyday… no disagreement there.

2.     Beginning readers need texts that they can read without too much difficulty.

When it comes to leveled reading, there are two distinct stages. Beginning readers, through about a high first grade or low second grade level is one stage and beyond those reading levels is the other.

Beginning readers and more advanced readers are dealing with different reading challenges.

Beginning readers need to master basic decoding. I’m not looking for advanced levels of decoding – three syllable words and such, since the research on second graders shows clearly that they can do better with harder books than those usually assigned to them by instructional level procedures.          

What makes a beginning text difficult tends not to be the complicated grammar, hard to link cohesive elements, complex organizational plans, subtle tone, or sophisticated vocabulary… basically it’s the words. Odds are if a 6-year-old can read the words, comprehension will follow. That means if you want to make a beginning reading text difficult, you use long, uncommon words, with little repetition and with no consideration of phonic elements or spelling patterns.

I’m definitely for ramping up text difficulty on the older kids, but like the authors of the IES guide, I agree that it makes sense to have kids reading relatively easy text that allows them to practice their decoding in real reading situations when they are getting started. That may be decodable text, but I’d mix that up with less controlled books too, still easy but manageable (perhaps some words they can’t decode yet, but with lots of repetition of these so they can master them anyway).

3.     With more advanced readers, text difficulty doesn’t matter much. Students should be expected to read texts across a wide range of levels, including those they’ll struggle with.

Once kids have basic decoding under control, we don’t need to level the books anymore as long as we’re willing to teach.

There are many things that make texts difficult, including decoding (even with these older kids). I agree with the IES practice guide: if decoding is an issue with a text, then fluency practice (oral reading of these difficult texts with feedback and repetition) can enable fluent reading.

The degree of reading difficulty for a student has to be counterbalanced by instructional support from the teacher. Again, like the IES guide, I think it is important that kids read texts that they can be successful with; not because we’ve put them in what for them will be an easy text, but because we scaffold sufficiently to help them succeed with it.

Student reading should not be limited to any particular level at a given time. Kids need to read a range of texts. This idea is even accepted by some proponents of leveled reading, though their notion is that kids should read hard texts when on their own and relatively easy texts when being helped by a teacher.

That seems like knucklehead stuff to me.

Expose kids to a range of text difficulties within instruction and give more support with harder texts and less with easy ones and let kids read what they want when reading on their own; they’ll figure out what is too hard.

4.     Readers at any age should not be allowed to persist in disfluency and low comprehension.

The IES guide wants kids to read every day, and they say that this reading should be fluent and understood. I recommend placing kids in harder books, at least with kids beyond those beginning levels, but I too strive for fluency and comprehension. Students might not be at an “instructional level” with a book at the beginning of a series of lessons, but they should be able to read that text as if it were at their instructional level by the time they are done. 

The reason why the IES guide and I seem to disagree is that with beginning reading texts difficulty is largely entailed in decoding issues: do the words use phonic elements and spelling patterns the kids have already learned, is there a lot of repetition, is attention somehow drawn to the spelling patterns. Harder text for those kids means reducing the textual support for decoding success. Given that, they stress relatively easy books – easy in terms of supporting kids’ decoding development. However, once kids get over this hump, text complexity becomes less a decoding issue and more and language and literacy issue. Go easy initially (both IES and Tim Shanahan), but shift this strategy once kids can read as well as a typical beginning second grader.

Before I answer, let me ask one:  What keeps Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, up at night?

You know Amazon, the trillion-dollar corporation that delivers something like a 5 billion packages a year.

I’m at a professional meeting. The chair asks what “levers” we have for improving reading achievement in the U.S.

It’s an easy question. There are so many possibilities.

The first one most folks think of is, the teacher. If teachers did better kids would do better.

There are a lot of alternative levers: school administrators, politicians, bureaucrats, publishers, universities, assessments, standards, curricula, media, screens, mom and dad…

As these discussions go, this one isn’t bad. Lots of levers, little blame.

But I’m not sure the levers question is the right one. I’ve grappled with all of those levers — “successfully” sometimes.

And, yet, as relevant as each and every one of those can be, I’m thinking about what Jeff Bezos worries about.

What’s that?

The “last mile problem.” Amazon must get packages to customers. Moving packages from warehouse to airport is easy. Flying them to Dubuque or Portland is straightforward, too, as is moving them from those airports to those shipping sites.

But now it gets complicated. We are to the last mile problem… getting that box to your house (the last mile) is the complicated part of the equation.

Classroom implementation is the last mile in reading reform.

For instance, a major reform effort a decade ago created new state educational standards, an important lever. The new standards emphasized teaching kids to read texts of particular levels of complexity. More than 40 states signed on, and publishing companies (another important lever) adjusted their reading programs accordingly…

But then the last mile…. National surveys show that teachers persist in teaching with instructional level texts, instead of grade level texts. So much for levers.

It isn’t just Jeff Bezos that should be losing sleep.

Your question about why it’s so hard to raise reading achievement points out the last mile problem in my opinion.

Imagine a veteran second-grade teacher, Ms. Jones. She’s always received good evaluations from her principals, the parents are happy to have their kids in her classroom, and whatever this or that test may say, she can see that her students make progress. They can read.

Now, the leveraging starts. We want that teacher to teach more phonics, or less. We want her to build knowledge instead of reading skills, or to work with harder books. Leveraging thrives on urgency, and its black-and-white rhetoric often sounds like, “If teachers don’t do what we say, kids won’t learn.”

But Ms. Jones has 15-years’ experience that tells her that the rhetoric is BS!  

She doesn’t do whatever the leverage is touting, and yet she knows for a fact that her children are learning to read. Her own success is one brake on reform — why change if what you are doing is working? — but the overwrought rhetoric is a second. Why change if you can’t trust the people who are urging you to change?

Let’s face it. Our problem in reading isn’t that nothing works. It’s that everything does.

In the 1960s, researchers cooperated in a couple of dozen linked studies to determine what gives kids the biggest boost in reading achievement. They considered lots of possibilities: basal readers, phonics, programmed readers, linguistic readers, language experience approach, and so on.

The outcome?

All of those approaches worked and pretty equally. Oh, there were some differences—those that provided explicit decoding teaching did a bit better, as did those with a writing component. But, basically, everything worked.

Of course, these days a lot of those first-grade programs are obsolete… they’ve been replaced by reading workshops, guided reading, multiple cueing systems, decodable texts, research-based this, and child-centered that… and, guess what? They all work, or at least to some extent they do.

Recently, School Achievement Partners released an analysis of Lucy Calkin’s Units of Study. I helped with that. We scrutinized the degree to which the program was in accord with the research on reading instruction, including how most effectively to serve English Learners. The response of many teachers who are using that program is that the research must be wrong because they know their students are learning. And, they are. Just not as well as they could be or should be.

Learning to read in English is coming to terms with a writing system. That it is a system means that someone can figure it out. Instruction helps with this figuring out, but some kids are advantaged enough that they can do okay even with low instruction approaches.

The instructional research summarized by the National Reading Panel didn’t show that phonics instruction worked and that nothing else did, or that if you don’t get phonics, you’ll be illiterate. It showed that providing explicit phonics instruction in grades K-2 improved kids’ reading success – in other words, there were either fewer reading failures or marginally higher average achievement across the board.

The same is true for phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension strategy, and fluency instruction. I promote teaching kids to read with grade level texts instead of instructional level ones, but not because the more demanding text regime ends with reading, and the easy-text approach with failure. I’m clutching for the marginal advantage.

The U. S. is a highly literate nation. Almost all of us can read – no matter how we’ve been taught. But we’ve constructed a society around literacy. Reading is deeply implicated in our academic, economic, civic, and social lives. Achieving the levels of reading that we have in the past is insufficient. Ms. Jones has done well, but if today’s boys and girls only read as well as her students did a decade ago, they’re being disadvantaged.

That’s where Ms. Jones and the last mile become significant. As long as our rhetoric fails to correspond with her experience, we can lever all day long, but won’t deliver significantly higher reading achievement on scale because the last mile won’t be implemented.

The last mile rhetoric shouldn’t be a hair-on-fire message, but one that acknowledges both the current successes and the need to do better.

“Ms. Jones, we need your help. Studies show that kids can do better in reading if they receive a substantial amount of high-quality phonics instruction. Research also shows that hasn’t been happening in enough classrooms. We know you’ve been successful in teaching reading, but the goal line has moved. We need to get kids to higher levels than in the past and that’s going to require some changes. Doing what we ask won’t change everything (and it’s not a criticism of your past efforts), but it will be better for your students and we all want that.”

Perhaps the strong rhetoric will move the levers, but remember we also have to persuade Ms. Jones in the last mile.

Everyone says reading and writing are connected. But our school focuses on only reading. We have a reading program (we don’t have a writing program). We test the students three times a year in reading, but never in writing. Writing isn’t even on our report card, though I guess it is part of Language Arts. What should we be doing with writing?

Shanahan response:

You came to the right place.

I think your school is making a big mistake not giving sufficient attention to writing.

When I was a teacher my primary grade kids wrote every day. When I became a researcher, I conducted studies on how reading and writing are related. When I was director of reading for Chicago, I required 30-45 minutes per day of writing in all of our classrooms.

There are, of course, a lot of good reasons why someone should learn to write. Many jobs, mine included, require it – and often jobs that require a lot of writing pay better (though I’m sure many nurses would disagree with that last point). Of course, writing is also an important form of self-expression. Just as there are people who play musical instruments, dance, sing, paint, knit, cook, and so on, there are many who use writing as a form of self-expression, and a form particularly useful for preserving memory. All those are terrific reasons for teaching writing.

I’m going to guess that the reason your school is ignoring writing is because someone figured doing this might help raise reading scores. I say that’s a mistake because writing can also be a path to higher reading achievement, so your kids (and your school) are really missing out. Instead of promoting higher reading scores, your school is probably squashing them.

So, there are lots of reasons for teaching writing, and this entry will focus on one of them: how writing can help kids to become measurably better readers.

Research has identified three important ways reading and writing are connected – and all three deserve a place in the curriculum.

First, reading and writing draw upon the same body of knowledge and skills. If you want to be a reader you must perceive the separable phonemes within words, recognize the most common spelling patterns, link meanings to the words in text (vocabulary), understand the grammar well enough to permit comprehension, trail cohesive links accurately, and recognize and use discourse structure (texts are organized and recognizing this in a text improves comprehension). Of course, background knowledge plays a role in reading comprehension, too, so the more readers know about their world the better they may do in reading. Yep, learning to read requires all of that.

But think about it. That knowledge is integral to writing too. If kids can’t hear the phonemes, match sounds and letters, and remember spelling patterns, they won’t be able to get words on the page. The same can be said about all those other linguistic and content features of text needed for reading. That means when you are teaching the foundations of reading, you are also teaching the foundations of writing.

It is the same knowledge base, and yet, they play out differently because readers and writers start in different places. A reader looks at the author’s words and starts decoding—matching the phonology in their head to the author’s orthography; the writer thinks about the words he/she wants to write, thinks about the phonemes, and tries to remember what letters or patterns will represent those. best The same thing happens with the other elements, too – one starts with ideas and turns them into written language, the other marches in the opposite direction.

My advice about knowledge? Teach the skills that you teach now, but then think hard about them. How would kids use that skill in reading and writing? For example, when you teach letter sounds, you should be teaching kids to use those sounds to sound out words. It is a pathetic phonics lesson that includes no decoding practice. But you also should have students trying to write words. Many programs include dictation, and that’s great. Myself I’m partial to invented spelling because it provides such extensive and supportive practice with the sounds. Look at this simple K-1 message:

Hermet Krabs liv in shels sum tims tha lev on the bech. [Hermit crabs live in shells. Sometimes they live on the beach.]

This piece of writing didn’t take long to produce, but to do it the student had to try to analyze 38 phonemes. He got most of them reasonably right, too. The most ambitious phonemic awareness lessons usually would NOT have individual children practicing anything like 38 phonemes, so encouraging this kind of writing is smart teaching.

You can do the same with older kids when you teach informational text structure. For reading, that would usually entail teaching how problem-solution texts are organized, then having kids read such texts to practice using that awareness to gin up their comprehension. That can be made even more effective if you have kids composing their own problem-solution texts – and what a great opportunity to review science or social studies content at the same time.

Second, reading and writing are communications processes. Studies show that writers think about their audiences and what they need to tell their readers to communicate effectively. That might not be surprising, but there are also studies showing the value of having readers think about authors and author’s perspectives (this is emphasized in educational standards and is essential for reading history, and for certain approaches to literary text, too).

Writing approaches that involve kids in reading and responding to each other’s texts have been found to be beneficial in improving the quality of kids’ writing. There are any number of ways that teachers facilitate this kind of sharing that heightens student awareness that texts are written by somebody and that can sensitize young authors to the kinds of things that may confuse or entice their readers. Writing conferences, writer’s workshop, and revision circles are just a few ways to accomplish this.

On the reading side, it can help to read texts in which authors have a strong voice and/or style. It is, for example, terrific when kindergarteners find that they can recognize Dr. Seuss books or when third graders can distinguish a Beverly Cleary from a Barbara Cooney with their eyes closed. I like to have these students write imaginary biographies of such authors, based only on the content and tone of the texts we are reading. Of course, as kids get older, having them read primary source text sets in their social studies classes and then evaluating the trustworthiness of this material based on who the authors are and when they recorded their ideas.

Basically, being author can give students insights into what is happening off stage (what is the author doing back there?), which can boost one’s critical reading ability. Likewise, being a thoughtful reader gives writers insights into what their readers might need.

The third way that reading and writing can connect is through combined use. Reading and writing can be used together to accomplish goals. Most research on combined uses have emphasized two specific academic goals, so I’ll limit my comments to those; specifically, studying or learning from text and composing synthesis papers, like school reports.  

In the first, writing is added to reading to increase understanding or improve memory. Research finds that writing about what one is trying to learn from text is beneficial. Often when students read for a test, they read and reread and hope for the best. Studies indicate that reading and writing summaries, analyses/critiques, or syntheses of the information has a powerful and positive impact on learning. We should be teaching students how to use writing in concert with reading to improve comprehension, increase knowledge and to conquer academia.

For the second goal, the emphasis is on synthesis writing. Teaching students how to collect information appropriately from text sources enables easier and more effective syntheses. Instead of just having kids writing a report with three sources or something like that, guide them to plan a paper with a particular purpose or structure and then help them to read the texts in ways that will facilitate this writing. For instance, if students are to write some kind of comparison of sources, providing a summarization guide that will allow them to collect information from the texts in a way that would facilitate comparison makes sense, such as charting which ideas the texts agree and disagree on. Reading the texts in that way should enhance the writing.

Too many principals think that ignoring and even discouraging writing frees up time better devoted to higher reading scores. Too many teachers are anxious about writing because of the limited preparation they receive in this area. But having kids writing every day – in any and all of the ways described here is a good idea.

Not doing so leaves reading achievement points on the table.

As Vivian says in Pretty Woman: “BIG MISTAKE!”

I am an instructional coach for a reading intervention program.  We are a pull-out program for K-8 LD students. 

We are implementing an evidence-based approach in our word level reading instruction, but we are struggling to lock down a framework to address reading comprehension.  As we pull students out of the core curriculum (1-3 hours daily for 2 years), we want to make sure that we are building skills that will transfer to any academic setting. 

Do you think it is worthwhile to spend time addressing comprehension? Or should we just be chipping away at our students' word level reading issues since improved decoding will have a higher rate of transferability outside of the

According to the Simple View of Reading decoding and language skills have two separate developmental trajectories. We wonder about the benefits of developing speaking and listening skills separately from decoding. Is this appropriate, especially for upper grades (4-8)? Could you direct me to a scope and sequence of listening comprehension skills? We need a tool to monitor progress and target instruction. 

Shanahan’s response:

The simple view of reading has been very useful, but if you take it too literally you’ll stray from evidence-based reading instruction real fast.

What has come to be called the simple view of reading can be traced back to the early 1970s (Gough, 1972; Venezky & Calfee, 1970). Its basic premise is that the only thing special about reading is decoding and that there is no such thing as reading comprehension. Once a reader is able to decode a text aloud, then listening comprehension takes over.

This approach has been useful for prioritizing early and intensive decoding instruction (if it is the only reading skill, then we better get it right). It also clearly conceptualizes reading as being a product of decoding and language and nothing more, which organizes research and practice in a neat way.

But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve run into three instances of people telling me that they were considering no longer teaching reading comprehension in favor of working on listening comprehension because of the simple view.

There are a number of problems with doing this.

First, listening comprehension and reading comprehension are correlated, but they are not equivalent. Research has long shown that people comprehend what they read and what they listen to at different levels of proficiency and that these proficiencies differ by age level (e.g., Goldstein, 1940; Mesherbi & Ehrlich, 2004; Sticht, 1974). That wouldn’t be the case if reading comprehension and listening comprehension were the same thing.

Second, a substantial number of studies show that oral language and reading comprehension are related, but that these relations are far less than a unity (NELP, 2008). What I mean by that is that if you got all students up to the highest levels of oral language proficiency, you would definitely reduce the amount variation in reading comprehension. But that would still leave a lot of variation in reading comprehension.

Third, there is a substantial body of research showing that oral language and written language differ in several ways (Chafe & Tannin, 1987). There are words that people don’t use orally that appear in text. Sentence lengths differ greatly across written and oral language which places different loads on memory. Style, proportions of adjectives and prepositions, degree of narrativity of the language, and so on all differ. Being a good listener means comprehending with easier and more involving language than what one confronts in text. Again, teaching students to listen may well be valuable (I think it is), but I don’t think that because it will improve reading comprehension.

Fourth, no study has found any reliable transfer of ability from listening comprehension to reading comprehension (van den Bos, Brand-Gruwel, & Aarnoutse, 1998). The reason I strongly support phonics instruction is because we have a extensive number of studies that consistently show giving such teaching advantages children in learning to read. If there were a similar body of studies showing that teaching listening improves reading comprehension, then I would encourage the teaching of listening and oral language as a good way to go. There not only isn’t a “body” of such research, there aren’t even single studies showing that teaching listening comprehension or other aspects or oral language improve reading comprehension. Teaching listening comprehension is not the teaching of reading comprehension, no matter its other value.

The one exception to this is with second language learners (August & Shanahan, 2008). If you don’t know English, that is a definite inhibitor of English reading comprehension. Building the oral English of English Learners can make a big difference in their reading comprehension and that should definitely be happening in school. Claude Goldenberg’s work shows that the informal development of conversational English is not enough to enable these students to do well in reading academic materials.

Given all of this, I would definitely encourage you to have both a strong decoding intervention (and I would include some text fluency for that), but another intervention that teaches students how to make sense of written language. NICHD reported many years ago the insufficiency of decoding instruction to meet the needs of a large percentage of struggling readers, and recently Rick Wanger and his colleagues have shown the great numbers of students who struggle with reading but who have sufficient decoding skills.  

The instruction in that kind of language or comprehension oriented intervention should focus on teaching students some of the intentional reading strategies that have been found to improve reading comprehension (NICHD, 2000) as well as how to deal with various features of written language including syntax, cohesion, text structure, depth of information, tone, and other features of text and content.

Of course, students should be reading text within such an intervention and I hope that those texts would be high quality and value in terms of both their presentation and the content that they include. It is important to make sure the kids came away both with greater proficiency for comprehending such texts and with content learning.

