I’m a second-grade teacher. Our school has purchased a reading comprehension program that emphasizes visualization. Is that such a good idea?

Shanahan Response:

Great question. This is one that I can answer with a “yes” or “no.”

I’m not answering like a politician, it just sounds like it.

My affirmative and negative isn’t an attempt to be on all sides of an issue. It’s just a recognition that visualization has been a successful instructional strategy… at some grade levels; and not so much at others. That means that program might be a good purchase for some of the teachers, but maybe not for you.

Basically, the idea of visualization is to get students to translate the text information into a mental image. Of course, doing that means the readers have to think about the text ideas (and that’s a plus) and if they are successful in seeing the information in their heads that should improve memory for the information (a second plus).

Visualization was also one of the comprehension strategies that was found to improve reading comprehension. The average effect sizes were not as high as for some of the other strategies evaluated but the results were positive and, truth be told, there are strong theoretical reasons to promote visualizing.

Some reading theories (specifically, dual coding and embodied cognition) maintain that visualization – and the forming of other kinds of sensory representations during reading – are an important part of the comprehension process itself. In other words, visualizing doesn’t help comprehension, it is part of the comprehension process.

There is plenty of evidence showing that better readers are better visualizers.

Authors provide linguistic information through their writing. They create texts. Readers, to comprehend those texts, must translate this information into what the researchers refer to as a “situation model.” This situation model is just a mental representation of the text, and it includes both linguistic info from the text and the reader’s own prior knowledge.

There is strong agreement that these mental representations are not linguistic, or more accurately, not linguistic alone, and that situation models include all modalities (visualization includes mental pictures and sounds and smells and tactile information).

It gets really interesting when you look into the neurological studies of all of this.

These studies look at the localities of brain activation while people are reading or listening to brief texts. With older proficient readers (8-11 yrs.), they activation in the occipital regions of the brain suggesting visual or imaginative processing in the right hemisphere. But this kind of activity is not evident with 5-7-year-olds when they are reading. Instead, their brains appear to be more focused on coordinating the visual representations of the words with phonological processing. On the other hand, when listening to narratives, these younger students evidence active processing in the occipito-temporal regions. This neural activity during listening was even predictive of how well these students would read later.

That means that visualization is evident in reading in grades 3-5, but not so much in grades 1 and 2, at least when it came to reading. There appears to be a shifting of neural activation when reading from ages 5 to 11. (Maybe that’s why illustrations are so important to younger children; the text provides the pictures they can’t or won’t create on their own.)

I mentioned that engaging kids in visualization can lead to improvements in their reading comprehension. The teaching studies are consistent with the brain studies. Basically, visualization improved comprehension in the upper grades but not in the primary grades. Hence, my yes and no answer.

Telling kids to “make a picture in your head” has just not been very effective. When it has worked, it has helped the older kids, not the second graders; and the effects have been relatively modest – it works, just not as well as some of the other strategies.

The versions of visualization that have been most effective have confounded it with an even more effective comprehension strategy, use of text structure. For example, kids are taken through a series of visualization steps that engage them in thinking about the text structure: make a picture in your head of the setting, now see if you can close your eyes and see the character, now see character’s problem, and so on.

So, I ask myself what’s working here? Is it the visualization or the structural guidance? Perhaps both are helpful.

In summary, visualization is a part of the comprehension process, and it is part of how most humans represent information in memory. It becomes part of reading once students have developed sufficient automaticity with the visual/phonological aspects of reading. Personally, I wouldn’t do a lot with visualization for reading in those early years; I’d save that training for when they’re a bit older and more accomplished as readers. With the older kids I would try to link their visualizing to structural properties of text (hedging my bets).

References

De Koning, B.B., & van der Schoot, M. (2013). Educational Psychology Review, 25, 261-287.

Horowitz-Kraus, T., Vannest, J.J., & Holland, S.K. (2013). Overlapping neural circuitry for narrative comprehension and proficient reading in children and adolescents. Neuropsychologia, 51, 2651-2662.

Sadoski, M., & Paivio, A. (2001). Imagery and text: A duel coding theory of reading and writing. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Sadoski, M., & Paivio, A. (2004). A duel coding theoretical model of reading. In R.R. Ruddell & N.J. Unrah (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (5^th ed., pp. 1329-1362). Newark, DE: International Reading Associaton.

Sadoski, M., & Paivio, A. (2007). Toward a unified theory of reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 11, 337-356.

Zwaan, R. A. (1999). Embodied cognition, perceptual symbols, and situation models. Discourse Processes, 28, 81–88.

Zwaan, R. A., & Radvansky, G. A. (1998). Situation models in language comprehension and memory.

Psychological Bulletin, 123, 162–185.

Zwaan, R. A., Langston, M. C., & Graesser, A. C. (1995). The construction of situation models in narrative

comprehension: an event-indexing model. Psychological Science, 6, 292–297.

Zwaan, R. A., Stanfield, R. A., & Yaxley, R. H. (2002). Language comprehenders mentally represent the

shapes of objects. Psychological Science, 13, 168–171.

Can you explain the difference between 3P (Pause, Prompt, Praise) and 3 cueing? I know you encourage one and discourage the other, but they seem to be the same thing to me. Help. 

 Shanahan reply:

At Shanahan on Literacy, we strive for consistency. Let’s see if we can get this straightened out.

First, let’s make sure we understand what these two trios are about.

Pause, Prompt, Praise (3P or PPP or P³) is used to guide oral reading practice (Glynn, 2002). Research has shown that having students read challenging texts aloud with support and repetition improves reading achievement (NICHD, 2000). 3P tells the reading partner how to help.

When a reader errs, 3P encourages the listener to pause to give readers a chance to fix the problem themselves. Let the reader get to the end of the phrase or sentence before intervening.

Prompting comes next. The student has erred and done nothing about it. Guidance is needed. In 3P, there are a couple of possibilities. One, tell the reader to look more closely at the word, to sound it out, or to break it up into parts and sound it out. In other words, encourage more accurate decoding. This is great for when youngsters read pony for horse, or only sound the beginning letters.

But if the reader makes a good faith effort to sound out a word and failed, then a different feedback is needed. An example of this is when the reader reads ballet as “ball-et” (rhyming with ball-net). The reader has fully analyzed the orthography, taken account of all of the letters, and come up with a reasonable pronunciation (if you doubt that think of, “bullet”). Telling the reader to sound it out or break it into syllables won’t help much in this case.