If kids are to miss as much content as you indicate, then I would strongly encourage you to consider what else can be done to ensure that these students learn about our social and natural world. Think expanded school days, parent involvement, media, text inclusion in your program and so on.

The simple view shouldn’t be the simplistic view. Until we have evidence that teaching oral language improves literacy, we ought to focus our teaching on those things most likely to advantage the students—that is what has successfully advantaged them previously. According to a great deal of empirical research, that is cognitive strategies and written language. Given your purpose, I’m not recommending a listening comprehension curriculum, but I would encourage you to focus on written language learning and getting those kids to read more than words.

You wrote recently that it was a good idea to teach comprehension skills, but our school district says we shouldn’t, that it’s prior knowledge that matters. Do you know the baseball study? Have you read Natalie Wexler’s research? It is really difficult to trust research when everyone tells us something different.

Shanahan response: 

I feel your pain.

There are research results and there are interpretations of research results. What research has been done, what these studies have found, and whether these studies were any good shouldn’t be points of disagreement. But interpretations of what a study means or what actions you should take based on it are going to lead to different claims and I’m sure that is confusing. 

That’s why I go to great pains to distinguish whether I’m reporting research findings or making claims based upon them. When I do the latter, I try to explain my reasoning so readers can determine whether they think my position is sound.

A few of my own rules for research interpretation:

(1)   Always distinguish research results and opinions.

(2)   Don’t make claims on the basis of a few studies (it’s okay to use a study as an example as long as it’s an example of more than itself).

(3)   Don’t prescribe instruction unless research has found it has benefited learners (no matter how tantalizing the theories and correlations may be, don’t trust them until they have been tried).

So, what I can tell you about prior knowledge? Prior knowledge refers to the knowledge readers have in their heads prior to reading a text. There is a substantial and extensive body of research going back to Bartlett’s 1932 study that reveals that readers use their knowledge to understand text. Case closed on that (and that is not an opinion).

But what does this mean for reading instruction? That’s where interpretation begins to intrude.

One conclusion that many of us draw from the research is that it’s a good idea for kids to know a lot. The more knowledge and experience they can bring to texts (or life) the better. Instructional practices consistent with this would include providing high quality teaching in social studies, science, and the arts. Some schools – in their efforts to improve reading neglect those subjects and I think this body of research suggests that to not be a good idea.

Another conclusion that seems consistent is that we should make sure the texts we use to teach reading are meaty. Why waste time? If kids are reading, why not expose them to high quality literature and informational texts. Following up later on these readings to ensure that this valuable content is retained seems like a good idea (and this makes sense for the earlier mentioned social studies and science texts as well).

Media is another potential avenue to knowledge, and that means encouraging Carmen Sandiego and Bill Nye the Science Guy rather than Angry Birds.

Yep, there are a lot of things one could do to increase kids’ knowledge, and that, presumably, in the long run could help to make kids better readers. Not many arguments there.

But then we get to the baseball study that you mention. This is a cool study (Recht & Leslie, 1988), that was nicely done. The researchers had 7^th and 8^th graders read a text about a baseball game. They divided the students into four groups: good readers who were high or low in baseball knowledge, and poor readers who were high or low in baseball knowledge. They found that reading ability contributed less to comprehension success than the students’ levels of knowledge about baseball. Good readers with high prior knowledge did no better than poor readers with high prior knowledge when it came to reading comprehension. But it doesn't prove what a lot of people seem to think it does.

It's a provocative study alright. But it’s a one off. There aren’t other studies with this kind of finding (lots of studies show the importance of knowledge, but no other one pits reading up against knowledge in this way – interesting that this has not been replicated in more than 30 years). Not only is it the solitary study on this, it was conducted with only a single text and that one designed to be used in a research study. Kind of hard to generalize very far from that in my opinion, though obviously there are people who think this is the definitive empirical evidence on this issue (such as whoever is making policy in your district).

Would I stop teaching reading or reduce the amount of reading instruction or end reading strategy instruction because of the baseball study? Nope, I wouldn’t, but if there were an accumulation of such findings, I could be so persuaded. (Recht and Leslie themselves didn’t draw this conclusion either, though in what amounts to an afterword they speculated on what it might say about the value of comprehension strategy instruction—which, of course, they didn’t actually study--it was speculation, not a finding).

One interesting thing about this study that isn’t discussed is that the students weren’t grouped on the basis of comprehension strategy use but on reading ability. If the study results can be interpreted (and this part is entirely interpretation) to mean that comprehension strategies shouldn’t be taught, then likewise this study should lead us to reject any other kind of reading instruction (such as decoding, vocabulary, increased amounts of reading, etc.). I’m not willing to go there myself.

Knowing the importance of prior knowledge, I’d likely do what Recht and Leslie actually recommended in their study – instigating students to use their knowledge when reading. Though I would do this in a science or social studies class where I’m trying to maximize their knowledge.

Respectfully, that isn’t what I’d do in a reading class.

Here my goal isn’t to ensure immediate comprehension of today’s text, but to make kids successful independent readers. That’s where strategies come in. If I’m always providing kids with the appropriate background knowledge to understand each text used for instruction, then how do students ever learn to take on a text on their own? And, what can they do to take on texts for which they don’t already have a bunch of relevant knowledge?

I’m not satisfied with the claim (and this is a claim, not a research finding) that readers can’t understand texts unless they have a lot of background knowledge. If that were true, we could never negotiate cultural boundaries or go beyond our very limited life experiences.

Cyndie and I have spent the past couple of years reading classical works of physics, biology, economics, philosophy of science, communications, political science, philosophy and history – works that we clearly have insufficient background for. But you know what? We’re able to make sense of them, albeit not as easily as we can take on a crime noir story of Dashiell Hammett or Anne Tyler’s latest novel.

That’s where strategies come in. They let readers in on the secret that if you are intentional and strategic you can make sense of texts, even if you lack the background for them. That’s why some smart people embrace reading as a “vaccine against populism, racism, and nationalism” (Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010); reading is more than finding information in texts that agrees with what we think we already know. It allows us to break the bonds of experience, superceding what we know. 

There are literally hundreds of studies showing that teaching certain strategies improves reading comprehension, so, despite any claims to the contrary, I do encourage the teaching of such strategies. However, for the most part these studies are brief. They show the value of strategies, but they don’t make the case that strategy instruction alone is the way to go or that we should invest lots of time in strategy teaching.

Given the great emphasis on knowledge as the source of reading comprehension, there is one strategy I’d really like to see emphasized more.

That is teaching students not to believe too deeply in their prior knowledge. You see, research not only shows that knowledge contributes to comprehension, but to miscomprehension as well (a research result, not an opinion). Readers need to be more open to what authors have to say without allowing current “knowledge” to dominate the process.

Show me a reader (or listener) who views communication and learning as being mainly about applying one’s knowledge, and I’ll show you unbridled egotism and unnecessary misinterpretation. Self-skeptical reading is the opposite of knowledge-dominated reading and we ought to make certain that kids both know a lot and that they are not entirely self-satisfied in their knowledge.

 I’m confused. I’ve worked with Lexiles for years and my district provided us with a chart showing the levels of books to use for each grade level. Then Common Core came along with a different chart that put different book levels with each grade level. I don’t live in a Common Core state, but I’m still not sure which chart to use. Can you help me?

Shanahan response: 

It’s funny, but no one has ever asked me that before.

What makes it funny is that you’re not alone. Most educators have no idea of the reason for those two charts.

Let’s start with the basics.

Lexiles is a readability measure. Readability measures are mathematical formulas that transform the structural properties of texts into predictions of how well readers will comprehend those texts.

For example, Lexiles counts the number of uncommon words and the average sentence lengths in a text and then uses that information to guess the likelihood that average readers will be able to understand that text. 

Of course, there is a lot more that goes into making a text difficult than the words and sentences, but that information alone is enough to allow for a reasonably accurate guess about comprehensibility. 

The reason Lexiles or any other readability estimate can do this with so little information is because most authors are pretty consistent in how the features of their texts work together. If the vocabulary and syntax of a text are appropriate for a sixth grader, don’t be surprised if the same is true for the organization, content, cohesion, use of metaphor, and so on for that same text. 

Of course, there authors who are noted for their inconsistency. Hemingway’s syntax, for instance, appears to be pretty easy in readability predictions. But readers usually find the interiority of his presentation, the subtlety of the actions, and the cohesion demands of his texts to belie the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and nubby little sentences. That means readability measures of Hemingway are likely to underestimate the actual challenge of making sense of his books. (That’s why middle-schoolers struggle with The Old Man and the Sea despite the rosy predictions for its comprehensibility.)

Here is the Lexiles chart that you refer to. In the middle column it shows the predictions of how well students are likely to comprehend a text. If a text is at 700L according to that chart, that would mean that Lexiles is predicting that an average fourth grader would read that text with 75-90% comprehension (and it predicts that because that’s how it has worked with thousands of fourth graders with such texts in the past).

That may be an old prediction, but it is still the right prediction if it is comprehension that you want to predict.

The Lexile ranges aligned to Common Core are another thing altogether. Those numbers don’t tell us how well students can read particular texts. These are aspirational levels. They indicate how hard the books need to be if students are to be on track for graduating high school with sufficiently high reading levels. Those levels are not predictions of how well students will read a book, but a statement of how hard the books need to be if kids are to succeed. 

I think a lot of teachers misunderstand this. They think that readability estimates and Fountas & Pinnell levels, etc. tell about “learnability.” They think if they match students to the right books, then the students will make optimum learning progress (and placing them in easier or harder books will interfere with this progress).

However, it’s kind of the opposite. Readability estimates predict comprehension, not learning. Lexile scales and book leveling systems provide gradients from easier to harder in terms of how well the texts are likely to be understood. But if students can already read texts with 75-90% comprehension without teacher assistance, then “teaching” kids to read from those books should be a non-starter. Instead of stretching students to handle harder texts (the Common Core column), they are focusing on having kids practice with levels of demand they have already conquered.  

You didn’t ask about it, but another important confusion is between readability and suitability.

To sort this one out it may be useful to think of texts as having two levels of complexity. One focuses on the linguistic demands of the presentation (the one measured by Lexiles and other readability measures), and the other on the appropriateness of the content and of its depth for the students. 

Take The Great Gatsby, for instance. The linguistic demands dimension emphasizes the likelihood students will gain the declarative meaning of the text. Lexiles predict that a sixth grader should be able to “comprehend” this text, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if such students could read it and recall important information from the book, such as Nick’s neighbor was Gatsby; Nick’s cousin was Daisy; Daisy was married to Tom; Tom was having an affair.

The second aspect of complexity focuses on the sophistication and appropriateness of the content, not the linguistic presentation. Perhaps sixth graders could read this book and provide the kind of answers noted above, but do I really want them, at age 11, reading about Tom’s sexual affair? And, Gatsby is a book with a lot of levels of meaning. Would an 11-year-old be able to profitably get the facts noted, while simultaneously gaining purchase on the symbolism (e.g., the green light, the closing of the window, etc.) 

That middle school students could read Gatsby with reasonable levels of comprehension does not make it suitable – in terms of content or the multiplicity of interpretation of which the book is capable. A sixth grader could read it, but I’d not require it until 9^th or 10^th grade. It is simply more sophisticated than the language it depends upon.

American English teachers have become expert at identifying books like Gatsby; that is books that a large percentage of students can comprehend easily because of the limited language demands of these books. In other words, they select relatively easy to read books that are suitable in terms of the content and sophistication of ideas.

Common Core has pushed teachers to assign texts that are not only suitable, but that have enough linguistic complexity that they will enable students to negotiate more difficult texts.

There is certainly nothing wrong with assigning a book like Gatsby in ninth grade, in spite of its relatively easy language, as long as students are also learning how to make sense of other texts with greater linguistic demands. 

Unfortunately, this information is not well or widely understood by teachers.

As text levels have inched up due to more rigorous standards requirements, teachers have been chagrined to find students struggling to make sense of grade level texts, when previously they could have read these with relative ease.

According to surveys by RAND and Fordham, as the books selected for teaching have gotten linguistically more difficult, teachers have been less inclined to teach with grade level books. Instead of teaching the students to make sense of the more complex language, they’ve avoided the problem altogether by going with easier texts.

Remember those language levels established in the standards show how hard the books need to be in terms of linguistic demands if the students are to succeed. Falling back to the “old Lexile” levels will certainly ensure that kids can understand the books that we are using, but they won’t give students the opportunity to learn to deal with the sufficiently texts that would prepare them for success.

Hello, Reading World! As with most of you, I’m sheltering in place… biding my time until the Great Pandemic Pandemonium subsides. Although despite being at what is currently an awkward (and apparently dangerous) age, I feel pretty safe locked down here in Chicago. Nevertheless, like all of you, I'm worried about family members who are on the front line in this fight, my students and colleagues, and all the people who are taking care of us. 

I’ve been traveling less but spending more time on Zoom and other telecommunications outlets. Talking to teachers I can’t see.

This week alone, I supposedly spoke to thousands of educators (I’m never sure I believe those numbers when I can’t look my audience in the eye).

Those online talks spawned a basket of questions, and much of Thursday was devoted to trying to answer some of them. Accordingly, this week instead of addressing a single literacy teaching topic, I’m providing an assortment of questions and answers dealing with amount of instruction, complex text, readability motivation, misbehavior, and so on.

Hope you find something useful in here and, please, be safe.

How early can you teach students in complex text?

There are good theoretical reasons not to place kids in “complex text” too early (though we have no data to go on with that). The thing that makes early texts complex for kids are the decoding demands. Making beginning reading texts complex means providing less phonemic regularity (making it harder to recognize patterns) and less repetition (which would reduce memory for words and patterns). That’s not a good idea when kids are first figuring out decoding. However, the studies are quite clear, by the time kids are in second grade, it is safe to move them to grade level texts instead of reading level texts at least for a portion of their teaching. Given that, I’d recommend complex text in Grade 2.

How much time should be spent on morphology and vocabulary in high school?

There are no data to go on with regard to the amount of time to spend on different aspects of reading with older students so I can’t give you a research-based answer to your question. However, as Director of Reading for the Chicago Public Schools where I was responsible for 90 high schools, I required our teachers to spend 30 minutes per day on that kind of word work (vocabulary, morphology, etc.) and another 30 minutes per day on oral reading fluency. Our teachers raised reading achievement markedly district wide, and unlike most reforms, our older students gained more than our younger ones.

How much phonics instruction should students do in the elementary grades?

I’ve been looking at the phonics studies that the National Reading Panel meta-analyzed. For the most part, these studies indicated that the students were getting 30 minutes per day of phonics (in a couple of instances it was 40 or 45 minutes). I think it is important for teachers to know that. Often, even when they have a phonics component in the reading program, phonics can get short shrift because the teacher glides through the lessons so quickly little is learned. Remember, the point isn’t just to teach some sounds and pronunciations, but to teach students to decode – that means engaging them in trying to recognize patterns or sound out words or spell words or to write accurately from teacher dictation. Those take time.

Our state says that teaching students at the instructional level is a research-based idea. Is it?

Of the studies that have directly tested the effects of teaching students to read with books at their “instructional level,” not one has found any benefit to the practice. There are several studies that have found no benefit to doing this and there are some that have found it to be harmful (that is, it reduces the students’ opportunity to learn). There is no set level at which texts need to be for students to learn from them, but if the texts are too easy (and traditional instructional level criteria are apparently too easy) learning is going to be limited. This has been found across a variety of grades from Grade 2 through high school and both with regular classroom students and learning-disabled students. When you are told that something is research-based you should ask which research they are referring to; you might be surprised that the citations will be for opinion pieces or studies that didn’t actually evaluate the effectiveness of the practice.

When we are selecting books for kids should we use qualitative or quantitative criteria?

If you are trying to find a text for a particular audience or grade level (such as following your state standards), I would definitely start with the quantitative measures. Those are scientifically derived prediction formulas that indicate who is most likely to be able to read the text with comprehension. Of course, there is error in any prediction, so if there are qualitative features of a text that would lead you to believe it is harder or easier than the prediction suggests you might either adjust the placement of that text or simply not use it for your intended purpose. Situations where a prediction might over- or under-rate a book might include things like frequent repetition of particularly rare words (one thinks of pandemic or coronavirus these days, a couple of words that might make a chapter appear like it would be very hard, when it probably wouldn’t be for today’s students).

You encourage the teaching of grade level text. Don’t you believe in differentiation of instruction?

You are thinking of differentiation in reading meaning that each student or each group works with a different book and that those books would be at different levels of difficulty. Instead of thinking of differentiation in terms of choosing different books, what if you had all of the third graders working with a single grade level text some of the time and varied what you did – the level of support that you provided. Some kids could probably read the book with reasonably high levels of comprehension and the teacher might have to do little more to facilitate this than to preteach a few vocabulary words and lead a discussion that focused kids’ attention on particular content issues. With some other kids, they might need to read it twice and the teacher might have to provide some specific support to help them to make sense of certain sentences, or to connect particular cohesive links, or to make use of the text structure. A third group might need all of those, plus some oral reading fluency work to ensure that they could read the words sufficiently well. There is more than one way to differentiate instruction.

What’s the right amount of time to devote to reading instruction? Our district requires a 90-minute block.

There is no research that has identified an optimum amount of time to spend on reading instruction at any grade level. As with your district, most schools I visit these days tend to be wedded to a 90-minute reading block. I’m not a big fan of that. For decades, surveys and observational studies usually reported that the average amount of time spent on reading instruction in the elementary grades was about 90 minutes (usually more than 90 minutes time in the primary grades, and less in the upper grades). If everyone spends that average 90-minute time, then first grade teachers must spend less time on reading than they have traditionally. While there is no optimum amount of reading instruction time, more is generally better than less, so 90 minutes might be a plus for fifth grade, but it is a impediment for first grade.

Should gifted readers be reading more challenging books?

This depends on whether you are trying to help gifted readers to increase their advantage and improve their reading or are just trying to engage them in practice while teaching everyone else. If you are trying to extend their abilities, then indeed, I would recommend putting them in books that would give them an opportunity for exposure to language, content, and text features that they haven’t already mastered.

Why do you think students would learn more from harder books?

The reason why students learn more from harder than easier texts is that there is more opportunity to learn. When you place students in a book that they are already comfortable reading there is little for them to learn… they can already recognize most of the words, they can understand a substantial amount of the text without teacher support. That doesn’t allow much opportunity for learning. When I have to take on a text that I can’t already read well, there is a possibility of growth. One interesting study (Powell & Dunkeld, 1971) done with second graders found that the kids who made the greatest gains during the year had started in books that they could read with about 80-85% accuracy (much lower than the 95-98% recommended as an instructional level) and with lower than 50% comprehension (again, much lower than the 75-89% recommended). Opportunity to learn is important.

I don’t see how kids can learn anything from books they can’t read. Why do you think that makes sense? 

Placing students in challenging text creates an opportunity to learn since such texts will include content, language, and text features that the students haven’t yet mastered. But the text only creates an opportunity. That’s where teaching comes in. The teacher needs to know the text and what is likely to be challenging and needs to monitor the students to see what trips them up (and you teach the students to negotiate those barriers).

If you teach with frustration level texts, won’t the students get frustrated and misbehave?