Here a meaning-based prompt is needed:  Does that make sense?

The third P refers to praise. If the child does something well, say so. Doing things well includes reading the text fluently, erring and trying to fix it, and using a prompt successfully.

Results from 3P are positive and research shows that teachers who tailor their cues to the students’ reading tend to be most effective (Pflaum & Pascarella, 1980).

Now for 3-cueing systems. The idea here is that word identification is a kind of guessing game, with three different clues or cues.

The cues are orthographic-phonemic (the letters and sounds), semantic (the meaning), and syntax (the grammar of the sentences). The idea is to teach students how to use all of these cues in combination to read words – though often there tends to be a greater emphasis on meaning when teachers do this. Thus, if the student replaces “horse” with “pony” or “automobile” with “car,” proponents of 3-cueing systems may judge that to be close enough since meaning is the goal of reading (though this approach clearly makes a hash of nuanced meaning—horses and ponies aren’t really the same thing).

In the 3-cueing scheme, students are often provided a set of steps or strategies to use when reading. For instance, “Look at the pictures” or “skip the word and reread” or “try a word that makes sense” or “look at the first letter and guess.” In the “ballet” example above, one can imagine a teacher encouraging the child to look at the pictures and “dance” might be accepted.

There are successful instructional schemes that use 3-cueing systems (think Reading Recovery), though the value of that part of their approach has never been tested independently so we can’t tell if it contributes anything to learning.

Studies have shown that students who recognize words by looking at the pictures or trying to use context to guess the word tend to be the poorest readers, however (Stanovich, West, & Freeman, 1981).

So your confusion is most likely arising from that meaning-oriented prompt in 3P. It sure sounds like the same guessing game – and, there is no question, that a teacher could implement it that way.

Guidance to sound pedagogy on this is based in the concept of a “mental set for variability or diversity” (Gibson & Levin, 1975). Mental set refers to our tendency to rely on solutions that have worked in the past. When a toddler knows “doggy”, don’t be surprised if the next 4-legged animal he sees is called “doggy” even if it moos. People try generalizing from past success which can lead to rigidity and overgeneralization – trying to use a particular fixed solution even when it doesn’t work.

When it comes to reading, if I know how to sound out words reasonably well, then my pronunciation of ballet may come out somewhat closer to “ball-it” then to “bal-lay.”

English is a rich and complex language, in part because it borrows so many words from other languages. In this case, the “et” spelling that sounds like /ay/ is a French contribution that comes up a lot in English – ballet, beret, bouquet, chalet, ricochet, crochet, and the homographic buffet (thanks, William the Conqueror).

Given the complexities of the English language, psychologists have concluded that the best readers must develop a mental set for diversity rather than a mental set for consistency.

Good readers have greater flexibility when it comes to decoding words. The reader who learns to expect consistency will pronounce “ball-it” and have no other choice but to turn to meaning to straighten things out. In that kind of uncertain world, looking at the picture and guessing “dance” is probably as well as one can do.

Good readers on the other hand try out a pronunciation, and if that doesn’t make sense, they try another one that is legal in the English language. They use meaning, or the failure to make meaning, as a signal that another pronunciation alternative should be considered.

In 3-cueing, the lack of meaning is not a signal to work through one’s alternative orthographic-phonological choices. It is the guide that is supposed to help you determine what the word is.

In 3P, one could use the meaning guidance in that way, of course. But that’s not what I would recommend. The lack of meaning (does that make sense?) should be supported by further guidance – not to context or pictures – but to pronunciation alternatives.

Such oral reading guidance should be supported by high quality, explicit, systematic decoding instruction.

A terrific phonics lesson would be to explore “et” spellings, comparing /et/ and /ay/words… analyzing them, sorting them, talking about them, spelling them, and so on. That would reveal to young readers these two options for pronouncing words with that spelling pattern.

Another relevant lesson would be stress what to do when the pronunciation that you came up with seems wrong. What are the pronunciation alternatives? Have your tried them?

We want students to depend upon the orthographic-phonological system when reading words. We support that by teaching decoding and through guided oral reading practice. Meaning plays a crucial role in oral reading, but not the role 3-cueing accords it. The point is to develop readers with a mental set for variability… learning that if one alternative pronunciation fails, you must try another (not that if one type of cue doesn’t work, you should try another type of cue).

Good readers flexibly work through alternative pronunciations, relying on what they know about the letters, spelling patterns, and phonemes to guide each of their choices.

Poor readers may use some orthographic-phonemic information when they try a word, but if that fails, they seek ways to solve their problem without reading (like guessing from pictures—that’s not reading, of course, but it might provide a right answer in a pinch, and the social situation of schooling too often rewards getting the right answer over learning).  

Good readers use meaning to determine if they made the right choice – and if they didn’t, there needs to be more analysis of the orthography/phonology. Poor readers use meaning to try to figure out the word, instead of using the orthography/phonology (Stanovich, West, & Freeman, 1981).

We need to teach students about the phonological-orthographic system and its relationship to morphology explicitly so they will have a rich knowledge base available when it comes to alternative pronunciations.

We need to build up statistical sensitivity to these spelling/pronunciation patterns through lots of reading experience (and not just with supposedly “decodable text” – all text is decodable), so students will have some notions about which pronunciation choices are most likely to work (Seidenberg, 2017).

We need to build up a flexibility through how we guide oral reading that encourages students to recognize when a different spelling-pronunciation pattern might be the better choice.   

3P can be a good way to contribute to that progression of learning, as long as the meaning cue is used properly. 3-cueing, on the other hand, is just a bad idea that encourages readers to mimic poor reading rather than proficient reading.

References

Gibson, E.J., & Levin, H. (1975). The psychology of reading. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Glynn, T. (2002). Pause Prompt Praise: Reading tutoring procedures for home and school partnership. London: Routledge.

Pflaum, S., & Pascarella, E. (1980). Interactive Effects of Prior Reading Achievement and Training in Context on the Reading of Learning-Disabled Children. Reading Research Quarterly, 16, 138.

Seidenberg, M. (2017). Language at the speed of sight. New York: Basic Books.