This has long been claimed, but there is only one study of it. Linda Gambrell and her colleagues conducted classroom observations in primary grade classrooms and found that, indeed, certain students did misbehave during silent reading time, and they were the worst readers in what were relative to their abilities the hardest books (just what you expected). Gambrell and company then intervened; they adjusted these children’s book placements so that they would no longer be in frustration level texts. and saw zero improvement (it wasn’t the text levels that was leading to the misbehavior). The outcome? No improvement in their classroom behavior; it wasn’t book placement that was the culprit.

Teacher question:

I teach high school students with reading disabilities, and I use your blog regularly as a source and inspiration. How can I help high school students develop oral fluency? Can you give me specific ways in my classroom to do this with reluctant readers? 

Shanahan responds:

This is an important question. Too few teachers ask it.

Many teachers think fluency teaching is just for the primary or the elementary grades. Of course, most state standards talk about fluency in those grades, but that’s a mistake that even the authors of many of those state standards would acknowledge. (If you have doubts about this, I would recommend that you read Tim Rasinski’s studies of high school and community college fluency levels; we definitely have a problem at those levels, a problem that instruction can successfully address).

Likewise, there are experts who claim that fluency is just a product of decoding skills, so teachers can safely ignore such teaching. That ignores the fact that studies show that students can often read words lists markedly better than they can texts; there shouldn’t be any difference in those scores if fluency is just the end result of proficient word reading.

I’ve used the “Frequently Asked Questions” below for a long time with secondary teachers, and I think it should give you some helpful guidance about how to improve the fluency.

FAQ’s about Fluency

Do all high school students need work with fluency?

No, not all high school students will need work with fluency.  Some students are particularly good at fluency, so good that they apparently can read almost any book so well that it sounds like they can understand it.  When students are this fluent, there is very little that fluency instruction can do for them.  As a population of students goes through school, an increasingly large proportion of them will be fluent at the highest levels.  This means that fewer students will need fluency work as time goes on.

Our students are getting low test scores in reading comprehension.  Why aren’t we focusing on that instead of fluency?

Low comprehension scores can mean many things.  They might mean that your students have poor knowledge of word meanings, or that their fluency is limited, or that they lack strategies for making sense of a text.  We need to address all areas of reading progress; fluency is just one of them.    

How much fluency teaching are we expected to provide?

 Schools should provide students with up to 30 minutes a day of fluency instruction.  But remember, this is across all classes.  If every class did 10 minutes of fluency work once or twice each week, that would be sufficient.

What do you mean “up to 30 minutes a day?”

If a student is fluent with the course materials and the teacher checks on this regularly, then there is nothing more to do with fluency.  However, if a student is not fluent, then the school should find ways to provide 30 minutes per day of this kind of instruction.  That could mean that students in an honors track do a minimal amount of fluency work, or only do so with particularly difficult texts, while most lower track students might need the full 30 minutes a day.

How do I keep from embarrassing my low readers if I have the students them doing oral reading?

Fluency work is a kind of practice activity, not much different from a basketball player shooting free throws to get ready for the big game. Practice usually isn’t  embarras-sing, as long as everyone sees it as practice. Most students actually enjoy the fluency work as it is involving and they can see their own improvement.  Don’t encourage round robin reading, where one student reads and everyone else follows along; paired situations are much better as they don’t single out anyone.  Talk to the class at the very beginning to make sure that they understand the purpose of this practice, and what to expect.  

How do I pair the kids?

 Don’t make a big deal out of pairing up, as that can be a real time waster.  One rule is to make sure that the students who are working together on a given day are using the same book.  That’s easy to do in most classrooms.  A second rule is don’t pair up the same kids all the time; kids differ in their ability to give feedback, so share the wealth.

Does fluency work actually make sense in a content class like science or math?

Yes, it does.  It is important that students learn how to read those kinds of materials as they often pose unique challenges (such as the inclusion of formulas in an Algebra book).  If students are to become independent learners in algebra or chemistry, they need to be able to read those texts fluently.  Technical subjects require that students read texts intensively, rereading some parts again and again.  Unfortunately, many high school students read such material once for gist only.  Fluency work can become a powerful way for teaching students how to understand these materials.

Doesn’t silent reading improve fluency?

Of course, silent reading can help with fluency.  Kids who read a lot will usually be pretty fluent.  Unfortunately, teachers can only be sure if their students are fluent if they listen to them read.  Paired reading becomes a great opportunity for this.  It is also important to remember that many high school students simply do not read when they are directed to read silently.  That is why having teenagers read a text aloud rather than silently can actually improve their reading comprehension. (Of course, beyond fluency, I also encourage a substantial amount of silent reading each day, too.)

Paired reading, repeated reading, and the other recommended activities don’t look very hard, but how do I know that they will work?

Research on these various techniques shows that for many students they do lead to improved fluency and higher reading comprehension scores.  Whatever it is that students learn while becoming fluent with particular texts transfers to their performance with other materials. With younger kids and especially low readers, research suggests that students are improving their ability to decode the words, but as students progress the benefits are likely more linked to their pausing patterns (how they parse the sentences to make sense of the text).

I tried repeated reading, but some kids need to reread the text too many times.  What should I do?

The number of readings that it takes before fluency is evident is a good indicator of how well the student can read that particular text.  Professional readers, like news anchors, usually can read anything fluently after a single reading.  Some students might need to reread a particular text several times before they can read it fluently.  As their reading abilities improve you should find that the number of these repetitions declines.  Until then, have the student focus on shorter sections (50 words), and stay positive.  (If things don’t get better, seek some help with this student from the school reading specialist; you are not alone in this endeavor.) Studies with younger kids suggest that most or all of the learning takes place in the first three readings of a text and that there is little benefit from more than that; you might use that as a benchmark.

Our school psychologist tests all of our boy and girls for RAN. He says it is the best predictor of reading ability. How can I improve my students’ RAN performance?

Shanahan’s response:

If someone tells you that you can teach RAN, run!

RAN refers to “rapid automatized naming.” Back in the 1970s, researchers wanted to measure cognitive processing speed, so they came up with a variety of RAN measures. Typically, students are asked to name known colors, objects, letters or words, and their performance is timed. The studies showed that rapid naming was a good predictor of reading ability and was an important indicator in dyslexia (Denckla, & Rudel, 1976).

Since then, there have been hundreds of studies of RAN confirming this result.

In a meta-analysis of 137 studies of 28,826 participants, it was concluded that RAN was one of the best predictors of reading ability, but that there was “still no consensus regarding the mechanisms responsible for this relationship” (Araújo, Reis, Petersson, & Faisca, 2015, p. 869).

In other words, we know RAN is important, we just don’t know why. Some experts think it has something to do with phonological processing, but there is evidence at least as persuasive that is implicated in orthographic processing (Georgiou, Parilla, & Papadopoulos, 2016; Georgiou, & Parilla, 2020). There is even evidence from the neurosciences suggesting that, while it may affect phonological and orthographic processing, that it is actually a separate thing altogether (Chang, Katzir, Liu, Corriveau, et al., 2007).

Reading is a complex process with lots of moving parts. The speed with which we can analyze letters and retrieve sounds, and combine this information in short term memory matters, but so does the timing of these varied processes. It won’t work if the parts aren’t well coordinate. Speed and timing.

Norton and Wolf (2012) have offered what I think to be the most persuasive analysis of RAB. They indicate that fluent comprehension is “a manner of reading in which all sublexical units, words, and connected texts and all the perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive processes involved in each level are processed accurately and automatically so that sufficient time and resources can be allocated to comprehension and deeper thought” p. 429.

In other words, whatever it is that RAN measures is implicated in many parts of the reading process.

One interesting thing the researchers have discovered about RAN is that it is more closely related to fluent text reading than to accuracy of word reading. It is important that students be accurate; that they be able to read the words right. But reading is more than just fast word recognition, it is a more integrated process than that.

Your eyes scoop up some information from a text and that information is communicated to your brain where it needs to be integrated with phonological information. But while it is doing that, your eyes are leaping forward to the next scoop of visual data.

This parallel or simultaneous processing is an important part of reading. Dyslexics, even when they are able to identify words accurately, don’t coordinate this parallel processing as well as good readers, and RAN is more closely correlated with this aspect of reading than with accuracy (Pan, Yan, Laubrock, Shu, & Kliegl, 2013).

In other words, your school psychologist is on to something important.

However, that doesn’t mean that you can teach RAN. The relationship of RAN to reading is so complex that only one research team has even bothered to try to teach it (no one who has studied it thinks that we can teach it successfully in any way likely to matter). In that one study, they trained students in rapid letter naming with no reliable impact on either RAN or reading (Kirby, Georgiou, Martinussen, & Parrila, 2010).

Norton and Wolf point out that although it has been shown that instruction can improve performance on most reading and language measures, those interventions have not resulted in much RAN improvement.  

That doesn’t mean there aren’t well-meaning (but not very knowledgeable) folks out there with sure-fire schemes to improve RAN. Here are a few examples of that kind of thing:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Browse/Search:rapid%20naming%20activities

https://literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-daily/2017/09/13/tips-for-increasing-rapid-naming-ability-in-struggling-readers

https://bonnieterrylearning.com/blog/rapid-automatized-naming-reading-dyslexia/

 Please avoid them. Save your time and your students’ time. Focus on teaching those things that improve reading achievement. RAN is a great predictor of success, but it is not what you need to teach.  

Maryanne Wolf has concluded that if you want students to accomplish that earlier mentioned fluent comprehension, you can’t single RAN out like that for specific focus.

What she does argue for are two things:

First, teach all of the components of reading that we know improve reading achievement. If reading requires the kind of coordination of processes, then you need proficiency in each process.

Second, teaching that emphasizes the coordination of parts makes sense, too. Teaching oral reading fluency through activities like repeated reading may be exercising their positive effects by helping students to develop that coordination, though she admits that such teaching may sometimes only lead to faster reading, rather than more coordinated or fluent reading.

References

Araújo, S., Reis, A., Petersson, K. M., & Faísca, L. (2015). Rapid automatized naming and reading performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107(3), 868-883.

Chang, B., Katzir, T., Liu, T., Corriveau, K., Barzillai, M., et al. (2007). A structural basis for reading fluency: white matter defects in a genetic brain malformation. Neurology, 69, 2146–2154.

Denckla, M. B., & Rudel, R. G. (1976). Naming of objects by dyslexic and other learning disabled children. Brain and Language, 3, 1–15.

Georgiou, G. K., & Parilla, R. (2020). What mechanism underlies the rapid automatized naming-reading relation? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 194, 1-9.

Georgiou, G. K., Parilla, R., & Papadopoulos, T. C.  (2016). The anatomy of the RAN-reding relationship. Reading and Writing, 29, 1793-1815.

Kirby, R., Georgiou, G., Martinussen, R., & Parrila, R. (2010). Naming speed and reading: A review of the empirical and theoretical literature. Reading Research Quarterly, 45, 341–362.

Mazzocco, M. M. M., & Grimm, K. J. (2013). Growth in rapid automatized naming from grades K-8 in children with math or reading difficulties. Journal of Learning Disabilties, 46(6), 517-533.

Norton, E. S., Wolf, M. (2012). Rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading fluency: Implications for understanding and treatment of reading disabilities. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 427-452.

Pan, J., Yan, M., Laubrock, J., Shu, H., & Kliegl, R. (2013). Eye–voice span during rapid automatized naming of digits and dice in Chinese normal and dyslexic children. Developmental Science, 16, 967–979.

When providing fluency instruction, should time, such as the number of words per minute, be an element? Our school has been doing that, but elsewhere I’m hearing that we shouldn’t be doing that.

Shanahan response:

Fluency is a bit of a mash up and not a pure skill.

In fluency, it is important that students read the words correctly. That’s the “accuracy” part of fluency. That obviously depends heavily on decoding skills (and decoding instruction).

Unfortunately, many kids can read words accurately but still aren’t fluent readers. (In fact, that’s what got people teaching fluency in the first place—boys and girls who were on track with their phonics, but still couldn’t read well).

If reading the words right takes a lot of effort it will likely be slow and labored. Dedicating all that attention and effort to decoding the words might result in accurate reading, but it is a sure distraction from reading comprehension. Fluency is about enabling comprehension attention, not distracting from it.  

This ease of decoding is not really about speed. Nevertheless, speed is how we tend to measure it. Faster decoders are probably not needing to exert a lot of decoding effort – at least that’s the theory.

That’s where those words correct per minute (WCPM) measures come in; that’s a combination of accuracy and speed.

The problem here is that we’re using speed, but we’re not interested in speed. We’re only using speed to draw an inference about how easily the reader is decoding.

There are two ways we can increase words correct per minute.

One way is to accomplish high degrees of proficiency in decoding, and second is to hurry. The first of these ways will improve reading comprehension, and the second, not so much.

Many experts (me included), instead of talking about speed or rate these days, have been using the term, “automaticity.” The problem with that approach is that it only changes the word, but not the measure. If speed is the measure of automaticity, then we’re assuming that a change in nomenclature will be sufficient to get teachers and students to focus on ease of processing rather than hurrying.

Recently, I came across some researchers’ speculation that helped me to think about this (Pan, Yan, Laubrock, Shu, & Kliegl, 2013). They viewed fluency as enabling parallel processing—that is, making it possible for readers to multi-task, to do more than one thing at a time.

We’ve long known about what is called the eye-voice span. If readers are reading a text aloud and you suddenly switch off the lights so they can no longer see the text, they’ll keep reading for a few words. The reason that works is parallel processing. Your brain is doing one thing, while your eyes are doing something else. While your eyes are jumping forward and gobbling up information about the next set of letters, your brain is busy turning the previous set of letters into phonemes and meaning.

Good readers have bigger eye-voice span than poor readers.

Those researchers have suggested that a better measurement of fluency might be an eye-voice span measure.

Remember the point of oral reading fluency or text reading fluency is to ensure that the foundational skills are being implemented in a way that enables or facilitates reading comprehension. 

That means text reading fluency includes a third skill – beyond accuracy and automaticity. That’s where proper expression or prosody comes in. 

Readers have to read the words and they have to do that easily, but they also have to organize the words in a way that allows them to be understood. I said fluency is a bit of a mash up, and that means it includes a bit of reading comprehension as well. Not deep thinking or extended analysis or reflective comprehension, but a first-blush sense making.

What is included in this “on the fly” sense making? The reader has to use the punctuation and the meaning in order to put the pauses in the right places and to do things like read heteronyms accurately (it matters if you come up with the right pronunciations of read, live, wind, bow).

There are fancy ways of measuring prosody, but basically it comes down to this: As a listener can you follow the ideas in the text as the student read it aloud? Does it sound like the reader understands it (whether or not he/she does)? Does it sound like language?

I have no real problem with using words correct per minute as a measure of fluency. But encouraging kids to read as fast as they can is not appropriate test preparation. And, great words correct per minute with lousy prosody is not fluent.

The problem, my dear, is not in our measures, but in ourselves.

I attended your recent webinar and you said that students should figure out the meanings of words from context and that they needed to be able to deal with syntax. But I’ve also read that you are against the 3-cueing systems. Isn’t that a contradiction? It seems hypocritical to criticize teachers for teaching 3-cueing and then to turn and around and recommend that they do just that.

Shanahan responds:

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that, “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”

What I said may seem inconsistent, but it would be foolishly so if I had ignored the fact that two distinctly different processes have to be developed in reading —word reading/decoding and reading comprehension. That these two processes have different purposes and operate somewhat differently shouldn’t be beyond the grasp of even the “small minds” among us 

The idea of cueing systems comes from analyses of oral reading errors (or miscues), and a theory of how words are read that simply has not held up to scrutiny. The late Kenneth Goodman examined word reading and found that when words were misread, you could categorize the errors. For example, a student is reading a sentence like:

            The man drove his automobile into the drive.

But instead of saying, automobile, reads he “car.” This error obviously shows no attention to the orthographic/phonological characteristics of the word (its letters and sounds), but car and automobile are both nouns (so they are syntactically similar) and they are synonyms or have similar meanings (which brings in semantics). 

From this, Goodman (1973, p. 9) theorized that a reader collects as little visual information as possible when reading; that he guesses or predicts what is coming based on the semantics and syntax and then “sampling the print to confirm his prediction.” In Goodman’s theory, the best readers minimize the amount of orthographic/phonemic processing that they do and figure out the words as much as possible based on context.

The problem with that theory is that it isn’t right. It turns out to be inconsistent with what we learned about how words are processed during reading. For instance, we know that readers don’t “sample the print” in that way; in fact, studies show that we look at pretty much every letter in a text, including those words that would be highly predictable from context.

Additionally, readers are able to recognize words in about a ¼ second, too fast to allow for the amount of neural processing that would be needed to sample all of these types of information. And, we also know that the best readers are the ones who are proficient with orthographic/ phonological processing, and poor readers are the ones who rely on alternative ways to read the words (Stanovich, 1980).

If the reader could have read “automobile” he would have, but since he couldn’t he used the syntactic and semantic information to make a best guess. (The reader found a work around since he couldn’t really read the word.)

Teaching kids to use these cueing systems to figure out the words is essentially an effort to teach them to read like poor readers. Good readers avoid using anything but the letters and sounds to figure out the words, the poor readers lack this facility so do the best they can otherwise.

Eye movement studies, speed of processing studies, neural processing studies, instructional studies, and so on, all concur. Good readers recognize words by translating letters to phonemes, and poor readers are stuck relying on pictures, and semantic and syntactic contexts to do the best they can under the circumstances.

I do not support the idea of teaching students to read like poor readers, even if this was an interesting and provocative idea in 1965. (And, I’m stunned by people who refuse to change their minds after the accumulation of 55 years of contradictory evidence – talk about “flat-earthers.”)

But reading is not about recognizing words alone. It is also about comprehending and using the information in text.

Reading the words properly enables us to make sense of the message in a text – but that making sense requires additional processing.

That’s why we need to teach phonemic awareness, phonics, and oral reading fluency so thoroughly and so well. We want readers to have automaticity with these; that is, we want them to read the words accurately, but with little conscious attention. This allows readers to devote their cognitive energies to thinking about the ideas in text.

What do we do to comprehend?

One thing comprehenders do is to figure out word meanings. For words we already know, we simply retrieve meanings from long term memory. In other cases, figuring out a word meaning (not the word, but its meaning) may entail the use of a dictionary, guessing based on context, analysis of the morphemes, or asking somebody for help.

Comprehenders also need to make sense of sentence structures and text structures, and to track ideas across a text. They need to bring their prior knowledge about the content to bear on the text, too, and to apply their critical senses to the information (is the information true?).

Word reading needs to be automatic and instantaneous. That’s why you don’t guess words using syntactic and semantic information.

Comprehension, on the other hand is slower and more consciously thoughtful. It requires analysis, reflection, critical thought, and consideration of the language and the content.

My research-based advice is to teach kids both to decode words and to comprehend texts.  Those are different things, they entail different abilities, and therefore sound teaching advice is going to differ for each.

When it comes to word reading, I'm going to teach students to decode. When it comes to figuring out word meanings, i'm going to teach students to use context to make sense of the words (and morphology and references). Just like the research says.

That’s wisdom, not inconsistency!

I have read the work of researchers like Louisa Moats, Stanislas Dehaene, and Linnea Ehri and have an understanding of how reading works in the brain. I understand the critical role of connecting graphemes to phonemes. My question is what is the true role of the kinesthetic activities promoted in many intervention programs? In a webinar that I watched the speaker mentioned several times how critical it was to have students trace the words because this created neural pathways. What does the research say about this?

Shanahan response:

The idea of tracing words to improve literacy has been around for a century. You’d think in that amount of time, we’d have a clear idea on whether or not tracing (and all of the other haptic and kinesthetic responses to letters and words) helps and, if so, how and why.

But you’d be wrong.

This method was first described by Grace Fernald and Hellen Keller in 1921. Fernald, a clinical psychologist, with a practice focused on reading improvement, applied the method with severely disabled readers. By all accounts, she was a remarkable teacher and her article described what she did and how well it worked (the boys and girls that she worked with learned to read). She didn’t devote much space to why she thought tracing was such a boon.

Needless to say, her idea caught on and ended up in a number of remedial reading programs, most notably in the one created by Gillingham & Stillman (these days referred to as the Orton-Gillingham method or the O-G method). And, via that route, there are today several commercial instructional programs aimed at dyslexia that include various kinds of tracing and air writing and that sort of thing.

Over time, these V-A-K-T (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile) practices accumulated a plethora of explanations for why they worked (Shams, & Seitz, 2008). Many of these explanations focus on memory – the person you listened to seems to be in that camp – that idea of building either additional neural pathways or reinforcing visual-auditory pathways in the brain through physical movement and touch. But there are also attentional and perceptual explanations and there have been many a rationale based on whatever the current thought on brain architecture and neural processing may have been at the time. Some of these explanations have fallen by the wayside as it has become apparent they are out of sync with the way the brain works, but many are still unresolved.

Personally, given more modern descriptions of neural processing (D’Mello & Gabrieli, 2018), I’m more in the attention camp. I’m not convinced that these practices create alternative neural routes or facilitate the paring of alternative paths typical of learning.

My own guess – and this is no more than that (and mine is not necessarily any better than yours) – is that the various kinesthetic schemes do little more than increase the amount of time that readers look at the letters and words when trying to learn them and tfocus the readers’ attention better on those things that have to be learned.

I say “no more than” as if focusing and extending student attention on a word’s construction were a trivial matter. But that is also true of many successful mathemagenic behaviors (those actions that give rise to learning). Think, for instance, of many study skills; they simply get students to spend more time thinking about the ideas in text by highlighting or taking notes (Rothkopf, 1970).

When youngsters simultaneously look at a word, say its name, and trace its letters, it is certainly possible that they are improving word memory for some subtle neurological reason, but it could simply be that they must keep their eyes trained on the word longer and that may encourage some of the kinds of phonological stretching (drawing out the pronunciation of a word to highlight the phonological parts and make them more phonetically accessible).

Of course, providing a rationale for why tracing works, assumes that it does, which raises a big, “Not so fast.”

Unfortunately, though educators have tilled these fields for a hundred years, it is unclear whether that it works or not.

Part of the problem is that despite numerous investigations concerning the impact of V-A-K-T approaches on learning, the issue has never gained so much sustained attention from the scientific community that deep understanding and insight has resulted. Often when there is a considerable amount of study of an issue, we start to figure out which paradigms are most informative and which study designs may be misleading us. That has not been the case here.

Making it even more difficult to sort out is the fact that many of the studies that have been done tend to be small (frequently with no more than a few children), and they are quite diverse in the outcomes they aimed for or the students whom they were teaching. They are so diverse in these regards I doubt that a meaningful meta-analysis could even be executed.

Certainly, some of the studies support the idea of teaching reading (or aspects of reading such as letter recognition or blending) using multisensory approaches (Campbell, Helf, Cooke, 2008; Connor, 1994; Gentaz, Cole, & Bara, 2003; Ho, Lam, & Au, 2001; Itaguchi, Yamada, & Fukuzawa, 2015; Itaguchi, Yamada, Yoshihara, & Fukuzawa, 2017; Nash, Thorpe, & Lamp, 1980; Thomas, 2015; Xu, Liu, & Joshi, 2019). However, for the most part these studies were conducted with non-alphabetic languages like Japanese or Chinese, or included fewer than 10 students. None of the studies done in Western languages made any attempt to control or measure the time differences between the trainings, which though not necessarily supportive of my earlier supposition that the effect is coming from more time on task, certainly does not refute it.

Yes, there are those studies that support tracing, but there are also many studies that reported no clear or consistent benefits from such approaches (Hulme, 1981; Lee, 2016; Myers, 1978; Schlesinger & Gray, 2017; Wilson, Harris, & Harris, 1976). And, there are still other studies showing that tracing can be distracting or irrelevant, leading to lower relative performance than more traditional visual-auditory approaches to decoding (Berninger, Lester, Sohlberg, & Mateer, 1991; Rau, Zheng, & Wei, 2020); Vandever, & Nevelle, D. 1972).

After 100 years, I still can’t tell you if tracing improves learning when it comes to reading.

Of course, there are a number of instructional programs that incorporate tracing, and studies have shown some of these programs to be effective. That, however, is not a contradiction, since these successful programs do much more than tracing. Maybe the tracing they are doing is beneficial, maybe it is simply inert adding nothing (though perhaps wasting a bit of time), and even if the tracing was disruptive, it obviously is not so damaging as to outweigh the remaining benefits of these programs.

Given all of this, as a teacher I would not specifically seek out multisensory programs (though I wouldn’t go out of my way to avoid them either).

If I were using such a program, I’d do what I could to ensure that the tracing was not distracting the students from matching up the sounds and spellings by ear and eye; I much prefer having students looking and sounds along with the tracing (which means I’m not a big fan of air tracing despite its effectiveness in supporting the memorization of Japanese characters).

I used the analogy of study skills earlier, and I think there is something to be learned from that work. Take a study skill like highlighting the key points of a text. Sometimes highlighting supports learning and sometimes it doesn’t. It helps when it leads students to think hard about the ideas in the text, trying to determine which parts should be highlighted, and then, going back and rereading the highlighted portions. But when students simply highlight everything, it does nothing to improve comprehension or recall.

I suspect tracing gains such a mixed bag of results for the same reason. If tracing supports more thorough and careful looking and listening, it could be beneficial. When it doesn’t, it may have no impact whatsoever. And, when learners get all wrapped up in rubbing the letters or dipping their fingers in goop, it could be a distraction that reduces learning.

Tracing, if it is to be used at all, should slow students down, focusing their attention on the letters and helping them to think about the letters and sounds more thoroughly and carefully. The teacher who uses this method has to be vigilant to make sure that it delivers.

References

Berninger, V., Lester, K., Sohlberg, M. M., & Mateer, C. (1991). Interventions based on the multiple connections model of reading for developmental dyslexia and acquired deep dyslexia. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 6(4), 375-391.

Campbell, M. L., Helf, S., Cooke, N. L. (2008). Effects of adding multisensory components to a supplemental reading program on the decoding skills of treatment resisters. Education & Treatment of Children, 31(3), 267-295. 

Connor, M. (1994). Specific learning difficulty (dyslexia) and interventions. Support for Learning, 9(4), 114-119.

Fernald, G. M., & Keller, H. (1921). The effect of kinaesthetic factors in the development of word recognition in the case of non-readers. Journal of Educational Research, 4, 355-379.

Gentaz, E., Cole, P., & Bara, F. (2003). Évaluation d'entraînements multisensoriels de préparation à la lecture pour les enfants en grande section de maternelle: Une étude sur la contribution du système haptique manuel. L’Annee Psychologique, 103(4), 561-584.

Ho, C. S., Lam, E. Y., & Au, A. (2001). The effectiveness of multisensory training in improving reading and writing skills of Chinese dyslexic children. Psychologia: An International Journal of Psychology in the Orient, 44(4), 269-280.

Hulme, C. (1981). The effects of manual tracing on memory in normal and retarded readers: Some implications for multi-sensory teaching. Psychological Research, 43(2), 179-191.

Itaguchi, Y., Yamada, C., & Fukuzawa, K. (2015). Writing in the air: Contributions of finger movement to cognitive processing. PLoS One, 19(6).

Itaguchi, Y., Yamada, C., Yoshihara, M., & Fukuzawa, K. (2017). Writing in the air: A visualization tool for written languages. PLoS ONE, 12(6).

Lee, L. W., (2016). Multisensory modalities for blending and segmenting among early readers. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 29(5), 1017-1032.

Myers, C. A. (1978). Reviewing the literature on Fernald’s technique of remedial reading. Reading Teacher, 31(6), 614-619.

Nash, R. T., Thorpe, H. W., & Lamp, S. (1980). A study of the effectiveness of the kinesthetic-tactile component in multisensory instruction. Corrective & Social Psychiatry & Journal of Behavior Technology Methods & Therapy, 26(2).

Rau, P.P., Zheng, J., & Wei, Y. (2020). Distractive effect of multimodal information in multisensory learning. Computers & Education, 144. DOI:10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103699

Schlesigner, N. W., & Gray, S. (2017). The impact of multisensory instruction on learning letter names and sounds, word reading, and spelling. Annals of Dyslexia, 67(3), 219-258.

Shams, L., & Seitz, A. R. (2008). Benefits of multisensory learning. Trends in Cognitive Science.

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(08)00218-0?_returnURL=

Thomas, M. (2015). Air writing as a technique for the acquisition of sino-Japanese characters by second language learners. Language Learning, 65(3), 631-659.

Vandever, T. R., & Nevelle, D. D. (1972). The effectiveness of tracing for good and poor decoders. Journal of Reading Behavior, 5(2), 119-125.

Wilson, S. P., Harris, C. W., & Harris, M. L. (1976). Effects of an auditory perceptual remediation program on reading performance. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 9(10), 671-678.

Xu, Z., Liu, D., & Joshi, R. M. (2019). The influence of sensory-motor components of handwriting on Chinese character learning in second- and fourth-grade Chinese children. Journal of Educational Psychology. DOI:10.1037/edu0000443

There is no research literature on education and pandemics.

But there is an all too extensive body of study focused on the effects of natural disasters (e.g., floods, fires, hurricanes, tsunamis). Such events differ from what we are going through… those causing greater direct loss and trauma. Children who lose a parent or home, or who are injured or separated, not only miss school, but may suffer from acute stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and any number of learning-disruptive fears.

Nevertheless, even disaster research tends to find that missed school is the main learning problem. For instance, after Hurricane Katrina, the children showed small, but statistically significant losses in reading and math achievement – and these correlated closely with the amounts of time children were out of school. They also found that quality instruction was later able to catch those kids back up!

In the current situation, most kids are safe, most school districts are trying to provide some kind of distance learning opportunities, and most parents and other caregivers aren’t being prevented from supporting their kids. Minimizing loss is both possible and worthwhile.

I’ve been getting lots of requests for a blog on what we might do at home to support our kids’ learning and here is my advice. Here it is:

Keep it literate. Whether there is a school assignment or not, your kids should read and write and talk about what they read. Pretty much every day. On one day they may be able to read the social studies chapter the teacher assigned on Zoom. On another, there may be no assignment, so get your kid to choose another book or magazine. If you have a good home library that may be the place to turn; if not, perhaps your local library is available, and my website has several sources for free electronic books (check out the “resources”), or you can purchase books for home delivery or subscribe to a magazine.

Usually you may not worry about that (but you usually don’t worry about toilet paper either). It would be a good idea to keep on hand an adequate supply of children’s books. You simply can’t know when or for how long you might be quarantined. I’m sure many schools now wish we would have sent more print home with the kids. It would be a good idea to be prepared for that if there is a next time.

Keep it varied. It is a bad idea to expect your child to spend large amounts of time doing anything or any type of thing. If one school assignment requires reading, then follow that with something very different—math problems, discussion, some activity involving movement. They can come back to read again later.

Type of activity is one kind of variation; personal preferences is another. Some kids will seize on the activities that they enjoy most, procrastinating on the others. It can be a better idea to take on the harder or unappealing tasks early on, using the preferred ones as a kind of break or reward. Or interleave the activities that your child enjoys with those that he or she finds to be less attractive.

Keep it purposeful. Even in school it can be hard to keep kids focused on why they are doing particular assignments. But purposeful action leads to learning. Ask your child what the purpose of the assignment is; get them to explain it. If they can’t, then see if you can figure out the point for them. If you can’t, then don’t be afraid to contact the teacher and get her to explain it. The why is as important as the what!

Keep it reflective. Kids often hurry through their work, just trying to get it done. But that reduces the chances of learning. When they think they are done, get them to take a moment to think about it – what they learned or what they are able to do now as a result. If they have just read a chapter and slammed the book shut thinking its sandwich time, get them to summarize what they have read before noshing. 

Keep it enjoyable. Recently, my grandson was given a writing assignment at a distance. He struggled to complete it for four hours because he couldn’t think of what to write about! He and his father both wanted to jump out the window by the end. But hard work doesn’t have to be that unpleasant. Some assignments can be done in parts; do 4 items and then do something else. Or, in this case, getting my grandson to talk about his ideas before writing did the trick—even if the talk is about the 10 reasons that he hates writing so much. Working hard is fine. Working futilely is pointless. If it seems unpleasant, something is probably wrong. Talk to the teacher (or your child) to try to find a solution.

Keep it connected. This is a hard one during confinement. In a classroom, the teacher might have a group of students working together. That’s ideal as kids can learn a lot from each other, and the social connection itself may be motivating. At home, it’s harder to muster, and parent participation may be at a premium (since mom and dad are working at home, too). Nevertheless, you might consider instigating some one-on-one Zoom-time for your child with neighbors or classmates to talk about some of the schoolwork or what they are reading. (I have a 4-year-old granddaughter who has been doing some of that and it has really kept her spirits up as well as her interest in her preschool work). Despite the difficulties, find some time each day (perhaps over a meal) to talk to your children about what they are reading or what they have been working on. Make your questions specific – what happens in that story?, what did you find out about whales?, so what is 5 times 3? – rather than how was your online school today?

Keep it organized. One of the hardest things for adults to do when they have a long layoff from work is to keep a regular schedule and the sense of control that goes with that. Develop a “learn at home schedule” for your children during the confinement. Keep regular hours for meals and bed, too. But don’t get crazy. If there are three hours of schoolwork to be done, that doesn’t have to be from 9:00-12:00. Three separate one-hour study periods may be better. And, just like during the school year, days off matter, too. 

Be safe. 

Could you recommend a strong vocabulary curriculum that my school could adopt?

Shanahan responds:

Because I work with various companies, I never recommend particular programs.

However, while there are vocabulary programs, this is an area where teachers are often expected to go their own way. Given that, let me suggest the scope of an outstanding vocabulary curriculum. My focus here is on what needs to be taught, rather than on the instructional approaches needed to accomplish this.

Overall, an ideal vocabulary curriculum would encourage the teaching of six things.

First, the ideal vocabulary curriculum would aim to increase students’ knowledge of the meanings of specific words. Vocabulary knowledge is closely correlated with reading comprehension (Nation, 2009), and there are studies in which words have been taught thoroughly enough to raise reading comprehension (NICHD, 2000). Knowing the meanings of words matters.

Vocabulary can be learned both from explicit teaching and implicitly from any interaction with language, and reading can be an especially target-rich environment for that. A curriculum, of course, would mainly focus on the explicit part of the equation. It would specify the words thought to be valuable for kids’ learning – the one’s we’d monitor to see if progress was being made.

This part of a vocabulary curriculum would include collections of words. The words in these collections should be worth learning (that simply means they should appear in print frequently so that knowing them is advantageous), and they should be worth the instructional time (which means that students at this grade level wouldn’t know them already). There needs to be a scope and sequence of these words so that teachers at different grade levels won’t keep teaching and reteaching the same words over and over.

Given the length of a school year, the numbers of words students are likely to retain, and the demands of review, I’d aim to teach about 150 words per year (students will learn more than that due to implicit learning).

Second, an ideal vocabulary curriculum would include a list of key morphemes to be taught; prefixes, suffixes, and combining forms. Research supports the value of such teaching (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010). But, unfortunately, it doesn’t provide clarity with regard to how many such elements to teach, so I can’t estimate as I did with words.

As usual, it makes the greatest sense to teach those morphological elements that are most frequent and there need to be grade level agreements so everybody isn’t teaching pre- and -able while no one familiarizes the kids with -re and -ment.

Third, an important part of vocabulary learning is developing an ability to use context to determine meanings of unknown words. Good readers can both figure the meanings of words they’ve never encountered previously, and they can decide which of a word’s meanings is the relevant one in a given context (you don’t want kids thinking that the Gettysburg Address refers to where Lincoln stayed when he visited Pennsylvania).

Most reading programs don’t do enough with this, so we should not be surprised that students do such poor job of it. Research (Schatz & Baldwin, 1986) found that odds of students getting words right from context was pretty random. Middle schoolers were as likely to light on an opposite meaning as they were a correct definition! A word like “ebony” was interpreted as meaning white as often as black.

Basically, we spend too much time preteaching words before reading, but not enough on close questioning to determine whether they’ve interpreted a word correctly. We certainly do not invest enough in showing students how to use context when reading. That would be an important part of an ideal vocabulary curriculum, and it would be taught during the various forms of guided or directed reading activities.

Fourth, whatever happened to the dictionary? One key element in learning to deal with vocabulary is the learning how to find out the meanings of a word. These days that’s a bit more complicated than when I was in school, given the availability of multiple online dictionaries, pop-up dictionaries, and the like. Students should be taught to use these resources throughout the elementary grades as appropriate. There are also specialized dictionaries, like science dictionaries or history dictionaries; those should be the province of high schools.

Dictionary instruction appears to be a lost art. Students need to know how dictionaries work, how to identify the appropriate definition from a dictionary entry, what to do when they don’t understand a definition, and so on.

Fifth, students need to develop a sense of diction, both as readers (or listeners) and as writers (or speakers). Words are complex and nuanced. They not only carry the declarative meanings that appear in dictionaries, but they convey attitudes and feelings. It matters whether you “question” your students or if you “interrogate” them.

As with the teaching of use of context, this part of the instruction is likely to make the greatest sense if it is linked to comprehension or communication. Students need to improve in their ability to discern author’s perspective or shades of meaning based on the author’s choice of words and for older students it is critical that they come to recognize how word choice influences bias. Such learning may not entail the development of new vocabulary, but the ability to implications of vocabulary already known.

Sixth, students need to develop a word conscience (or they need to learn the metalinguistic aspects of vocabulary (Nagy, 2007)). Here, I can’t tell you much from research. However, as someone who regularly reads text in a language that I cannot speak and who reads in many fields of study that I’m not especially well versed in (e.g., economics, physics, chemistry, biology, communications, political science), I have become quite aware of the importance of vocabulary conscience.

Good readers – in this case, readers who handle vocabulary well – need to be aware of when they do not know the meaning of a word. If you aren’t conscious that you don’t actually know a word’s meaning, then you are going to have comprehension problems (for instance, do you really know what “accost” or “voluptuous” mean?). If you are unaware of your ignorance, then you won’t be skeptical of your use of context, you won’t know when to turn to the dictionary, or that morphological analysis might be a good idea.

Word conscience also includes recognizing when it’s okay not to worry about a word meaning. Often, I can gain understand what I need from a text, without knowing the meaning of every word. Recognizing when I can safely (and ignorantly) proceed, and when I’d better do a bit more work, is an important distinction that good readers make.