Stanovich, K. E., West, R. F., & Freeman, D. J. (1981). A longitudinal study of sentence context effects in second-grade children: Tests of an interactive-compensatory model. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 32, 185-199.

Can we raise student achievement by teaching subject area content knowledge? I’m concerned about this approach because I work with struggling readers. We know a lot about how to help them learn to read, so I was wondering if there is evidence that teaching “knowledge” to such students really makes any difference. I recently came across a study of a widely touted reading program that is supposed to be better because it emphasizes knowledge building and yet the results weren’t positive at all (See, Gorard, & Siddiqui, 2017).  

Shanahan responds:

In February I go to my doctor for my annual health exam. You know, every 6,000 miles they change the oil, check my points, plugs, and generally make sure that I’m still hitting on all cylinders. Okay, the doctor actually checks my weight, sleep, exercise, alcohol intake, runs some blood tests, and that kind of stuff.

It’s a different experience when I’m there because something isn’t working right. Then the doctor prescribe medicine or sends me to a surgeon for a procedure.

The annual exam leads to general advice, while in the second kind of visit he intervenes.

His advice tends to be based on correlational evidence. Don’t drink too much… more than 1-2 drinks a day increases your risks. Being sedate, adds to that risk. Letting your weight climb above some point is associated with problems, too. And so on.

However, when treating me, he shifts his evidentiary requirements. For this, he requires proof that a treatment can work. No matter the problem, he’ll still proffer those general health recommendations, but he usually wouldn’t rely on them to cure my disorder.

The better we manage our general health, the less likelihood of illness and the easier it may be to treat one. However, a general health regimen is rarely enough to fix a problem.

Reading instruction works a bit like that too. If you want to specifically improve reading ability, then teaching skills like phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension strategies matter. There is much research showing that such teaching has a clear impact on learning.

Nevertheless, beyond this, there are several other actions that seem to be generally positive for reading. For these, there just aren’t studies showing clear and immediate improvement in reading ability. And yet, these things consistently correlate with better reading achievement and can be improved upon. It is not unreasonable to recommend these auto-positive behaviors (e.g., build knowledge, read to your child, encourage reading). Over time these may help particular individuals – though to what degree and how quickly would be impossible to predict.

If young children are struggling to decode and you provide several months of phonics teaching, you’d expect to see clear improvements in decoding and probably reading comprehension and spelling, too. But with something like increasing knowledge, it might take years before any general effects of this would be apparent and those effects would likely be pretty subtle; possible to measure with a population, but not with an individuals or even smaller groups like classrooms or schools.

We’re starting to see longitudinal research results that show positive achievement benefits due to volume of reading (e.g., Torppa, et al., 2019). However, these effects are decidedly small and are taking years to manifest. To me that both suggests the wisdom of encourage kids to read, and the foolishness of replacing reading instruction (which has powerful immediate effects) with free reading time (that doesn’t); just as it would be a bad idea for patients to skip dialysis for daily exercise – that just isn’t the choice.

Your letter is about one of these general abilities: knowledge. In response to your question, there are no studies showing that increasing students’ knowledge of the world reaps general reading comprehension benefits.

There are correlational studies revealing that people with more knowledge tend to be better readers. These studies tend to be badly confounded with IQ and economic advantage. Such studies hold out the possibility that increasing knowledge may improve reading, but those are just possibilities so far.

There is also substantial and unambiguous evidence showing that knowledge use is an important part of comprehension. P. David Pearson has gone so far as to define reading comprehension as “building bridges between the new and the known.” Readers use their knowledge to make sense of texts. That comprehension depends on knowledge, is not proof that increases in knowledge will lead to general improvements in reading comprehension.

Then there is experimental evidence showing that providing particular information relevant to a particular text can improve comprehension of that text. Much of this work is confounded, too. The information provided prior to reading often repeats what is in the text itself. If we tell one group of students and not the other that wombats are marsupials and then have them read an article that says that don’t be surprised if the repetition is advantageous – but this is due to repetition, not necessarily knowledge. Nevertheless, some studies have identified small comprehension benefits due to the provision of non-repeated information (e.g., Sherwood, et al., 1987).

If Mrs. Smith’s third grade spends a year studying wombats, the kids may be superstars when reading on that topic, but what about other texts? Wombat knowledge isn’t likely to improve comprehension of texts on the U.S. Civil War, 2020 elections, or relativity. Perhaps the wombat lessons can be generalized to other topics within animal behavior and development. It should be evident that reading ability. Has to generalize to a much wider range of text; there are just so many possible topics.

We see this problem with vocabulary (Stahl & Faribanks, 1987). Studies find that teaching the words from a text improves comprehension of that text. But the general impact of such instruction – that is, how much better students read with texts not so carefully circumscribed – tends to be much more limited (though it is above zero). Vocabulary is somewhat more flexible across a wide range of topics and texts than knowledge is. Vocabulary has both specific and general impacts, and this might be true of knowledge building as well, though to get the general payoff – the one that lets your read lots of different texts successfully – will require a great deal of knowledge.

What sense do I make of the study of knowledge teaching that you mentioned? The curriculum in question is widely recommended and claims to improve reading by increasing content knowledge. In this case it failed, for which there are three possible explanations.

One is that increasing knowledge may improve comprehension, but this particular program doesn’t increase knowledge sufficiently. It is a failure of the program, not of the theory.

Another possibility is that both theory and program are terrific, but the implementers failed. I don’t love that explanation since it is often used to defend approaches that don’t work, and it ignores the possibility that it was something in the program itself that made it hard for teachers implement. Here we don’t even know that the program works, so blaming the teachers looks like weak soup.

A third possibility. Perhaps increasing knowledge exerts a small general reading benefit across an entire population over a long period of time, but without discernible shorter-term impacts on most individuals or groups. Without large groups to provide adequate statistical power and long periods of time for knowledge levels to build up to sufficiency, there may be no noticeable effect – just like with those health analogies.  

Improving reading ability through explicit and systematic daily teaching of decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension with sufficiently challenging texts is the best way to go since those actions have been proven repeatedly to enhance learning.

Those things are essential. But remember my doctor. There may be more to one’s reading health than that.

Building knowledge may – over a sufficiently long period of time – improve one’s reading. In addition to those explicit reading lessons, let’s encourage and support the development of knowledge. If these efforts aren’t allowed to elbow sound reading instruction aside, they cannot hurt and, in the long run, they might even help. In any event, whether these knowledge increases improve reading comprehension or not, they definitely offer other important benefits (knowing social studies and science can help us live better lives).

Towards those ends we should provide students with abundant opportunities to learn science, social studies, literature, and other subjects in school, and we need to be energetic in our efforts to make sure students gain that knowledge in those classes.

We also should make sure that there are opportunities to gain knowledge from the texts we use for reading instruction. Why read about nothing and why treat such content as nothing? Yes, we want kids to get reading practice in their lessons and we want them to extend their reading skills, but let’s be as assiduous about the learning of content from those texts as we are about mastering the skills.

It is often necessary to pull struggling readers from content classes to address their problems. There may be no alternative to this. In such cases, we should go the extra mile to ensure they are not missing out on the content of those classes (that should be required in IEPs).

Schools also could do a better job of guiding parents with media use. Often, we try to discourage kids from watching television or playing video games. It might be better to keep parents apprised of good choices, choices that may serve to increase students’ academic knowledge.

I suspect we’ll never have clear evidence that teaching knowledge improves general reading comprehension because of the nature of their relationship (it is too highly specific and generally subtle). But just as health care professionals both rely on research-based actions to guide their interventions and on an extensive though less rigorous body of evidence to advice on how to sustain health, we, too, can walk and chew gum at the same time.

If you want to read more there is a recent useful review on knowledge and reading see Cabell & Hwang (2020). It describes examples of other knowledge building interventions that have not delivered what may be expected.

References

Cabell, S.Q., & Hwang, H.J. (2020). Building content knowledge to boost comprehension in the primary grades. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1), 99-107.

See, B.H., Gorard, S., & Siddiqui, N. (2017). Can explicit teaching of knowledge improve reading attainment? An evaluation of the Core Knowledge curriculum. British Educational Research Journal, 43(2), 372-393.

Sherwood, R.D., Kinzer, C.K., Hasselbring, T.S., & Branford, J.D. (1987). Macro-contexts for learning: Initial findings and issues. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1, 93-108.

Stahl, S., & Fairbanks, M. (1986). The Effects of Vocabulary Instruction: A Model-Based Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research, 56(1), 72-110. 

Torppa, M., Niemi, P., Vasalampi, K., Lerkkanen, M., Tolvanen, A., & Poikkeus, A. (2019). Leisure reading (but not any kind) and reading comprehension support each other—a longitudinal study across grades 1 and 9. Child Development, 91(3), 876-900.

I teach kindergarten. We are trying to follow the science of reading. We believe that is the best way to go. However, my colleague and I are disagreeing over one aspect of our program. Should we teach the letters first, the sounds first, or should we teach them together?

Shanahan response:

This is such a practical question and often research fails to answer such questions. That shouldn’t be too surprising since researchers approach reading a bit differently than the classroom teacher. A good deal of psychological study of letters and words over the past century hasn’t been so much about how best to teach reading as much as an effort to understand how the human mind works.

In this case, there is a research record that at least provides some important clues as to what the best approach may be.

There has been some disagreement over whether it is a good idea to teach letter names at all. Back in the 1970s, S.J. Samuels conducted some small studies with an artificial orthography and found that the “letter” names were neither necessary nor useful for college students learning to read this new spelling system. Later, Diane McGuiness (2004) in her popular book argued against teaching letter names because they can be a hindrance in some situations. An example of this were my first graders who figured that “what” must begin with the /d/ sound (using the name of the letter “w” as a clue to its sound, an approach that works often but not always).

Nevertheless, newer and more relevant research has shown that letter names may play an important role in early literacy learning. Those confusions do occur, but more often the letter names facilitate the learning of letter sounds – because the names and sounds are usually in better agreement than in the confusing instances (Treiman, et al., 2008; Venezky, 1975) and letter names seem to be more effective than sounds in supporting learning early in the progression (Share, 2004; Treiman, 2001). One instructional study with preschoolers found that teaching letter names together with letter sounds led to improved letter sound learning when compared to just teaching the sounds alone (Piasta, Purpura, & Wagner, 2010) – and this benefit was clearly due to the combination and not to any differences in print exposure, instructional time or intensity. Another study (Kim, Petscher, Foorman, & Zhou, 2010) found that letter name knowledge had a larger impact on letter-sound acquisition than the reverse, and that phonological awareness had a larger impact on letter sound learning when letter names were already known.

That learning advantage may be something specifically American, however. In the U.S., children tend to learn letter names quite early – look at the number of toys that emphasize this knowledge (type “letter name toys for infants” into Google and you get more than 8 million hits) or the Head Start curriculum. Old fashioned toys like wooden blocks emphasize letter naming, as do the latest technological gadgets. That means that many kids start school knowing at least some of the letter names and that knowledge may be the reason why letters do more to help sound learning, rather than the opposite.

One cool natural experiment compared children in the U.S. with those in England, where letter names are introduced later than letter sounds. There, the kids use their knowledge of sounds to help in the mastery of the letter names (Ellefson, Treiman, & Kessler, 2009). Essentially, the researchers figured that learning that first list of letters or sounds is just arbitrary memorization. Then, when the kids try to learn the second list, they use what they already know to make the task go easier. If I know my letter names, and they give me a clue that will help me learn the sounds, then I do that. On the other hand, if I already have mastered the sounds, then they may be used to facilitate my learning of the letter names.

If English was more like Finnish, with everyone pronouncing the language pretty consistently, and a written symbol for every phoneme in the language, I would conclude from all of this that we only need to teach letter sounds. English is more complicated than that both in terms of the range of dialects and the conditionality of the spellings – particular sounds are often represented by multiple letters (think of the letter “s” in sick, sure, ship, and use). Having a name for the letter separate from the mélange of sounds that it will represent is helpful – it provides some stability to work with. Even in England, by the time kids are taking on English spelling in its full complexity, letter names will usually have been learned. (It should also be pointed out that consistent letter names also provide a useful consistent anchor for the visual forms of the letters as well:

In the U.S., given that many children come to school knowing at least some letter names, it makes the greatest sense to start right there. The studies show that letters are a better base for sound learning in American schools, but they don’t reveal whether this sequence is superior to a combined approach, teaching letters and sounds simultaneously. None of the studies compared this.