This aspect of vocabulary knowledge also governs what I do when I don’t know all the words and have no tools to solve them. Sometimes readers just need to power through, making sense of as much of a text as possible, accepting that they aren’t getting it all since they don’t know all the words. Sometimes 50% understanding just has to be better than 0%. Too many readers encounter a couple of unknown words and call it day. Vocabulary conscience includes the development of reading stamina in low vocabulary knowledge situations 

Of course, this sounds like six discrete areas of learning, but there is nothing discrete about them. Those words that are taught explicitly could also be the source for morphological study.  Words the students struggled to figure out from context could be added to the memorization list and any words that students know could become the focus of lessons on diction. Any of these can be confronted in reading, writing, or oral language instruction, too, and simply encouraging an interest in words belongs here, too.  

What would be the ideal vocabulary curriculum? One that increases the numbers of valuable words that students know, that increases their ability to define words from morphology and context, that fosters an awareness of meaning and diction, that enhances the ability to use appropriate reference tools, and that encourages metalinguistic awareness and sensitivity when dealing with word meanings.    

You say that one-quarter or one-fifth of the reading instruction time should be spent on oral reading fluency. But I teach kindergarten and most of my kids can’t read, so fluency instruction doesn’t make any sense. What should I do instead?

Shanahan responds:

When we talk about oral reading fluency – or what I prefer to call text reading fluency – we’re referring to the ability to read text accurately, with automaticity, and appropriate expression or prosody.

As such, text fluency is a mash up of a plethora of applied skills including decoding ability, knowledge of high frequency words, ability to multitask – processing one word while moving along to look at the next, and while this is going on, trying to construct meanings, and so on.

Often, text fluency instruction focuses on reading speed; trying to hurry kids along (since we use reading rate as an index of automaticity).

A better way to think about text fluency instruction, however, is as a coordination task that requires the reader to integrate and consolidate their abilities to orchestrate several skills and abilities simultaneously.

Unfortunately, we don’t talk much about the roots of text fluency.

I think the basic idea that many people have is that when students learn to read words fluently, then they’ll be able to read text fluency. If you can do the first, you will certainly be able to do the second. At least that’s what they claim.

Consequently, they recommend staying away from text fluency work altogether, or at best they suggest it is something for later (like the second half of first grade). Leaving kindergarten teachers, like you, off the hook.

If text reading is no different than fast individual word reading, then that would be an appropriate approach. 

But research suggests a more complicated picture… and, that’s where things get interesting. Of course, those skills that allow kids to read word lists fluently contribute to text reading fluency, too. But there’s more to it than that (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003).

At what point do children begin to integrate the various skills and abilities that become reading? Certainly, much earlier than when they can actually read text fluently.

That brings me to what constitutes fluency instruction in a kindergarten classroom: “fingerpoint reading.”

Fingerpoint reading refers to the ability to point at written or printed words as they are being said. Usually the way this plays out in classrooms and in the studies of fingerpoint reading, is that the children memorize a short piece of text, perhaps a nursery rhyme or song. Then they are given a printed version of that text and are asked to recite it while pointing to each word that they say.

There is a lot of variability in students’ ability to do fingerpoint reading accurately, since it requires some knowledge of words, phonology, syllabication, print awareness, and other skills. I myself did a study like that as part of my master’s degree almost 50 years ago. My first graders sometimes pointed at the individual letters, sometimes they thought the printed words corresponded to the pronounced syllables, and so on.

Ehri and Sweet (1991) did a neat study of this trying to figure out what skills were required to sustain fingerpoint reading and what it, consequently, contributed to reading development. They found that to be a proficient fingerpoint reader you needed develop some knowledge of phonemic segmentation, some beginning sounds and the letters they correspond to, as well as a knowledge of at least a few words. Kids who lacked these skills simply weren’t very good at fingerpoint reading.

However, studies also point out the difficulties in applying phonological knowledge to text without a clear understanding of the “concept of word,” the idea that those groups of letters that are separated by spaces and punctuation marks refer to words and not to syllables (Morris, 1983; Morris, 1989; Morris & Henderson, 1981). In other words, students have to coordinate what they are learning about segmenting phonemes with these ideas of the concept of a word and how print works.

Clearly, this complex early literacy task entails those things, but it also includes left-right and top-to-bottom orientation, familiarity with written language structures, realization that spoken language corresponds to written language along with those decoding and word reading skills already noted (Bowling & Cabell, 2018; Ehri & Sweet, 1991; Mesmer & Lake, 2010).

What does this mean instructionally?

It means that we should be spending time in kindergarten (preschool, and early Grade 1) intentionally teaching students to read disfluently initially.

That’s one way to look at it, since reading the words and pointing to their counterparts tends to be a bit choppy. However, until students develop those initial abilities to match speech and print, it is unlikely they’ll be able to develop fluency in its more traditional form.

There are studies showing that the same tasks that we use to evaluate fingerpoint fluency can be used to teach students to engage in it successfully (Shepherd, 2011). For instance, having students memorizing poems or songs or predictable texts and then having them trying to point to the words as they “read” them – but with teacher support and coaching.

Another popular fingerpoint reading task is when teachers read big books to the children, pointing to the words as they are read. Teachers often engage the students in helping with this activity either chorally or individually.

Additionally, I’d recommend things like working with language experience stories. In the language experience approach (LEA), teachers transcribe student dictations, typically reading and rereading these to the child – pointing at the words all the way. Then the children try to read them, too, both pointing at the words as they read, and trying to find words that the teacher says. Early on, I separate the words pretty far apart, but over time they get closer together.

The point of all of these activities are multiple: they help the students to build memory for language; to track print; to coordinate oral and written language; to apply phonemic segmentation in a reading situation, and so on.

In the instructional scheme that you refer to, I argue that 25% of instructional time should be devoted to word learning (the decoding and meanings of words and parts of words), 25% to fluency, 25% to comprehension and learning from text, and 25% to writing. Or, in another version, I would divide that pie in 5 pieces and add oral language to the mix.

Clearly, fingerpoint reading is closely connected to the word work that kindergartners should be engaged in (phonological awareness, alphabet, letter sounds). Research also shows it to be closely tied to the invented spelling that would commonly be a part of beginning writing (Uhry, 1997). I suspect, because of its verbal memory demands, that it is also related to certain aspects of oral language development.

As I wrote above, fluency is about coordinating all of these systems. That is also true when these skills are first starting to develop. When students can read in a conventional manner, typical oral reading activities with feedback and repetition are likely to be the best route to increased coordination of decoding and meaning. But before we can get to that, activities like fingerpoint reading, that require the coordination of language and print belong in that fluency slot.

On this day his lesson focused providing students with tools that would overcome writing blocks. His students often struggled to figure out what to write about; they agonized when given a writing assignment. He demonstrated his strategy and directed the students to give it a try.

One especially bright young man towards the back of the room was being a pain and I was trying to get him engaged. He was refusing to do as the teacher asked and was being confrontational about it.  

But as I listened to his complaint, I came to see he was right. He knew what he was talking about. The day’s lesson plan wasn’t terrible, it had just missed the mark in an important way.

As I thought about it, it became clear to me that strategy lessons were often ruined by the same omission. Although this lesson was on writing, it could have easily been reading comprehension strategy instruction. No wonder so few kids actually use the strategies we teach.

What is a strategy?

According to the International Literacy Association, a strategy is a “systematic plan, consciously adopted, adapted, and monitored, to improve one’s performance in learning.” That’s pretty good. Their notion of metacognition, a related idea, also seems to be on point: “Awareness and knowledge of one’s mental processes that allow one to monitor, regulate, and direct self to a desired end.”

One key part of these definitions is the idea that strategies are always goal directed. That’s what the “improve one’s learning performance” or “desired end” are about. If we are trying to understand something or trying to communicate something and we want to succeed, we should take steps towards those goals. Strategies are goal directed efforts.

Sometimes that goal-directed bit is where strategy instruction goes bust – though that was not the problem raised by my obstreperous middle schooler.

Students may blow them off strategy use because they either aren’t goal directed or they simply have different goals. The student’s real goal might be something like, “I want to get this assignment done as fast as possible.” If higher comprehension isn’t their goal, then they won’t use strategies aimed at slowing them down and making them think.

Another key feature of strategies is their intentional quality (“consciously adopted,” “awareness and knowledge of one’s mental processes”). Strategies aren’t automatic. We have a goal we want to accomplish, so we come up a plan for accomplishing it. There is a plethora of strategies, so strategy use requires intentional choice.

In this middle school class, the teacher had the kids identify a couple of words (I came up with “hair” and “lake”). Then they were to brainstorm ideas that were connected to each word and to do this until they saw a connection between the two original words. I ended up remembering an event in my life where I had to shampoo my hair in Lake Michigan (brrrrr!). Another possibility that I often use when I’m stuck is not to write the piece I’m trying to write, but to write a letter to someone that explains what I’m trying to write. Hemingway was known to engage in non-stop writing, just doing a brain dump on paper until he found his way.

You want to write something, and you can’t get going, any those strategies can be quite successful… and yetl Mr. I’m Not Going to Do It wouldn’t play along.

Why not?

Because he didn’t need the strategy.

Remember, strategies are about intentionally trying to accomplish goals.

If you can accomplish your goal satisfactorily without a strategy, then why bother?

That was what that middle-schooler explained to me: “I think about what I want to write about. Then I make up two words. I brainstorm other words for a few minutes until I connect them so I can write about what I already decided to write about.”

Strategies help us to surmount barriers. He was a prolific youngster and had no problem coming up with a writing idea. Pretending to have a problem so he could practice solving it seemed dumb to him and he didn’t want to do that. He wanted to write.

You might think that is a rare circumstance, but it isn’t.

Most reading programs recommend placing students in texts that they can read with 75-89% comprehension – a level of success good enough for most circumstances (including for showing the teacher that you understood the text by answering her questions). The students – by design – are able to read these texts with comprehension. But these are what are used for strategy teaching.

Most kids won’t buck the order of the day by refusing to pretend to use the strategies.

They’ll go through the motions, doing the required activity, but it won’t be connected to accomplishing any goal – since the strategy wasn’t actually necessary.

Strategy use only makes sense when success isn’t certain.

Teaching students to use strategies with relatively easy texts neither lets them see how to use the strategy nor reveals to them the power that it can provide.

Many times, I’ve heard P. David Pearson talk about starting strategy off with an easy text that students can already read well… it allows the teacher to demonstrate the steps of the strategy clearly. I have no problem with that. At that point, strategy lessons should focus not on texts that students can read well, but on texts that they can’t.

Strategy instruction is one of those scaffolds that we teach to enable students to read complex text. Let’s stop pretending, and place students in reading situations in which strategies can really help.

Our school uses XXXXXXX [widely used commercial program] in the primary grades to teach fluency. I don’t like it because so many children can read fluently but don’t understand what they are reading. Wouldn’t it be better to focus on reading comprehension?

Shanahan responds:

Thanks for your question. I’ll answer it, but I suspect your premises may be wrong.

I don’t buy the idea that our instructional choice is fluency or comprehension. We need to teach both. The simple view of reading emphasizes the important role each plays (Gough & Tunmer, 1987), and there is a substantial body of evidence showing the value of instruction of each (NICHD, 2000). Both of these constellations of skills are necessary to successful reading, but neither is sufficient.

If students cannot decode text fluently, they won’t comprehend it – no matter how advanced their intellectual and linguistic abilities. (If you don’t believe me, try to read text written in the Cyrillic alphabet). Likewise, no matter how well students can decode, they won’t comprehend a text if they lack adequate language development (oral and written) and world knowledge.

We need to emphasize explicit daily teaching of comprehension and fluency (along with work on word knowledge—decoding and morphology, and writing). When I visit classrooms, one of the most frequent gaps that I see is the lack of explicit teaching of text reading fluency; there just isn’t much of that. Perhaps that’s why your district purchased that program.

These days many districts monitor children’s reading development, evaluating skills like letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, decoding, and oral reading fluency. If a child does poorly in one or another of these, then the youngster gets extra instruction (Tier 2) in the specific skill. Possibly that was the target of the purchase of that program—for use with kids who lag in oral reading fluency.

That’s not an unusual approach, but it often means that kids get a lot of skills work without comparable emphasis on language development and reading comprehension. That may be the source of your complaint: the disfluent kids get a dose (or an extra dose) of fluency instruction… but without instruction aimed at building up the other strand of abilities.

If the problem is the latter, then I cheer your school for doing what it can to enhance text reading fluency. I’m on their side; that is a smart move. Research shows that fluency instruction pretty consistently improves reading comprehension 

But, like you, I jeer them for only monitoring decoding, while neglecting the language side of the equation. Kids should be receiving daily classroom instruction focused on vocabulary, morphological knowledge, syntax, cohesion, text structure and the like. And, there should be Tier 2 and 3 interventions with that kind of focus, as well.

There was another premise in your letter, and let me express some doubts about that one, too.  You say a lot of primary grade students at your school can read fluently but without comprehension. I hear that claim often, usually from “experts” trying to denigrate fluency instruction. It’s fashionable.

The problem with the claim is that it doesn’t match well with large amounts of empirical data. Oral reading fluency tends to so closely correlated with reading comprehension, particularly in the primary grades, that there just can’t be large numbers of those children.

One possibility is that your criterion for determining that a child is “fluent” may not be sufficiently rigorous.

Some teachers consider a reader fluent if he/she can read many of the words right. But it also matters how easily the student is able to do that. If students must devote a lot of cognitive resources to figure out words, then there won’t be enough left over to think about the ideas.

Reading rate is used to estimate that ease, though the point isn’t fast reading as much as automatic reading. If students can easily and relatively quickly read the words, that won’t compete with comprehension.

Not long ago a second grade teacher was showing me a student who she thought to be adequately fluent; he was reading accurately (that is, he pronounced the author’s words correctly), but he did this at about 40 words correct per minute. That means he was as fluent as an average late year first-grader, not a mid-year second-grader (look at the Tindal & Hasbrouck norms on this site under Resources). She thought he was fluent, but the data said, “no.”

It also matters if the reading sounds like language. Are the students pausing in the right places—paying attention to punctuation and meaning? Or, are they just reading lists of words that are laid out horizontally?

Kids are reading fluently when they are easily decoding words accurately in a way that sounds like language. I’ll bet some of the kids you are judging to be fluent, really aren’t.

The research on this is clear: (1) we should teach text reading fluency – in the classroom, in interventions, and in special education programs; (2) the teaching of fluency doesn’t take the place of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, or writing instruction – it is just one, along with those others, of the important things that needs to be taught; and (3) students’ text reading fluency needs to be accurately estimated – considering accuracy, automaticity, and expression simultaneously.

As a parent, I’m worried about my children being out of school during the pandemic. Our district still hasn’t decided whether or how to open again this fall, so it isn’t even clear if they will be going back to school. They did their distance learning most of the time this spring, but those online meetings with the teachers and the assignments they had to do don’t seem to be enough. What should I be doing at home?

Shanahan respond:

Usually the questions I’m asked can be answered from research or my own experiences as a teacher or school administrator. That’s not the case here. I’ve never tried to teach classrooms of kids over the internet myself and the research on this is virtually non-existent (though perplexingly there appears to be a growing cadre of “experts” with neither more research nor experience than me).  

I’ll do my best to generalize from what I do know about more usual instructional situations.

There are three things that make a difference in academic learning – the amount of teaching, what is taught, and how well it is taught.  

The first of these is the amount of teaching and practice the students get. That’s the most obvious problem right now. Most kids lost two months of schooling in the spring and looking forward it isn’t clear how much they will lose going forward.

My hunch is that the time already lost may not have been as damaging as it could have been, since many kids missed spring break, standardized testing and the preparations for that, and the end of year celebratory activities (e.g., student Olympics, end of year parties, faculty-student softball games), none of which was likely to make much contribution to reading improvement.

Going forward, we aren’t apt to be as lucky.

What can you do to keep the time loss from being debilitating? Definitely you need to make certain that your child is taking part in the academic activities that your school is providing. Your kids need to log onto the school’s lessons and meetings. These might leave much to be desired but take advantage of them anyway. If you are able to sit in on these and talk to your kids about the information all the better. Likewise, any homework should be treated as obligatory. Make sure your children do that and that those are returned to the school as the teacher indicates.

Additionally, you should schedule daily reading times for your kids to read books and magazines. Usually I’d recommend relying on the library for that, but obviously that isn’t available in many communities right now. There may be some cost to this recommendation. However, there are many sources for online books that are free (go into the resources section on my website, for instance – there are several sources there).

In any event, keep your kids reading and talk to them about it (get them to retell the stories or to talk about the subject matter). Perhaps the school would be willing to lend you a set of your child’s textbooks in reading, math, science, and social studies, those could be used. (If your kids aren’t yet able to read on their own, read to them – and, again, with a lot discussion).

This is a great time to get kids writing, as well. Buy a tablet for them to record their thoughts and ideas on a daily basis. They can write about what they are doing, or what they watch on television last night, or about the books that they are reading.

The second issue deals with what needs to be taught. There are particular things that students need to learn if they are going to make progress in reading.

Younger children, ages 3-7, need to learn to decode text (that is, to turn the letters and spellings into pronunciations). There are a lot of free materials and programs that can be used to give your kids practice with these skills. For instance, go to the www.pbskids.org website for that kind of activity, and, again, there are other similar free resources noted on my website.

Kids also need practice reading aloud (ages 6-12). It would be great if you could carve out some time each day to listen to your child’s reading. It is good if that reading is a little hard for the kids—in other words, that shouldn’t be able to read it perfectly from the beginning. This site: https://www.readinga-z.com/fluency/fluency-practice-passages/ provides passages at different levels, so you can experiment a bit to figure out which levels are hard enough. Have your child practice a passage 2 or 3 times to get good with it (meaning that he/she reads the right words and that it sounds like language).

Reading comprehension is important, which is why I recommend talking to your youngster about what he or she reads. They’ll remember more of it and will pay closer attention if you show an interest in what they know about these texts.

And, then there is quality. Many parents worry that these kinds of lessons will not be as good as the ones delivered by teachers. That may or may not be true, but that comparison isn’t the point. Kids need to be engaged in reading and writing, and practicing those skills, and whatever you are able to provide is going to be better and more effective than what they are going to get otherwise.

 One quality factor is going to be consistency. It is better to do a small amount of something every day, than to save it all up for one big school day. Set aside 30 minutes a day for your child to read. Set aside time to listening to their reading. Create a writing time, too. These don’t have to be all day affairs. It could be 30 minutes of reading and then go out and play in the backyard for an hour. 30 minutes of writing a story, followed by 30 minutes of television time, and so on. 

I hope your children’s school is able to re-open safely and that you’ll feel comfortable with those arrangements. Every plan I’ve heard so far (every other day, two days a week, every other week, etc.) includes some real loss of learning time. The advice here may help you to keep those losses from doing any real damage.

I know you advocate the idea of teaching reading with more complex text. But what about motivation? Won’t this approach discourage students?

Shanahan response:

I do support the idea of teaching reading with grade level texts. The theory that there is a magical way to match kids to books that will increase learning simply hasn’t panned out. Studies of the instructional level find that it at best makes no difference – that is, kids learn as much from grade level text as they do from instructional level ones. And, in the worst cases, the studies show that those easier text placements actually hold kids back and severely limit their learning.

Within-class grouping in reading is usually driven by the idea of trying to match kids to instructional level books. Studies show that those most likely to end up in the below grade level groups are racial or linguistic minorities, kids with disabilities, and high poverty kids (Hallinan & Sorenson, 1983). Groups who certainly don’t need to have their learning depressed by a flawed and out-of-date theory.