My sense of this as a teacher? If kids come to school knowing a bunch of letter names – at whatever age, I would turn my focus to the letter sounds – that available letter name knowledge will be a boon. On the other hand, if they know few letters when we start, I might vary my approach a bit… with the preschoolers I’d focus more on the letter names for a while, and not sweat the sounds. While in kindergarten and grade 1, I’d try to teach names and sounds together. I think there’d be less chance that I’d confuse those kids with a combined approach – their attention spans are a bit longer. I expect that I’ll hear from preschool teachers telling of their success in teaching letters and sounds in combination, and K-1 teachers of their one skill at a time triumphs… but that just means it probably won’t matter much, one way or the other, if you can make your approach work efficiently.

I definitely wouldn’t start with the sounds first, though that doesn’t seem to be a problem in the U.K. I think of the unifying value of letter names as being foundational knowledge, so I feel more comfortable starting there. That approach, however, is an opinion rather than a data-based, science of reading claim.  That opinion is drawn from my experiences in teaching children and in my estimation of my own pedagogical skills (those with greater skills may be able to succeed with less likely bets).

Finally, I’d add something you didn’t ask about. When teaching the letter names or sounds I’d teach students to print the letters. There is no reason to leave printing out of this equation – this added demand requires students to look at the letters more thoroughly, gaining purchase on their distinguishing features and it may increase the chances of the letters and sounds ending up in long term memory. Kids are hands on… they like to stack blocks, fingerpaint, decorate Christmas cookies, sit in water (don’t ask), and put their hands in stuff I don’t even want to think about… they like to mark on paper too, and getting them physically involved in literacy is not a bad thing. Letters then sounds, or letters and sounds together, but writing included with either approach. To me, that’s the winning hand.

References

Ellefson, M. R., Treiman, R., & Kessler, B. (2009). Learning to label letters by sounds or names: A comparison of england and the united states. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102(3), 323-341. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1016/j.jecp.2008.05.008

Piasta, S. B., Purpura, D. J., & Wagner, R. K. (2010). Fostering alphabet knowledge development: A comparison of two instructional approaches. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23(6), 607-626. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1007/s11145-009-9174-x

Share, D. L. (2004). Knowing letter names and learning letter sounds: A causal connection. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 88(3), 213-233. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1016/j.jecp.2004.03.005

Treiman, R., Pennington, B. F., Shriberg, L. D., & Boada, R. (2008). Which children benefit from letter names in learning letter sounds? Cognition, 106(3), 1322-1338. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.06.006

Treiman, R., Sotak, L., & Bowman, M. (2001). The roles of letter names and letter sounds in connecting print and speech. Memory & Cognition, 29(6), 860-873. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.3758/BF03196415

Venezky, R.L. (1975). The curious role of letter names in reading instruction. Visible Language, 9, 7-23.

Shanahan response:

Back in the 1940s, Emmet Betts was trying to figure out how to improve reading instruction. The idea of matching books to students’ learning needs had floated around for decades in the research community. The 1910-1920s had ushered in reading tests and readability formulas, which provided clear scientific evidence that both books and children varied in difficulty (books) and facility (kids).

If variations in text difficulty affected reading comprehension and speed, why not learning as well?

The teacher’s editions of the 1920s usually recommended grouping to adapt reading instruction to varied abilities. The educational journals even offered recommendations on how put kids in the right books.

None of those schemes captured the hearts and minds of many teachers. Some resisted the idea of adapting instruction altogether. Others, who may have embraced differentiation, found the schemes to be onerous and unlikely (such as hiring a psychologist to test everybody’s IQ). When teachers did differentiate, they tended to do this based on their own views of the matter (which likely ranged from thoughtful attention to the kids’ performance to any kind of bigotry one can imagine).

Betts’ effort in this arena was notable both because it was empirical (science over opinion) and authoritative – he was a big shot in the reading field.

Betts’ set out to determine an instructional level, and he did so, at least to his satisfaction. The independent reading level was a side effect or unintentional consequence of this process.  

The theory of the instructional level is pretty simple and fairly attractive: put kids in the right books and they will learn more. But what are the right books?

Betts’ surmised that level of difficulty was the key. On the one hand, if students could read a book well already, there wouldn’t be much opportunity to improve with that. And, if a book was especially hard then they might be discouraged or overwhelmed and that could undermine improvement, too. The trick, according to Betts, was to figure out which texts were in that sweet spot for a given student. His conclusion was that kids would do best if placed in text they could read the words with 95-98% accuracy and with 75-89% comprehension. That’s the scheme I learned early in my teaching career, and all these years later it is the scheme widely recommended by many reading authorities and programs.

My problem with that plan is two-fold. The way Betts chose those criteria (the 95-98%) was nonsensical and more recent studies have shown that matching kids to books like that doesn’t provide learning advantages. In other words, he did it wrong and it doesn’t work.

I’m not forgetting your question about the independent level. But a detour was necessary since that level was just an offshoot or by-product of the instructional level.

Betts thought students would improve their reading most from books they could already comprehend reasonably well. Where this idea came from is unknown. Years later no one could remember, but it’s fair to say he just made it up. So much for the science.

The oral reading accuracy part of the equation came out of a study of a Betts’ doctoral student (P.A. Killgallon) that examined 41 fourth graders to determine how many oral reading mistakes they could make and still reach Betts’ made-up comprehension levels. That’s where the 95-9% came from. Those students could usually err that much in oral reading and still answer 75-89% of the questions.

They never even evaluated whether such book placement was beneficial to the children. That’s why I think it to be a boneheaded approach. It makes teaching relatively easy since with such placements students can already read the instructional book reasonably before any teaching begins.

The independent level was just what was left over. In the Betts’ scheme a book is at a student’s independent level if it can be read with 99-100% accuracy and 90-100% comprehension. He was even particularly explicit about what such a placement meant. Years ago, Catherine Snow pointed out the flaw in the ointment… kids weren’t supposed to be able to learn much on their own from texts that were harder than the “independent level” and books at that level tended to not include much that the kids didn’t already know. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

What that highlights is that there is really no explicit theory of what an independent level is or how it works. If an instructional level placement is supposed to deliver maximum progress in learning to read, then what is it that an independent level promotes? Some possibilities include ease or minimal effort needed to gain information from a text, enjoyment, and, perhaps, a sense of well-being or competence for the reader. 