I recognize that when kids are starting out in kindergarten or first-grade, it is helpful to limit text difficulty since those kids need to master basic decoding. Having texts that repeat words and spelling patterns frequently is beneficial. Instructional level is fine in kindergarten and grade one, but by the time kids can read at a second-grade level, research champions more complex text.  

The instructional level scheme was first articulated in the 1940s, and part of the idea behind it was that it would limit students’ frustration. That’s why texts more challenging than instructional level are labeled “frustration level.” But that was the 1940s, when Freud was all the rage. Frustration then was something to be avoided at almost any cost.

The claim was that if students struggled with a text, that would cause frustration which would not only interrupt learning but would upset the child. As a result, he/she would be more likely to act out in class and have other psychological maladies.

Interesting theory… but it is consistent with data from real kids. Several years ago, Linda Gambrell and colleagues did a cool study. They determined which kids were placed in frustration level texts and observed their behavior in class. Sure enough, as expected, it was the kids in frustration level books who misbehaved.

So far so good.

Then they intervened. They changed the book placements so these students wouldn’t be psychologically frustrated anymore. The changes in book placements did nothing to improve these kids’ behavior.

The lowest kids almost always will be placed in relatively harder books than the better readers. Those are also the kids most likely to act out in your class. The mistake is to think that those two facts are connected. We imagine a causal link when none exists.

Roberts found that kids motivation for reading wasn't related to the degree to which the books matched their abilities; in other words, kids at "frustration level" were as interested in reading as their supposedly more aptly placed peers. Even studies that measure changes in motivation during reading tasks finds no connection between the two (Fulmer & Tullis, 2013).

I suspect this whole theory is buggy. Theories of motivation usually tout the motivating power of challenge, not comfort and ease. It is only the reading educator who dedicates himself/ herself to making sure there are no challenges to promote motivation.

Recent studies of the relationship of text difficulty on motivation suggest either no relationship or a markedly more complicated one than we have been operating under (e.g., Rosenzweig & Wigfield, 2017).

I suggest telling your students how demanding the instructional texts are going to be. Explain to them that you’ll be teaching them to books harder than anything they’ve ever tried in the past. Tell them that you will teach them with harder texts than anything you would have attempted with their older brothers and sisters.

Don’t get me wrong. No one wants to fail. It is not enough to tell kids how hard the books will be. You then have to make them successful with those books.

That’s where the teaching comes in. These days my goal is to start with a text that kids can’t read well already. But by the end of a series of lessons they should be able to. They should have command of the content and the vocabulary. They should be able to read it with fluency. Instead of placing kids at their instructional level, move on when they reach that level of proficiency.

When kids are challenged and their learning is obvious, you won’t need to worry about discouragement or a lack of motivation.

References

Fulmer, S. M., & Tulis, M. (2013). Changes in interest and affect during a difficult reading task: Relationships with perceived difficulty and reading fluency. Learning and Instruction, 27, 11-20.

Gambrell, L. B., Wilson, R. M., & Gantt, W. N. (1981). Classroom observations of task-attending behaviors of good and poor readers. Journal of Educational Research, 74, 400-404.

Hallinan, M. T., and A. B. Sorensen. (1983). “The Formation and Stability of Instructional Groups.” American Sociological Review 48, 838–851.

Hunt, L.C. (1970/1997). The effect of self-selection, interest, and motivation upon independent, instructional, and frustration levels. Reading Teacher, 50(4), 278-282.

Killeen, P.R. (1994). Frustration: Theory and practice. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1, 323-326.

Roberts, T. (1976). ‘Frustration level’ reading in the infant school. Educational Research, 9, 41-44.

Rosenzweig, E.Q., & Wigfield, A. (2017). What if reading is easy but unimportant? How students’ patterns of affirming and undermining motivation for reading information texts predict different reading outcomes. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 48, 133-148.

We go through periods of using textbooks or avoiding them; embracing phonics or eschewing it. The educational pendulum swings to and fro. A new reading program or approach is discovered, seems to be everywhere, then one wonders whatever happened to it…. Wisconsin Design, SRA cards, Whole Language, learning styles… the beat goes on.  

One thing that never seems to change, however, is the ubiquity of “round robin reading.” This is the practice of having one child read text to the group or the class, while the others supposedly follow along. The term “round robin” used in this way, is relatively new (the first mention I can find is in the late 1950s), but the practice is much older – Ben Franklin was already complaining about it in the 18^th century.

The practice hangs on because it is a workable scheme for operating a lesson. Even low-skilled teachers can keep kids on task through it and can be assured that the content has been covered, if not learned.

Unfortunately, this practice goes wrong two ways. It crushes more potent versions of oral reading practice and then crowds out silent reading instruction, too. In this sense, it is the kudzu of reading instruction, an invasive species that sucks up all of the life-giving resources that other species need to thrive.

I’ve written in this space repeatedly about the value of supervised paired reading and repeated reading and the like. Instead of having each student reading aloud which is a big time waster or focusing on choral reading (in which kids may participate like Milli Vanilli, appearing to mouth the words without necessarily reading them), it makes more sense to partner kids up, having them taking turns reading to each other with the teacher circulating among the groups. Kids can easily engage in 10-20 times as much oral reading practice as they ever could in round robin reading. It also is much more palatable to ask a youngster to reread something that was read disfluently under these partnered circumstances.

My bigger concern now, with so many people teaching at a distance, is the use of round robin as the way to guide reading comprehension. As I mentioned, teachers tend to find this kind of activity controlling. Thus, having students take turns reading a portion of text aloud can fill the Zoom session easily and keep kids on task, without really helping them learn. This practice could eat up reading instruction as well as social studies and science!

Of course, beginning readers need to read aloud initially so round robin isn’t as horrible at that point, but certainly by grade 2 and beyond, boys and girls should be guided to read silently with the purpose of comprehending.

Many teachers tell me they don’t do this because the children may not understand the text when read silently. Duh! That’s kind of like not teaching someone to ride a bicycle because they keep falling down. The reason you teach something is because the students can’t already do it.

Typical guided or directed reading lessons in which the teacher prepares the students for reading (e.g., previewing the text, introducing new vocabulary, thinking about relevant prior knowledge, setting purposes), the students then reads the text in portions, and after each portion is read there is a discussion, is a sensible way to go.

The key here is for those portions to be read silently instead of aloud. Keep the portions short initially and expand them over time as students demonstrate an ability to handle that. Part of your job is to “stretch them out.” This both reduces the variability in reading speed and will allow you to monitor how well a student can read varying lengths of text.

If students are unsuccessful at making sense of a section, then have them read it over (or have them reread a particular sentence or paragraph). The point is to use the discussion to identify where comprehension might be going wrong and then to help the student to figure it out from reading (not from you telling them the answer).  

I’m a big fan of multiple response during class and group discussions. That means that the teacher asks the question, and everyone answers simultaneously. I usually do this through writing… I can easily see who is uncertain (as they look around at everyone else) and I can move among them to see who got it and who didn’t.

I haven’t been able to figure out how to pull that off successfully on the various distance learning platforms. I don’t know if there is a way kids could type in an answer that only the teacher would see but that would be ideal. If anyone knows how to do that, please leave a note as I’m sure I’m not the only one grappling with that idea.

In any event, we want to teach students to read silently with a high degree of comprehension. Extensive oral reading fluency practice contributes to that goal, but it doesn’t take the place of having students engaged in accountable silent reading practice with teacher guidance. Student should get better at this over time. “Better,” in this case, meaning: able to read increasingly complex texts successfully; able to sustain successful reading for longer periods of time or over a greater number of words/pages; able to comprehend well with less teacher support.

That will only happen if you engage students in accountable, supported, and expanding silent reading opportunities – even if that has to be done over a distance.

I’ve read what you’ve written about the instructional level. You claim that there is no such thing. Haven’t you ever heard of the “zone of proximal development (ZPD)?”

Shanahan responds:

I’ve heard of it, but if you think what I’ve written is contradictory to it, then I suspect you don’t really understand the ZPD construct or its relationship to this aspect of reading.

Let’s start with the “instructional level” idea first.

A century ago, it was common practice for reading teachers to place children in different reading books based on their abilities. For instance, one Wisconsin survey from 1918 shows that the majority of teachers were grouping children by book placements; this was the old bluebirds, redbirds, and crows plan. It was also more than a decade prior to Vygotsky’s ZPD and about three decades before the instructional level was operationalized.

In the 1920s and 1930s, various reading educators (e.g., Donald Durrell, William S. Gray) referred to the idea of their being an instructional level – that is an optimum student-book match that would promote maximum learning; but these references were informal, much like the actual classroom practices being used at the time. There was not any very explicit theory of it, and there were no criteria for determining what a good match would be… just the vague idea that texts could be too hard to support learning.

This changed in the 1940s with the publication of Foundations of Reading by Emmett Betts. Betts made explicit the theory of the instructional level (along with the independent and frustration reading levels). He also endorsed a specific measurement scheme that would supposedly allow teachers to place their students properly; that is, in texts that would lead to the greatest amount of learning.

Throughout the 20^th century, university-based reading experts “tsked-tsked” about teachers who were not placing their students in easy enough books, because, of course, there were still many teachers who just used a single grade level reader without adjustment.

Lev Vygotsky’s work on the zone of proximal development took place in Russia during the late 1920s and early 1930s. However, this work had no impact whatsoever on American education until the 1960s when it was first translated to English.

Basically, the ZPD idea was Vygotsky’s attempt to cast learning into a social context. He was reacting to earlier schemes proposed by other psychologists (Piaget, for instance) who had treated learning as more of an isolated, individual pursuit. According to Vygotsky, there is a social transaction that takes place between a learner and someone more knowledgeable or skilled that leads to learning; that is, this series of social interactions take someone from a state of not being able to do something to being able to do it.

An example might help.

Mom wants Junior to learn to tie his own shoes. She says something like, “Junior, let’s tie your shoe. Watch. First, we cross the strings like this, and then we tuck this end under and pull it tight. Next we make bunny ears and then cross them and put this end under. Pull it tight again.”

Now, mom might be stressing that “we” are doing these things, but that is just a social device. Junior really cannot tie his shoes yet. This social interaction is getting him to participate in the task by watching closely under her direction.

At some point, mom changes this routine. “Junior, what do we do first when we tie our shoes?” The child responds that you have to cross the strings and tuck one end under, and she tells him to do it, he does, and she completes the task for him. Over several such episodes, Junior takes over more of the task until it is mastered.

Initially, mom knows how to tie shoes and Junior does not. Over time, however, Junior becomes able to do it, too, as a result of mom’s demonstration, accompanying language, explicit guidance, and so on. These social supports are the basis of learning in Vygotsky’s theory (and these supports are what Jerome Bruner and company later described as “scaffolds”). The scaffold metaphor is an apt one – notice that the shoes always end up getting tied – with mom providing only as much support as necessary.

ZPD refers to that space between when the learner can’t do some task at all and when he/she can do the whole thing independently.

Vygotsky died before he could fully rough out the implications of ZPD, but it is fair to say that it was a startlingly different concept than what Betts’ (and later Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell, & Lucy Calkins) conceived the instructional level to be.

According to Betts, students would make the greatest reading gains when a text was matched to the child’s reading level. If the child were placed in an easier or harder text, then less learning would result. This makes the learning zone very narrow and very specific; you are either in it, or you don’t learn. But Vygotsky’s notion was much broader, more supple and dynamic; Junior was learning even when the only role he could play was to follow mom’s actions with his eyes.

The mechanistic and automatic quality of the instructional level is much more consistent with the kind of individual learning psychology that Vygotsky was challenging (with his more social teaching psychology).

That’s why those who embrace the instructional level idea are so gung-ho about independent learning. They encourage minimal teaching, because if the book placements are right then there should be little for the students to figure out and they should be able to do much of that on their own.

However, if you recognize that the ZPD is not just a narrow band of learning territory, but the entire distance between where the child is now (in terms of concepts and skills) and what full proficiency would be, then placing students in grade level text won’t seem so odd. We’re both trying to work in the ZPD, but instructional level fans want to zero in on a particularly slender slice of it.

And, if you accept that the ZPD can be so varied and expansive, then Vygotsky’s relative valuing of the social interaction that is teaching over the idea that students will learn mainly through their own individual explorations should make more sense, too.

Students who are working in a text that they can already read pretty well (the skinny little instructional level slice of the ZPD) will need considerably less scaffolding than those grappling with a relatively harder text.

The instructional level approach tries to minimize what needs to be learned in the hopes that kids will be able to figure those things out by themselves. By contrast, the idea of teaching with more complex text aims to expand the role of teaching in order to maximize the amount of student learning.

Aside from those differences, both approaches toil within Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.

I work with students in small groups daily and need the rest of the students to be engaged in meaningful practice of their new literacy skills. What types of activities would be best for this practice?

Shanahan response:

The benefits of small group instruction are obvious. Teachers can make the learning experience more apt and intense – the small numbers allow for more responsiveness, more vigilant monitoring, and fine tuning of the teaching.

The downside of small group instruction should be equally evident. While the teacher is working with one small group, the rest of the kids are on their own. Much more learning takes place with the teacher and, frankly, much less with the kids on their own.

There are some supports and approaches that can mitigate this problem, though their availability is pretty uneven. For instance, some schools provide teacher’s aides and this assistance can allow productive activity with a couple of groups simultaneously. Or, there may be parent volunteers who play that role. Some schools are close to a college and have access to preservice teachers. And, then there are those classrooms with multiple computers that allow students to work with research-proven programs.

Those situations exist, but there are many more teachers who are on their own trying to manage small groups. I suspect you are one of those.

Even in those cases, there are things a teacher can do to minimize the problem. For instance, in some schemes the teacher moves among groups. This takes various forms. In paired reading, the teacher goes from pair-to-pair to monitor progress, guide partners’ responses, and add some teaching to the mix. I recommend that all the kids in a class work on fluency simultaneously, to make this as efficient as possible. Or, sometimes teachers alternate between two guided reading groups, interacting with one while the other reads. Cumbersome, perhaps, but workable. Another possibility is book club groups in which the kids play a big role in operating the group discussions; this allows the teacher to move profitably among even more groups.

Teachers can also have everyone in the class reading the same selection at the same time. What varies in this case is the amount of scaffolding, support, and extension that will be provided to some students. That increases the amount of teaching delivered to the lowest readers (they get more help) and decreases it for the best – which fits nicely with Carol Connor’s research on what leads to the greatest learning for a class. (Connor found that the best readers could make real progress reading on their own and being engaged in more independent activities. She did not find the same benefits for the other students.)

In any event, I’ve long recommended that teachers minimize small group work. Often such work is unnecessary, engaged in only because the teachers are required by their district to do it. This leads to silly stuff like teachers delivering the same lesson multiple times.

While I try to avoid any more small group teaching than absolutely necessary, I would never ban the practice. It’s just too valuable and classroom life too complicated to not have access to it – at least when it is used appropriately.

Let’s say you use small group instruction strategically, to target particular learning needs of students and you need to know what kinds of activities to assign the other students. For that, all you need to do is turn your attention to the research on seatwork…

Except there is no body of research on seatwork (just one study as far as I can tell—and, though helpful, it doesn’t even attempt to describe appropriate instruction in any kind of specific detail).

This is an issue without empirical data; Just lots of authoritative opinion.

So, let me add my advice to the mix.

Use activities that require a lot of accountable reading and writing. We want kids to read and write a lot. Some schemes aimed at doing that actually reduce instruction markedly to free up reading time. I’m not talking about that kind of thing, since studies haven’t found those practices to be productive for most kids.

The accountability issue is big here. If students know that there will be some real follow up that will take them back through the text in detail it changes both their reading behavior and their learning. I’m not a big fan of one-on-one conferencing in reading because it increases the amount of time kids are away from the teacher and minimizes their accountability.

There are various ways of requiring reading during the time a teacher is busy with another group. The teacher might encourage students to attempt that day’s selection on their own before they try to undertake it with the teacher’s guidance. The same thing can be done, frankly, with a social studies or science chapter. That permits students to read such texts multiple times.

Another possibility is to teach a writing lesson just prior to starting with reading groups and to have the boys and girls working on their compositions or revisions while the teacher is elsewhere. The same can be done with vocabulary lessons.

However, if students have problems with the work tied to such lessons, the teacher will have to follow up – so it’s important that the seatwork not be so demanding that children need teacher help. I’ve tried this with math, which would be fine if doing the problems wasn’t such a big part of the math learning. Teachers really need to be available to take part in that classroom activity, so that particular pairing wasn’t a good one. 

Accountability means that the teacher is going to have to closely monitor student success. This can be done a number of ways – but usually through either follow discussion (small group or whole class) or writing.  

The best seatwork activities will guide students to engage the meaning of the text more deeply. I suspect this is as true for seatwork as for other pedagogical endeavors. That’s why many worksheets and centers simply don’t work very well. To complete them it usually isn’t necessary to think much about the text.

What kinds of activities fit the bill? Here are a few that can be done with any texts that the students are trying to read. The key is to focus them on key parts of the text or language that you suspect will trip kids up.

1.     Sentence reducing and sentence combining

Get students to dig into the meaning of sentences by recomposing them. For instance, have them turn these three sentences into one:

“Cities in many countries have special building laws. Buildings must be strong and flexible. That way, they won’t collapse during an earthquake.” ----> 

To keep buildings from collapsing during an earthquake, cities in many countries have special laws that require the buildings to be strong and flexible.

Or, try breaking this sentence down into multiple sentences:

“So Hayleigh began drawing out her ideas to make charms that look like earrings.”  ---->

Hayleigh draws out her ideas.

She makes charms.

The charms look like earrings.

2.     Cohesion analysis

Get students to connect the ideas across a text. To track the ideas, students can mark each appearance of an idea with different colors or by some other marking system. Here I have used underlining, italics, and bolding to show the links.

“When disasters such as storms, floods, and earthquakes strike an area, people from all over the world want to help. They know that someday they may need help themselves. They also know that it is the right thing to do and that it is rewarding. I think that when people are in need it is important for all of us to find a way to help out.” â

“When disasters such as storms, floods, and earthquakes strike an area, people from all over the world want to help. They know that someday they may need help themselves. They also know that it is the right thing to do and that it is rewarding. I think that when people are in need it is important for all of us to find a way to help out.”

3.     Vocabulary and context

Lift some sentences from the text and have the students use the context to figure out the meaning of the underlined word and then have them replace the word with an appropriate synonym or phrase.

Buildings must be strong and flexible. That way, they won’t collapse during an earthquake. â

Buildings must be strong and flexible. That way, they won’t _fall down_ during an

earthquake.

4.     Text Comparisons

Have students write text comparisons. They can compare today’s text with any other text that you have already had them read or that you have read to them. These comparisons might be of something quite specific such as comparing the characters from two stories, or it might be something more all-encompassing like comparing two social studies chapters (comparing two civilizations in grade 4, for instance).

Each of these exercises requires that students think deeply about the language of the text that they are trying to understand. These kinds of exercises can be done before or after the students have read the text.

Of course, if they are going to analyze text in those ways successfully, you cannot start out with a seatwork assignment. Initially, you’ll need to do these with the boys and girls so that they learn how to do them. In that one study on seatwork that I mentioned, this was one of the big take-aways. Kids often don’t have any idea how to do the seatwork. Using similar activities throughout the year and preparing students to complete them will make a big difference.

I would love to know what you think about the movement in personalized learning in K-8 schools. A few schools in my district have been moving to this approach for math instruction and I'd be interested in hearing your ideas of how this would look in reading and writing instruction. Thanks!