Unfortunately, research shows that except for the easy reading outcome, requiring students to stay to what they can read independently by these criteria fails to accomplish any of these other goals. Such independent reading usually doesn’t improve reading, provide enjoyment, or encourage a positive sense of self as reader

Not surprisingly, poor readers, when left to their own devices, tend to select books above their reading levels. This isn’t surprising since book availability is often skewed towards harder texts (a third-grade classroom will probably have more third-grade books than anything else). Then there is curiosity; a student who doesn’t read well is still likely to be interested in the same things that other students are. Then there is self-esteem and social standing; most kids wouldn’t be caught dead reading a “baby book.”

No, that is not surprising. What is surprising is that this tendency to frequently select difficult text for enjoyment is evident even with the better readers (Donovan, Smolkin, & Lomax, 2000). Studies find no relationship between student enjoyment of books and the degree to which the books match with their supposed reading levels, and students rarely refer to difficulty when they discuss their selection of books (Halladay, 2008).

We’ve known for a long time that interest can improve student reading performance, though it isn’t entirely clear how much of this is due to background knowledge and how much to motivation – since those tend to be so closely related.

The idea of kids selecting books that are “too hard” often bothers because of their fear that kids won’t read the words but just looking at the pictures. That is a legitimate concern with instructional texts, but not with self-selection. Let kids read what they want to read for independent reading or at least let them give it a try.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t provide guidance and advice. However, many teachers and librarians limit children's reading to this figment of the imagination "independent reading levels" -- instilling a dread of reading and a fear of failure.

“Jimmy, that’s a wonderful book about World War II. Are you interested in that war? I think some of the words might be hard for you – I usually recommend that one for fifth graders, but if you want to give it a try go right ahead. Tell me if you think it is too hard, and I’ll try to help you find an easier one about that war.”

Or, “Patty that’s a terrific story, but some second-graders tell me they find it hard to read. Why don’t you take this book along, too. It’s a really good story, so if you find that one too hard or just don’t like it, then give this one a try and see what you think (or read them both if you like).”

Of course, we want independent reading to support learning and to encourage future reading habits. But text leveling is not an effective way to go.

Encourage students to take on reading challenges – to read books that scare them a little. It’s a good thing to know that you can pursue your curiosity through reading, even if it doesn’t always work out on the first try. There is nothing wrong with discontinuing a book in the middle or to read it more than once to get what it says.

Independence is not a matter of text levels, but of desire and courage. Children often enjoy trying to meet a challenge; for them, easy doesn’t mean fun.

Oh, and the Easter Bunny? You’re too old to believe in either independent reading levels or the Easter Bunny – they’re made of the same stuff.

References

Betts, E. (1946). Foundations of reading instruction. Boston: American Book Company.

Donovan, C. A., Smolkin, L. B., & Lomax, R. G. (2000). Beyond the independent-level text: Considering the reader–text match in first graders' self-selections during recreational reading. Reading Psychology, 21(4), 309-333.

Halladay, J. L. (2008). Difficult texts and the students who choose them: The role of text difficulty in second graders' text choices and independent reading experiences. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University.

"My district is trying to shift literacy instruction to be in line with the science of reading. We are wondering where comprehension strategies fit into Scarborough’s Reading Rope? Inferences and making connections are part of Verbal Reasoning, but what about other skills my students still need to be taught, like understanding and using text structure, summarizing, visualizing, questioning? There is much research to support explicit instruction in comprehension strategies, so where do they fit?  Also, even when our teachers do a good job of scaffolding students’ comprehension of complex text, our at-risk students struggle to independently process texts on tests and with grade-level classroom assignments. What else should we be doing?

Shanahan responds: 

Any model is a simplification and what gets emphasized may shift over time. Hollis Scarborough’s rope (2001) is no exception.

You’re correct that the rope does not include a strand for comprehension strategies though it does indicate that reading comprehension becomes increasingly strategic with development (just as word recognition becomes increasingly automatic).

However, don’t despair.

In her later writings, Scarborough (e.g., Cutting & Scarborough, 2012) explains that reading comprehension includes “executive functioning,” which would be an important strand in that reading rope. Executive function – according to Scarborough, and many other scientists— encompasses working memory, planning, organization, self-monitoring, and similar abilities. She explicitly says that executive functioning involves the ability to use those comprehension strategies studied by the National Reading Panel.

In other words, your school is using an outdated or incomplete version of Scarborough’s model; one that omits a strand that Scarborough – and the science of reading — have found to be fundamental and essential to proficient reading.

Unfortunately, that omission is consistent with the zeitgeist of our time. Many folks, these days, want to relegate comprehension strategies to the ash heap of history. An out-of-date or incomplete model that leaves them out may be reassuring to them.

What do I make of Executive Functioning?

Well, first it requires intentionality… it’s the part of our mind (not brain) that takes agency, that tries to accomplish things, that aims at goals. Too often we treat reading comprehension as if it operated mainly through automaticity – arising spontaneously from reading the words.

But to comprehend we must focus on the ideas. Research reveals that adults often “read” text without attention to meaning. Haven’t you ever found yourself on page 24, not knowing how you got there? This happens with young kids, too, who may get absorbed in reading a text fluently rather than trying to gain information. Reading with the aim of understanding the text is under the control of that little guy in your head wearing the EF (executive functioning) sweatshirt.

Of course, if a text is relatively easy and you’re not too distracted, Mr./Ms. EF doesn’t have much to do. Other times, EF has to get off his/her duff and expend more effort.

That’s where reading comprehension strategies are supposed to come in. Strategies are actions we take to try to solve a problem. Several strategies have been found to improve reading comprehension. For example, summarizing has been lauded in many studies. Students who stop occasionally to sum up what the text has said so far tend to end up with higher comprehension. That makes sense. Anyone who is summarizing along the way is going to spend more time thinking about the ideas in the text than those who just read it; and that repeated rehearsal of ideas can help move them into long term memory.

 That’s how strategies work. They guide the reader to pay attention or to manage memory in ways that increase learning.

That some strategies -- summarization, self-questioning, visualization, using text structure, and so on – have been researched can foster the mistaken impression that strategies are a rather static set of steps that automatically enhances reading comprehension.

That’s unfortunate because strategy use needs to be flexible, suitable to a reader’s goals, the demands of a specific text, and the actual problems being confronted.