Shanahan responds:

Your question reminds me of the first time I tried to cook chicken.

I was in a hurry so I figured if I turned up the heat, I could cook it faster… and that works – but only on the outside of the chicken. The inside, I discovered, was almost as red as when I started. Raw chicken is neither tasty nor healthy and I ended up having to throw the whole unappetizing mess away.

Trying to eat chicken before it is ready is a bad idea.

I feel the same way about instructional approaches. “Personalized learning” for teaching reading is an idea whose time has not yet come. No matter how tantalizing the exterior, the insides are still too raw.

The basic idea of personalized learning is a good one and pioneers in this area have made some excellent advances in mathematics instruction (especially in the arithmetic part of that). When it comes to teaching, technology has a great future – something that I’ve been told repeatedly since I was first charged with designing lessons that could work on an IBM “mag card” set up in the early 1970s.

There are definitely some very specific skills that computers can do a great job with. For instance, according to the What Works Clearinghouse, there are several computer programs that can teach decoding effectively, and there are some experimental programs that can teach summary writing.

The notion of “personalizing” instruction is that the program will assess the students and then guide them through a curriculum aimed at teaching those skills that were assessed, monitoring student progress and adjusting the instruction as you go.

We don’t yet have a very complete idea of what it is that people need to learn to become readers or writers or speakers of other languages. Oh, we know the kinds of things that one has to learn Readers benefit from learning letter sounds, spelling patterns, and high frequency words, for instance. We can’t say with any certainty whether a given protocol will result in success. You teach a collection of phonemes to one child and he is a reader. You teach the same sounds to another, and though he masters the sounds, the result is different.

Accordingly, teaching literacy is more reciprocal than linear. A program might teach a youngster the letter “b” and its associated phoneme /b/ thoroughly and well and may not allow him/her to take on the challenge of “m” and /m/ until mastery is accomplished. That’s personalized but it is not necessarily going to result in success. And, if that is true with letter sounds, imagine the complications of teaching reading comprehension.

I have no doubt that personal learning approaches will get more and more sophisticated, flexible, and effective over time. Unfortunately, there are lots of cheerleaders out there who are touting this stuff already (sort of like me cooking the chicken in a hotter oven with the idea of getting it done faster). No matter how good the salesperson or how exciting it seems to be on the bleeding edge of technological progress, these aren’t the things that cook the chicken.

There is a reason why there are not yet any peer reviewed studies showing the positive impacts of personalized teaching in reading. Because no one has a program that is sufficiently effective to take most kids very far in reading. That could change, in fact, it is likely to, but until it does, I’d be careful about investing much in such an approach. (The studies that are there don't say much about how well the kids are learning--and they use words like potential and possibility a lot.)

One more story: Many years ago, parents of a learning-disabled middle school student were suing the school because their son was not doing well. They wanted to enroll him in a private high school for kids like him, and they wanted the school district to pay the cost of tuition (at that time it would have been more than $100,000). Both sides agreed to forego the courts and to have a mutually acceptable judgment from an expert in the field; me.

I studied the case carefully. The boy had been tested thoroughly when he entered the school, so they had a clear idea of what he needed. They purchased a commercial computer program aimed at teaching kids like him (it doesn’t matter what the program was, but it had a lot of research support showing its potential effectiveness and it was easily the best personalized learning tool available at the time). Now, however, after two years of working on that program, he was retested and found to be reading even lower than he started out.

How can such an effective program have such a terrible result?

I asked the boy. He said that when it started, he really like it. At ELA time, he would go to the library each day and log in and do the reading and the exercises and he thought it was fun and interesting. But over time, as he spent each day with the computer by himself, working on his reading he grew lonely and discouraged.

The “personal” in personal learning means individual or unique. In other words, each student will be taken through the lessons in their own way, a way tailored to their needs based on their past performance. In that sense, personal is an accurate description of the instruction.

Unfortunately, as many teachers are finding out during these days of confinement, this kind of personal does not mean warm, reassuring, or intimate. This young man was suffering from what Dan Willingham recently labeled “Zoom fatigue.” The student felt lonely and isolated from his peers (and from his teachers). He lapsed into a kind of learning lethargy and the school didn’t notice.

Reading and writing are language activities and a major purpose of learning language is to connect with other human beings. No matter how successfully technology is able to personalize or individualize teaching, at their heart reading and writing are social rather than individual pursuits and effective instruction must proceed on that basis.

My opinion of personalized learning in reading?

Turn the heat down to 350° and make sure it cooks all the way through before serving. It just isn’t ready yet.

Admittedly, parts of this report rankle… particularly when causal effects are attributed to correlational data (for those of you not fluent in statistics – this simply means they make claims not justified by the data they have analyzed). The real surprise for me – given the tenor and reasoning of the report – is that I fully agree with their conclusions.

These days people are so ideological that they go blind when something supports their view and can see nothing but the devils in the details for any disparate evidence. My goal is not to undermine the report, so much as to point out the flaws in its reasoning and inadequacy of its evidence. This is important because these kinds of “hooray for our side” claims plague pedagogy. These kinds of arguments do as much to warn people off of research as the flat-earth science deniers who champion any data that supports their view and pigsties any equivalent evidence that goes the other way.

I also hope to look at these data in some ways that might be more persuasive and useful for those who make these timing decisions.

My first problem with the report: Never send correlational data to do a causal study’s job (and certainly don’t claim that the use of multiple correlations makes it a causal study… oh, Doctor).

Despite the causal claims put forth in this report, such as “Increased instructional time in social studies—but not in ELA—is associated with improved reading ability”, the evidence just doesn’t match with the assertions.

What does that claim make it sound like they studied?

It sounds to me like they tested students’ reading and then had teachers either increase their reading instruction or their social studies teaching, or just kept things as they were, and then after a while, tested the kids again to find out how much reading improvement they could be attributed to these three approaches. It would even be better if they tested these students’ social studies knowledge to be sure the increases in reading were attributable to the learning that resulted from the extra social studies teaching. Such a study, if well implemented, would offer strong evidence for increasing social studies to make better readers.

But nothing of the sort was done here. Instead, teachers were surveyed about how much instruction their schools offered each year and in fifth grade the students were tested in reading. The students who scored best in reading tended to be enrolled in schools where teachers had reported more social studies instruction. These teachers did not even necessarily know how much instruction was provided in subjects that they didn’t teach, but they were encouraged to answer anyway. And, of course, no one measured the impact of increasing social studies teaching since no teacher increased the amount of social studies teaching.

The study neither observed any of this instruction, nor evaluated the learning that came from it. This investigation aimed to support the theories of E.D. Hirsch (and others) on the importance of cultural knowledge in reading comprehension. I’ve observed a lot of elementary social studies instruction in my time and I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to lead to big gains in “knowledge” (especially in the primary grades). But my skepticism aside, for this theory to be supported you’d need to show that the social studies teaching increased student knowledge about social studies, that the students simultaneously improved in reading, and that this social studies knowledge was instrumental in the reading improvements.

This research didn’t even review the passages used to measure reading comprehension to see how aligned the measure was with the social studies knowledge that was supposedly leading to these higher reading scores. If the reading test passages were about social studies content, then I wouldn’t be surprised if social studies instruction had an impact. But what if these were fictional passages or passages about science? Then what happens to these claims about the potency of social studies instruction?

A peculiar finding in this study was that there was no connection between the amount of ELA, math, science, the arts, physical education and student reading levels. They wave that problem off with the claim that cultural knowledge only comes from social studies and science classes and then claim that science vocabulary might be too technical to translate to improved reading. That interpretation not only requires some very uncomfortable gyrations (just reading it made my back hurt), but it certainly turns Hirsch’s theory to thin gruel (knowledge is important, but only knowledge about social studies). A simpler conclusion would be to recognize the greater likelihood of finding one meaningless significant correlation among seven independent comparisons.

Another possible explanation for these odd results would be that whatever constellation of conditions that led some schools to offer more social studies teaching were the same things that led to higher reading achievement. For instance, they noted that private schools had higher achievement and more social studies teaching. The researchers wisely corrected for some of these differences statistically, but there’s a reason why such correlational certainty often evaporates within the context of real policy implementation.

This is the kind of study that should encourage researchers to test out its recommendations; to experiment to see if the promised benefits result. Only then should policymakers take it as a call to action.

Some of the data here don’t add up either. According to the U.S. Department of Education the typical elementary school day – minus lunch and recess – is 6.5 hours or 390 minutes per day. The Fordham report separates the data by percentiles of amount of teaching that may have been provided in each subject. For example, they separated out the top 10% of schools that claimed to devote the greatest amount of time to each subject. A school was in that 90^th percentile column if it offered about 2.5 hours per day of ELA. That same school may or may not have been included in the 90^th percentile for social studies.

I found it interesting to imagine a highly academic school that managed to crack the top 10% for all the subjects. You know, a school with a lot of reading and writing, science, math, social studies, music, and so on. You’d think that such a school would be a rare beast. It seems like it may even be an impossibility, since all the subjects are competing for the same pool of time. More ELA time must, as these authors conclude, lead to less social studies time. Schools with lots of art would probably end up with little math or science.

Except that isn’t what you find.

If all schools delivered daily instructional amounts sufficient to place them at the 90^th percentile for each and every subject, we’d still have about a 30 minutes of unaccounted time each school day (shifting these minutes to social studies alone would be enough move the bottom 10% to the top 90% in amounts of social studies teaching).

Even more interesting is to look at the median, that is the average school time allotments. Imagining schools that offer average amounts of ELA, math, science, social studies, and non-core subjects, would leave about an hour and a half of instructional time unaccounted for each day.

Instead of trying to steal time from reading and writing instruction for social studies, why not use a small amount of that lost time?

Think of it this way: Let’s imagine a family with a $40,000 annual income. They currently spend $10,000 on housing, $10,000 on food, and $5,000 each on healthcare and transportation. Food prices rise dramatically, and they need another $3,000 a year to cover the additional cost. Would you recommend that they stop paying rent or going to the doctor to make up for the shortfall? Or, would you wonder why it couldn’t come out of the $10,000 not being used for the family’s survival?  

Arguing for less time for language instruction to accommodate adequate time for social studies is kind of like that.

But isn’t it peculiar that the amount of ELA time didn’t correlate with reading achievement?

Indeed. And, yet, there are some possible reasons for that. One problem is the relative amount of variance associated with the different subject matters. In math and reading, relative variance was low (.19 and .18, respectively) probably because schools are explicit about how much time to spend on those subjects. Social studies and science get less attention, so they lead to a lot more variation in teacher practice which increases the possibility of finding a positive correlation with achievement (relative variance for social studies, science, and non-core subjects were .39, .40., and .44, respectively).

Even with that, however, there was certainly enough variation in the amount of ELA teaching to correlate with reading achievement. But here we have the same problem with reading that I mentioned earlier with social studies. We don’t know what this time was used for. In many schools, students’ independent reading time is counted as reading instruction (despite the poor results associated with that practice). The same happens with teacher book sharing, when teachers read chapter books to students. Such practices although enjoyable, perhaps, do little to improve reading achievement, though they do divert a substantial amount of instructional time. The same can be said for all of the worksheets and other activities used to keep kids busy while the teacher works with other small groups. None of that independent busywork has ever been found to do much for reading, and yet those activities often take up one-third to two-thirds of the instructional time.

There are literally thousands of studies showing the impact of increasing the amounts of instruction on student learning (e.g., preschool, full-day kindergarten, use of time during the school day, afterschool programs, summer programs, homework, days without substitute teachers, years with minimal “Act of God” days, mathmagenic processing, models of school achievement, academic press, and so on). There definitely are exceptions to this overwhelming pattern of results, but these are exceptions that prove the rule (such as unmonitored afterschool programs don't seem to improve achievement, but afterschool programs in which we know teaching is taking place do).

Amount of instruction matters, but what is being taught, how it is being taught, and how the learning is to be measured, all matter in this equation as well (though you can’t tell that from this report).

Frankly, as a profession, we’ve been careless in our safeguarding of children’s instructional time (grabbing at those exceptional cases when amount of teaching doesn’t matter and folkloric theories of motivation as excuses for not maximizing teaching and academic experience). Encouraging the kind of groveling between subjects encouraged in this study is not the way to fix that.

Instead, I argue for making every minute count; for providing substantial academic experience with the various arts, sciences, and humanities; and for teaching reading/language with rich literary and informational texts worth reading and remembering. I have no problem with 45 minutes per day of social studies. In fact, I like the idea. Fordham’s notion of how to get there is problematic, however.

Note: I want to thank Michael Petrilli for catching a couple of factual errors in the original blog posting. I have corrected those errors as of October 1, 2020 (omitting one erroneous sentence and replacing one relative standard deviation). Neither change required any revision of the point of view expressed in this blog, and, yet, accuracy matters. The responsibility for the original errors is mine alone.  

For the want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For the want of a horse the battle was lost;

For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost;--

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

                        -James Baldwin

This oft used litany reminds me of reading:

For the want of phonemic awareness the decoding was lost; for the want of phonics the fluency was lost… you get the idea. The abilities that comprise reading are hierarchical, each nested in the other (though it is not as linear as the horseshoe nail formula—we don’t completely accomplish a reading step before the onset of the later ones, and those later steps can enhance the earlier ones; phonemic awareness, for example, is easier to accomplish when the phonics that it enables, is itself being taught).

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about letters and phonemes, decoding, fluency, vocabulary and the like. Recent research (Sorenson, et al., 2020) reminds me of an important step in the learning sequence that we tend to skip. Reading researchers have assiduously explored the importance of vocabulary and text structure in reading comprehension, as well they should; these are important aspects of language that have been found to facilitate the ability to understand text. But between these two linguistic extremes (the smallest chunks and the largest), there is the seemingly unloved sentence.

Correlational studies have long demonstrated that one’s ability to negotiate the meaning of sentences is connected to reading comprehension. This connection has been shown by comparing performances with texts that vary in their sentence complexity (think of all the studies of readability), by correlating the results of grammar tests and reading comprehension tests, and by evaluating good and poor reading comprehenders’ ability to understand particular oral sentence structures (as in the recent study, that explored passive and active sentences). Sorenson and colleagues reported that passive sentences were markedly harder for fifth graders to understand.

Despite the long history of such research, that has not translated into substantial efforts to improve students’ comprehension through sentence instruction.

Part of the reason for that may be due to the long-noted failure of explicit grammar instruction to improve writing quality or reading comprehension (e.g., Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, & Schoer, 1963). If grammar instruction doesn’t help, then why pursue the issue?

At one time, I would have agreed with that. I can’t say I took to formal grammar instruction much as a boy, and in fact, I considered it to be quite a pain in my nether reaches. As children we were tortured with sentence diagramming exercises that I still don’t really understand when one gets much beyond the declarative sentences of the Hemingway variety.

But I’ve come to believe that the issue is more subtle and that the expectation that general grammar instruction should enhance reading or writing for native speakers is somewha simplistic. Readers must be able to understand sentences, but they must do so like proficient language users, not linguists. If a student can construct sentences that make sense and tease out the meanings of those sentences they confront in texts, then I don’t care much whether they can explain the difference between an infinitive and a participle or know what a gerund is.

I’m not rejecting the value of formal grammar instruction altogether either. It clearly helps when one is studying a second language, at least with regard to sentence constructions that differ across languages. For instance, in English a simple sentence may follow the sequence: Subject – Verb – Direct Object… while in French, it would be Subject – Direct Object – Verb. It can help to have somebody point that out.(If you’re French and trying to learn English you don’t want to say, “John him called”).

Steve Graham helpfully pointed out in his meta-analyses on writing instruction that while formal grammar had a negative effect size (meaning the comparison groups outperformed the grammar groups), unlike the other approaches to instruction, grammar was always in the role of control group. What this means is that grammar was never tested in a circumstance in which the researchers were striving to make it work. All the new materials, professional development, classroom visits, and the like were showered on the alternative approach being touted by the researchers. Perhaps if someone set out to make formal grammar teaching work, it might fare better in such studies.

But even if not, it strikes me that instruction in how to make sense of sentences could play an important role in reading comprehension.

We don’t monitor students’ comprehension of text especially closely. Oh, we evaluate comprehension both formally (e.g., standardized tests) and informally (e.g., classroom discussions, teacher questions). But we aren’t especially attentive to the potential sources of the misunderstandings. Where did the students go wrong?

If we recognize that students may struggle with sentences written in the passive voice, then it would behoove us to teach reading with some texts that use this difficult construction. Our monitoring of student success in this case would not simply pursue general questions about the ideas in the text. They would zero in on the ideas expressed in those passive voice sentences to see if that was part of the problem. Obviously the same could be done with all kinds of grammatical constructions (several problematic ones have been identified in the research literature).

When students fail to understand such sentences, it would make sense not just to tell them they got it wrong. We’d want to show them how to make sense of those kinds of sentences. A student who easily understands, “The cat chased the dog” may be confused by, “The dog was chased by the cat.” Teaching students to keep their eyes open for that kind of sentence and how to either translate it to its active form or to question who was doing the chasing seem to be in order.

Of course, that kind of teaching cannot be beneficial in an instructional environment in which students are protected from language complexity (e.g., the instructional level). If students are to spend their instructional time reading texts they can already understand easily, then teaching them to make sense of complicated sentences won’t improve their performance and kids will soon learn to disregard what for them would be unproductive teaching.

We do something like this with vocabulary; intentionally introducing words we think students may not know and supporting them with vocabulary instruction. (As with grammar, the value of such instruction varies to the extent that comprehension turns on the meaning of those words. Vocabulary instruction has greater effects when comprehension is evaluated with texts containing the taught words than with texts that don’t).

Reading instruction should intentionally place students in situations in which their understanding of a text will depend upon their ability to surmount some particular conceptual or linguistic barriers. As noted, vocabulary instruction often does that. We should also be doing it with morphology, sentence grammar, cohesive links, text structure, and the like.

For the want of a word a sentence was lost;

For the want of a sentence the text was lost;

For the want of a text the learning was lost;

For the failure of learning the kingdom will truly be lost.

Reference

Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N., & Deacon, S. H. (2020). Not all sentences are created equal: Evaluating the relation between children’s understanding of basic and difficult sentences and their reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1037/edu0000545

I’m confused. I’ve heard you say that we should teach phonemic awareness and letters simultaneously. Other “experts” say that phonemic awareness is strictly an auditory skill and that including letters slows children’s learning. Help!

I have some children who, no matter what, don’t seem to be making any progress with phonemic awareness. These three are the only ones who have not progressed to phonics instruction. What should I do?

Shanahan’s response:

This is one of those, “Do we follow theory or data” questions. I’m a data man, myself.

Many educators tout the idea that phonemic awareness (PA) is an auditory skill and that it, therefore, must be learned auditorilly. And, indeed, there are many people who see learning to read as a rigidly sequential exercise… progressing unerringly from phonemic awareness to decoding to text reading fluency to reading comprehension to writing – accomplish one and then you’re prepared to take on the next.

All that makes sense.

Or, it does, at least, until you start teaching 5- and 6-year-old children and see how their learning actually progresses. That’s why studies of reading suggest more complicated lines of development.