Right now, I’m reading what for me is a particularly hard book, Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson. In each chapter, Empson provides a complex and subtle claim about a type of ambiguity he believes is evident in literature. He then provides quotations from poems that supposedly illustrate this form of ambiguity and takes the reader through a mind-numbingly intensive exploration of the vocabulary and syntax of the poem to reveal the role ambiguity plays in literary interpretation.

By the time I’ve read 2-3 pages, my head is spinning. Each part of his argument is so demanding that I lose sight of any connections among them. The four possible meanings of a word may be compelling but by the time I’ve come to terms with them, I’ve totally lost sense Empson’s overall argument. I find myself saying, “I understand that example, but what in the heck is this an example of?”

Picture walks, predictions, visualization and the like would be of no help – and I suspect that’s often how kids feel about their strategy lessons. The comprehension problems I face with this particular text are individual and specific, requiring individual and specific responses. A major barrier in this case is the need to connect ideas that are not obviously connected. This requires a series of strategic steps – rereading, ignoring, moving information into parallel, and so on. You can say that’s a “drawing connections” strategy, but it is certainly not generic.

Students should be taught reading strategies as part of their reading comprehension instruction. But those strategies need to be more purposeful and dynamic than is often envisaged. We need to promote a desire to understand.

The fundamental basis of successful strategy use needs to be an acceptance of the premise that we are trying to know the information in the texts that we read, and that such understanding will not always come easily. When that is the case, we need to make an effort to accomplish it.

With some texts, reading and thinking about the information may be all that is needed. In other cases, we have to try to solve the problems. Those problems may be linguistic (e.g., breaking down a sentence, looking up a definition), organizational (e.g., trying to use the author’s plan to connect ideas appropriate), or conceptual (e.g., connecting the ideas with prior knowledge)so we need to be flexible and responsive.

I said executive functioning is intentional. It is also self-conscious. Good readers are self-aware. They monitor their own understanding. That’s what allows them to make choices to solve the problems.

Too often we have kids practice reading comprehension with relatively easy texts. We guide them through the mindless application of some pre-packaged strategies (mindless in that the students aren’t making choices or responding to the actual demands of the text but are just doing an activity that the teacher is orchestrating).

Those guided reading lessons may appear to be beneficial, since even the low readers appear to understand the texts by the end of the lesson. That supposed success may be more the result of the teacher or other students exposing or revealing information from the text that the low readers weren’t gaining on their own. (That may be why the low readers do fine in your reading group, but not so much in more independent reading situations).

Of course, the texts that we use for such guided reading lessons have usually been selected with the idea of minimizing comprehension problems, rather than trying to expose students to them. To my way of thinking, it’s better to more planfully confront students with potential barriers so they can learn to surmount them.

If you think about it, much of what we do to teach comprehension appears more aimed at developing automaticity than making one’s executive function more flexible and strategic. Keeping difficulty levels low, doing lots of repetitive practice, minimizing conscious decisions, ignoring reflection, and so on can have value in teaching word recognition skills.

Those lesson features are the opposite of what is needed for teaching students how to gain meaning from complex text. Comprehension instruction needs to nurture (1) an intense desire to know, (2) an ability to flexibly take intentional actions towards that goal, and (3) a self-awareness of one’s degree of success in accomplishing it.

That means placing a heavy emphasis on the learning and use of ideas in text even during the reading comprehension lessons. That means creating situations that could lead to failed efforts to comprehend (through the texts and tasks we assign). If the reading is kept relatively easy, then there is neither any reason to develop a strategic repertoire, nor any purpose for reflection or rereading to evaluate the effectiveness of one’s choices or the nature of the difficulties that the text posed.

References

Cutting, L.E., & Scarborough, H.S. (2012). Multiple bases for comprehension difficulties: The potential of cognition and neurobiological profiling for validation of subtypes and development of assessments. In J.P. Sabatini, T. O’Reilly, & E.R. Albro (Eds.), Reaching an understanding: Innovations in how we view reading assessment. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Education.

What are your thoughts on teaching syllable division patterns? I recently came across some new research from Devin Kearns and it made me start thinking about if all the time programs spend teaching syllable division patterns is really justified. If teaching syllable division is not time well invested, what type of instruction would you recommend replacing it with? 

Shanahan response:

I was training for a 500-mile bike trip. Three of the days’ rides would be centuries (100 miles plus). The practice was making my back ache and my knees hurt, but I felt no closer to being able to accomplish those distances. They seemed absolutely impossible. I was so discouraged I I wanted to drop out; there is no shame in knowing your limitations.

But I didn’t quit. I pedaled all 500 miles and was even charging at the end.

What turned things around? I had an epiphany. It dawned on me that I would never be able to pedal 100 miles and that no one else could either. That realization made all the difference. You see, though I couldn’t ride a century, I could easily ride 10 miles. So, to reach my goal, I just had to ride 10 miles 10 times.

If you look at the productivity literature – how to solve complex problems or take on overwhelming challenges – the idea of “decomposition” comes up a lot. The experts say if you want to do something hard break the problem into smaller parts.

That, fundamentally, is the idea of syllabication in decoding. When you confront multi-syllable words, it may help to break them into smaller parts.

It’s kind of like that old joke:

How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

That may seems pretty sensible, but where do you bite?

That’s the problem when it comes to splitting up English words. It isn’t always clear how to divide things and what do you with the vowels once you have bite size chunks?

Syllables matter in English. The consistency of spelling patterns and their relationship to phonemes and pronunciations is determined, in part, by where particular letters appear in syllables rather than where they appear in words (Venezky, 1967), and the perception of vowel sounds (the central element of the syllable) is key to successful early phonemic awareness development (Linnea Ehri has described the perception of the syllable as paving “the way for entre into benefiting from phonics instruction”). The syllable has been found to be an essential unit in phonological processing (Ecalle & Magnan, 2007). In other words, syllables are pretty basic.