The reason I say that it makes more sense to teach phonemic awareness with letters than without is because research shows that instructional routines that do that end up with greater success (NICHD, 2000). It is also true that studies find that when young children engage in activities like invented spelling their phonemic awareness tends to improve. That’s weird, from a theoretical view, since invented spelling depends upon children’s knowledge of letters, a supposedly later developing skill. (David Kilpatrick says that the instruction in those PA studies didn’t start with letters – they used counters and such —but over time they replaced these with letters. That replacement appears to matter.)

Studies of preschoolers and kindergartners have even found efforts that integrate phonemic awareness and phonics instruction to be effective (NELP, 2000).

How can we teach higher level or later developing skills and facilitate foundational or earlier developing ones?

Several years ago, I raised these questions myself with Linnea Ehri, one of our true experts in beginning reading development. Her thoughtful response is in close accord with data:

“Rather than a line [between PA and decoding], I would draw a recycling circle (like a slinky?) by adopting a developmental perspective. Auditory PA that involves teaching children to analyze syllables and initial sounds including articulatory gestures in words begins the process that paves the way for entry into benefiting from phonics instruction and letter name/sound learning. Auditory PA helps children detect the critical sounds in letter names and in pronunciations of words when they practice using letters to represent sounds in words in invented spelling tasks. Practice at inventing spellings improves their PA and their movement into word reading and spelling and ability to benefit from phonics instruction. Learning grapheme-phoneme mapping skill to read and spell in turn improves their PA. So PA and phonics skills and instruction are reciprocally intertwined as children acquire PA, spelling, sight word reading and decoding skills.”

Foundational skills help readers to progress with higher level ones. That means phonemic awareness facilitates decoding and spelling. However, trying to apply phonemic awareness within decoding and spelling refines and extends that ability. The payoff might be greater in one direction (from the simpler to the more elaborate skills), but it definitely goes both ways.

The esteemed Dr. Ehri isn’t the only scientist to recognize the reciprocal nature of reading skill development. Charles Perfetti, Isabel Beck, Steve Graham, Charles Hulme, S. Jay Samuels, Sally Shaywitz, Julie Washington and many others have all written about it. Perfetti and Beck’s, “Phonemic knowledge and learning to read are reciprocal” is an oft-cited example.

Studies have revealed the impact of decoding, spelling, and word reading on phonemic awareness; the impact of morphology and oral reading fluency on decoding ability; and the impact of writing on reading comprehension. This reciprocity has been found in longitudinal correlational studies and in instructional studies.

In the case of phonemic awareness, trying to perceive the sounds within words can be difficult. If you have any doubt about this, you should listen to a foreign language; try to count the words. Good luck!

Having a visual representation can help, however. Eventually you need to perceive the sounds by ear alone, but the support of the eye can help facilitate the accomplishment of that.

I suspect it’s the same with the other well-known examples of reciprocity. The higher skill somehow supports the lower one. For instance, morphology may help with decoding because it tips the learners off to some of the meaning-bearing structures within words. Fluency may contribute to decoding through greater development of the automaticity required to do more than decode lists of words. And, when someone tries to write a story, they use what they’ve learned from reading to do that. But that effort to construct a story could sensitize them to more subtle aspects of structure that enhances their reading comprehension.

So, include letters in phonemic awareness work, but remember that students have to get to the point where they can perceive those phonemes by ear alone.

Even more importantly, don’t fall for the idea that the literacy components are learned one at a time in sequence. Good literacy instruction in the early grades is going to focus on decoding (both phonemic awareness and phonics), oral reading fluency (and, initially, things like finger point reading), reading/listening comprehension (including vocabulary), and writing (including spelling). Not one at a time, but all of them in every kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms.

That means get those kiddies who are still lagging in PA into a good phonics program; it’s time.

Here is a short list of studies illustrating the reciprocity described in this posting. It is meant to show how common such findings are, but it is not anywhere near a comprehensive list.

Partial Listing of Studies that have identified reciprocity in learning to read:

Conrad, N.J., Harris, N., & Williams, J. (2013). Individual differences in children’s literacy development: The contribution of orthographic knowledge. Reading & Writing, 26, 1223-1239.

DOI 10.1007/s11145-012-9415-2

Deacon, S. H., Benere, J., & Pasquarella, A. (2013). Reciprocal relationship: Children's morphological awareness and their reading accuracy across grades 2 to 3. Developmental Psychology, 49(6), 1113-1126.

Hulme, C., Zhou, L., Tong, X., Lervåg, A., & Burgoyne, K. (2019). Learning to read in Chinese: Evidence for reciprocal relationships between word reading and oral language skills. Developmental Science, 22(1), 1-11.

Martins, M.A., & Silva, C. The impact of invented spelling on phonemic awareness. Learning and Instruction, 16, 41-56.

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

National Reading Panel. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

O’Leary, R., & Ehri, L.C. (2019). Orthography facilitates memory for proper names in emergent readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1), 75-93.

Perfetti, C. A., Beck, I., Bell, L. C., & Hughes, C. (1987). Phonemic knowledge and learning to read are reciprocal: A longitudinal study of first grade children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 33(3), 283-319.

Puranik, C., Branum-Martin, L., & Washington, J.A. (2019). The relation between dialect density and the codevelopment of writing and reading in African American children. Child Development, 91(4), 866-882.

Schaars, M.M.H., Segers, E., & Verhoeven, L. (2017). Predicting the integrated development of word reading and spelling in the early primary grades. Learning and Individual Differences, 59, 127-140.

Sparks, R.L., Patton, J., & Murdoch, A. (2014). Early reading success and its relationship to reading achievement and reading volume: Replication of ’10 years later’. Reading and Writing, 27, 189-211.

Tong, X., & McBride, C. (2017). A reciprocal relationship between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. Learning and Individual Differences, 57, 33-44.

Wadsworth, S.J., DeFries, J.C., Fulker, D.W., Olson, R.K., & Pennington, B.F. (1995). Reading performance and verbal short-term memory: A twin study of reciprocal causation. Intelligence, 20, 145-167.

Over the past few weeks, I'e fielded many questions about testing – from policymakers and teachers. Here are a couple of examples: 

1.     Should schools lower grade level benchmark reading expectations due to lost instructional time during the pandemic? Please advise ASAP.

2.     A question that keeps coming up is, if a student cannot read grade level text on their own, can they then listen to the text and answer the questions on an assessment in order to be considered "meeting" reading standards 1-9 in grades 2-5 since there is a specified Lexile band for those grades through standard 10?

Shanahan response:

Over my career I’ve worked on many tests (e.g., PARRC, ACT, NAEP, SAT, and various state tests and commercial tests, too). I have also done research on classroom testing, including informal reading inventories and cloze tests. Despite that, I think we overdo it with testing. I’m not just mouthing the usual complaints about intrusive accountability tests, but I think we do more classroom assessment than necessary as well.  

Nell Duke and I were on a podcast for the National Association of School Boards recently and a question about state tests came up. Both Nell and I were unified in our opinion that given the terrible disruptions to education this year, annual accountability testing should be suspended this time around. 

There are several reasons for not bothering with that kind of testing right now. The most persuasive is that instructional time is at a premium. Too much instruction is being lost. Devoting any instructional time to accountability assessment at this time would be profligate.  

We should forego next spring’s accountability tests. But we also should be prepared for an early round of testing at the beginning of the next in-person school year (Fall, 2021?) to provide schools with worthwhile information early on. Summative data this spring won't help, but formative data early the next school year would.

But it isn't just policy makers who are concerned about evaluation. Teachers and principals seem to be at sixes and sevens over classroom testing. How do we test over Zoom? Should we test at all? How do we interpret the tests? Should we lower our standards?

To tell the truth, though I’ve tested hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of students, I’ve never done so from outside a classroom. I think, with sufficiently high quality equipment, I could test students’ oral reading at distance – and, yet, teachers I respect are divided over the matter. Those who've tried tell me they don't trust the results, while others are more confident. These tests have not been validated under current circumstances. We should be able to figure out that one -- how to evaluate performance at a distance - but we may take longer than the Pennsylvania primary.

I’m less sanguine about other kinds of at a distance testing, since kids can figure out work arounds to avoid having to know what the tests are evaluating.

Of greater concern, is that many schools have lost sight of the purposes of these classroom tests... either to offer predictions about students' ultimate success (so we know whom to give extra resources to) or to provide benchmarks that show where students are right now so we'll know what should come next. The introductory questions above, I suspect, are driven by concerns over fairness. In other words, the teachers are treating these screening and monitoring tests as if they were high stakes assessments like the ACT or SAT.

Imagine if physicians decided that their diagnostic tests had to be interpreted according to such notions of fairness. "Mrs. Jones the results of your mammogram would usually be concerning. But since we are in a pandemic, I'm not going to recommend a biopsy;the disease might not have been this advanced without all the stresses that you have been under. I think it would be fairest if we treated this as a less advanced tumor and just not worry about it right now."

We have a word for such notions of "fairness" -- malpractice.

Schools often evaluate students' early reading performance using DIBELS-style measures. The benchmarks of such tests are intended to be diagnostic... "Oh, Johnny still is having trouble with phonemic awareness, I'd better continue PA instruction for him, but the rest of the class can move on" or "The test indicates that Janie is struggling with decoding, especially with the vowels... I'll teach those next." Adjusting those benchmarks may make everyone feel good: "Johnny and Janie might not be doing as well as in the past, but doggone it, it's not their fault that we haven't had as much teaching as in the past." 

Those kinds of benchmark adjustments can only disguise the fact that Johnny and Janie need additional tuition with particular reading skills. The kids and teachers might --for now-- feel great about the results of tests with lower benchmarks. Unfortunately, that good feeling will be temporary, a sugar-high if you will. The test is telling you there is a problem. Accepting a lower score as being sufficient, just will hide the problem and keep it from being addressed.

Those reading text level goals were not established with the idea that they'd be easy for everyone to reach in a certain time period. No, they were aimed at lsetting a long term continuum that, if students advanced along successfully, would result in adequate proficiency. Adequate here means that students could enlist in the military, enroll in higher education, or get a job -- and thrive.  

I doubt very much that colleges, employers, or the military intend to lower their standards down the road because of today's pandemic. Accordingly, we must do everything possible to get students to the levels of achievement that will allow them full access to our society's economic, civic, and social benefits.

The idea of concluding that students can read well enough if they have strong listening skills is more of the same and merits the same response. The reading comprehension standards require that the student be able to the read texts independently. Our job is to teach them how to make sense of text at those levels of difficulty indicated in the standards.

I have no problem with reading accommodations for learning disabled or non-English speaking students. If I want to find out what they know about science, their inability to read English could lead me to incorrect conclusions. But, if the point is to teach students to read, then teaching them to listen instead is a rip off.  

This pandemic is an educational disaster for many of our boys and girls. Lowering our standards and our efforts to accomplish them will not make it better for the kids; it will just reduce the likelihood that we'll do what is necessary for their success. Please don't lower those benchmarks.

It seems there is currently a focus on intervention solely for the word recognition side in the early grades. The explanation is that most students who struggle, struggle with decoding, and I of course agree. However, I would add that many of those also struggle with language comprehension, with language development deficits that are measurable and observationally apparent in conversation with them as preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders. The district’s current assessment model pretty much excludes them any assessment of language comprehension. I was told that one of the main reasons that children struggle later with reading comprehension is from the missed opportunities for language development from lack of ability to read over the elementary years. So, if they can learn to read, their language comprehension will improve. While I do not disagree that this occurs (Matthew effect...), I do disagree that this is the main source of the language comprehension issue, when we can see it clearly before hardly any of the children are readers. Can you help me?

Shanahan responds:

I love the broad strokes of the “simple view of reading.” It eschews detail and embraces the big picture. According to the model (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) – and its predecessor (Venezky, 1972) – there are two things that determine reading comprehension. There is decoding (the translation of print to pronunciation) and language comprehension (the ability to understand oral messages). Readers can make sense of text to the extent that they are able to render oral language from print but then they must be able to understand that oral language.

If I can’t decode well then there won’t be much of a message to work with at all. We must make sure kids can decode proficiently. Nevertheless, no matter how well I decode, whether I comprehend depends on my language abilities.  

For instance, consider this French sentence:

“Le président américain donne du fil à retorde aux traducteurs et aux journalistes français.”

I can read that sentence aloud adeptly enough that my French friends will know what I’m saying. My French decoding may not be perfect, but it’s more than serviceable.

Despite my adequate decoding, my understanding falls apart due to my ignorance of what “donne du fil à retorde” means. I can pronounce all of the words, and I know the sentence is about President Trump and that he was giving something to French translators and journalists. But that gap in my knowledge of this French idiom is determinant.

It should be obvious from this example that there are two places reading can go wrong: in the decoding or in the language.

Reading is more complicated than the simple view makes out because decoding and oral language each include multiple components themselves, each differing in their scopes and developmental trajectories. Decoding includes knowledge of letters, phonemic awareness, orthographic-phonemic relations, spelling patterns, conditional rules, exceptions, fast mapping or statistical sampling, and so on. While language includes vocabulary, morphology, syntax, cohesion, discourse structure, world knowledge… well, you get the idea.

Nevertheless, it is broad strokes of the simple view that make it so useful. As a policymaker it helps me frame a response to children’s learning needs. Some kids will have trouble learning to read, and that there are two distinct categories of reading failure suggests the need for two distinct categories of intervention.

That makes sense… and yet… that isn’t necessarily what is really happens in many schools. Most young struggling readers – no matter the etiology – will exhibit problems with decoding. This is because, initially, decoding is what is needed to make the process go.

Accordingly, most schools send in the decoding/fluency cavalry early on when there’s trouble.

But it’s different with oral language. Language deficiencies may not even be noticed until the students can decode reasonably well and the text demands begin to outstrip their language attainment, even though studies suggest these language problems to be long standing (Catts, Compton, Tomblin, & Bridges, 2012).

More recently, Mercedes Spencer and Rick Wagner have published an impressive array of studies focused on struggling readers with average decoding ability (Spencer & Wagner, 2017; Spencer & Wagner, 2018; Spencer, Wagner, & Petscher, 2019).

Obviously, we are in need of two streams of intervention: one focused on decoding and one on oral language.

Unfortunately, the powers that be in many districts have decided that early language gaps will best be addressed by decoding interventions alone. It’s an interesting theory, but one far from proven and the evidence suggests that this is a bad way to go.

There are three possible explanations for how this all works:

(1)   Language problems show up early but are not detected by teachers and psychologists focused on ferreting out decoding problems.

(2)   Language problems are latent, not expressing themselves until children are 8- or 9-years-old (an age by which most kids have gained adequate decoding skills).

(3)   The language problems are late developing but result from the diminished amount of reading caused by the early decoding problems (the so-called Matthew effect).

Which is it?

The honest answer is that we don’t know.

For instance, my friend Herb Walberg postulated the Matthew effects idea long ago (Walberg & Tsai, 1983) based on a biblical quote taken from the Book of Matthew (“the rich get richer”). In reading, that means the kids who read earliest get to read more which builds their vocabulary giving them a growing advantage over the early strugglers (Stanovich, 1986).

This theory is accepted as fact by many, and there are some data that are consistent with the idea. However, there is at least as much evidence that challenge the Matthew effects contention (e.g., Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Pfost, et al., 2014; Protopapas, et al., 2011; Protopapas, et al., 2016).

What have school leaders done in the face of such uncertainty? In far too many cases, they have replaced the simple view of reading with what I’ll call the “even simpler view of reading.” According to them, one can bake this cake with a single ingredient, decoding. Get that right, and the rest will follow.

I suspect that such dogged single mindedness is one of the reasons that reading problems persist into high school for so many of these early strugglers. Increasingly evidence is suggesting that these significant language delays are there from the start (Catts, et al., 2012; Morris, 2020).

It seems to me that a high-quality multi-tiered response systems shouldn’t play dice with the universe. We shouldn’t be saying, “Gee, a large percentage of struggling readers have trouble with decoding, so let’s have interventions that teach decoding.” No, instead we should be saying that “there are two major abilities required for reading success and that we must have interventions aimed at both areas of need.”

According to the simple view, reading development is two-pronged. Success in developing strong readers is going to need to be two pronged as well. Take a look at some of the cool early language assessments and materials Trina Spencer and Howard Goldstein have developed (Brookes).

References

Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. (2011). Matthew effects in young readers. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 44, 431-443. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219411410042

Catts, H. W., Compton, D., Tomblin, J. B., & Bridges, M. S. (2012). Prevalence and nature of late-emerging poor readers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(1), 166–181. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025323

Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104

Morris, R. (2020). Predicting response to reading disabilities intervention. In Grigorenko, E.L., Shtyrov, Y., & McCardle, P. (Eds.), All about language. Baltimore: Paul Brookes Publishing.

Pfost, M., Hattie, J., Dörfler, T., & Artelt, C. (2014). Individual differences in reading development: A review of 25 years of empirical research on Matthew effects in reading. Review of Educational Research, 84(2), 203–244. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654313509492

Protopapas, A., Parrila, R., & Simos, P. G. (2016). In search of Matthew effects in reading. Journal of learning disabilities, 49(5), 499–514. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219414559974

Protopapas, A., Sideridis, G. D., Mouzaki, A., & Simos, P. G. (2011). Matthew effects in reading comprehension: Myth or reality? Journal of Learning Disabilities, 44(5), 402–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219411417568

Spencer, M., & Wagner, R. K. (2017). The comprehension problems for second-language learners with poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding: A meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Reading, 40(2), 199-217. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12080

Spencer, M., & Wagner, R. K. (2018). The comprehension problems of children with poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 88(3), 366–400. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317749187

Spencer, M., Wagner, R. K., & Petscher, Y. (2019). The reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge of children with poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding: Evidence from a regression-based matching approach. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000274

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360–407. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.21.4.1

Venezky, R.L. (1972). Language and cognition in reading. Technical Report No. 188. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin.  ERIC 067 646 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED067646.pdf

Walberg, H. J., & Tsai, S.-L. (1983). Matthew effects in education. American Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 359–373. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312020003359

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 – including through our charitable giving. Be generous, be safe, and have a wondrous and literate holiday.

Links to these 6 worthy charities are on my website year-round: https://shanahanonliteracy.com/charities

Book Trust. Book Trust attempts to empower kids from low-income families to choose and buy their own books, all through the school year. They focus on children’s book choice and ownership. Studies show that children are much more likely to read books that they choose. Over a school year, the percentage of Book Trust students reading at grade level jumps from 31 percent to 59 percent. During the past year, Book Trust has served 57,000 children in 21 states – and they have distributed almost a million books in that time.

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.

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.

United Through Reading. United Through Reading (UTR) unites military families facing physical separation by facilitating the bonding experience of reading aloud. In more than 200 locations worldwide on land and at sea, United Through Reading offers military service members the opportunity to be video-recorded reading books to the special children in their lives. The videos allow families to share story time during periods of physical separation. Services can be accessed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year through the United Through Reading App. Veterans and their families are also encouraged to participate in UTR. When service members read to children they love and send the video recordings and books home: family morale is boosted; separation-related stress is reduced; family reading routines are maintained; children remain connected to their service members, making family reintegration easier; and children's literacy and language skills develop! 

Worldreader has designed a reading program to help vulnerable children from pre-K through 5th grade keep reading. The benefits of supporting these children will be felt for years to come. At the touch of a finger, children and their families can access a rich collection of global digital titles anytime, anywhere via any mobile phone. Keep Children Reading allows students to read around the world with 100+ age-appropriate books curated from international and US publishers. Through push notifications and messaging, students will be encouraged to read. After completing key milestones, students will receive certificates or rewards.