I, too, read the Kearns study (Kearns, 2020). You seem to think it says something about whether to teach syllables. I don’t see it that way (a close reading of the study suggests Kearns doesn’t either – and his other work confirms that (Kearns & Whaley, 2019)). Remember Kearns only examined a single category of syllabication patterns (a group governing the pronunciation of single vowels). He found a high degree of reliability in VCCV words (such as rab-bit) and a reasonable degree of consistency in VCV words of two syllables (though that division rule didn’t do so well with longer words). He also reported that there were particular spellings with highly reliable pronunciations within that universe of words (such as “ic” and “wa”). And, that still leaves us with all of the other kinds of syllables such as sion, tion, ble, or a raft of common morphological units that operate consistently as syllables in our language (e.g., un, pre, trans, pro, ing, ed). None of these were the focus of his analysis.

I take it that Kearns was just reminding us that simplistic approaches to decoding instruction that encourage students to expect a simple and consistent set of pronunciation rules would be a poor reflection of the facts of the English spelling system.

Students need to develop a mental set for diversity or variability when it comes to word recognition. Teaching syllabication as a rigid set of “rules” makes no sense, since our orthography doesn’t work like that. Telling students that VCV patterns are to be divided after the first vowel may benefit the reading of words like label or tiger, but it plays hob with words such as statue.

We must remember that the sounding out of words is only intended to provide readers with approximate – rather than exact – pronunciations anyway. It may be possible to determine that the word is statue if you starts with “stay-tue” but it would be infinitely more likely if “stat” was the starting point.

The solution to that problem isn’t proscribing syllabication training, but to make it more conditional (studies like that by Kearns can be useful for informing those curriculum choices). In any event, it is wisest to tell budding readers that when beavering away at an unknown word with that VCV pattern, they should try splitting the word both before and after the consonant, trying out at least a couple of the high probability pronunciation possibilities (there are more choices than those two, with schwa being a frequent culprit – Rosemary Weber (2018) provides an interesting analysis of the role of the schwa in word perception). 

As I’ve written many times before, we can’t determine what works in teaching through descriptive studies of the brain or language. Such studies may help explain why some instructional approaches work or provide valuable insights about new pedagogical possibilities. But they can’t reveal what works – which is what any real science of reading instruction ultimately needs to be about.

There aren’t a huge number of instructional studies to go on, and some of those found that syllable teaching didn’t work. However, an insightful analysis of these studies (Bhattacharya & Ehri, 2004) sorts this out nicely: Those regimes that taught rigid spelling rules for syllabication didn’t improve reading, while those that aimed at fostering conditionality and flexibility in the use of syllables to decode words did significantly better. Also, since that time, syllable instruction studies have been consistently positive in their results (Diliberto, Beattie, Flowers, & Algozzine, 2009; Doignon-Camus & Zagar, 2014; Ecalle, Kleinsz, & Magnan, 2013; Ecalle & Magnan, 2007; Gray, Ehri, & Locke, 2018).

Your letter makes it sound as if teachers spend a lot of time teaching syllabication. I doubt that and hope it isn’t the case. In studies that found syllabication instruction to improve word recognition and reading comprehension, students received only 2-9 hours of teaching (yeah, even 2 hours of syllable training was beneficial).

Given all of this, I would definitely teach syllabication. It clearly has value. Though the amount of such teaching can be pretty limited. Nevertheless, decoding instruction is not primarily or mainly about teaching students to sound out words. Such teaching, if successful, must instigate readers to perceive patterns and conditionalities within words (that’s what orthographic mapping and statistical learning are all about).

So, yes, teach syllabication, but expose kids to the exceptions and teach them to use these divisions conditionally and flexibly. Approach words both through decoding and spelling (see Richard Gentry’s fine work on this). Focus considerable attention on the morphological units within words as well (for this I turn to the book Words Their Way, and to Peter Bowers’ WordWorks Literacy Centre.)

Please pass the elephant.

References

Bhattacharya, A., & Ehri, L. C. (2004). Graphosyllabic analysis helps adolescent struggling readers read and spell words. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 37(4), 331-348. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1177/00222194040370040501

Diliberto, J. A., Beattie, J. R., Flowers, C. P., & Algozzine, R. F. (2009). Effects of teaching syllable skills instruction on reading achievement in struggling middle school readers. Literacy Research and Instruction, 48(1), 14-27. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1080/19388070802226253

Doignon-Camus, N., & Zagar, D. (2014). The syllabic bridge: The first step in learning spelling-to-sound correspondences. Journal of Child Language, 41(5), 1147-1165. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1017/S0305000913000305

Ecalle, J., Kleinsz, N., & Magnan, A. (2013). Computer-assisted learning in young poor readers: The effect of grapho-syllabic training on the development of word reading and reading comprehension. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), 1368-1376. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1016/j.chb.2013.01.041

Ecalle, J., & Magnan, A. (2007). Development of phonological skills and learning to read in French. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 22(2), 153-167. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1007/BF03173519

Gray, S. H., Ehri, L. C., & Locke, J. L. (2018). Morpho-phonemic analysis boosts word reading for adult struggling readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(1), 75-98. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1007/s11145-017-9774-9

Kearns, D.M. (2020). Does English have useful syllable division patterns? Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S145– S160. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.342

Kearns, D. M., & Whaley, V. M. (2019). Helping students with dyslexia read long words: Using syllables and morphemes. Teaching Exceptional Children, 51(3), 212–225. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040059918810010

Venezky, R. L. (1967). English orthography: Its graphical structure and its relation to sound. Reading Research Quarterly, 2(3), 75–105. https://doi.org/10.2307/747031

Weber, R. (2018). Listening for schwa in academic vocabulary. Reading Psychology, 39(5), 468-491. doi:http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1080/02702711.2018.1464531

I recently read an article suggesting that the research findings on reading comprehension have been modified, distorted and ignored (Dewitz & Graves, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.389). What concerned me most is that close reading and the CCSS came under heavy fire. Although the article ends with suggestions for bridging the research to practice gap, it leaves practicing teachers using the CCSS wondering whether to modify their reading comprehension instruction and use of close reading. Since you have written about close reading and the CCSS in other blogs, what are your suggestions?

Shanahan responds:

This article claims that today’s reading comprehension instruction is not in close accord with the science of reading. The commentary presents no new evidence but cites a number of past publications that have showed gaps between what we know and what we do. Nothing for me to disagree with there. I’ve written several articles and blogs about the role of strategies, value of knowledge building, benefits of vocabulary teaching, and so on. Instruction is, indeed, often far afield from the research.

This article goes on to assign blame for the discrepancy: commercial reading programs, public testing, the emphasis on close reading, and educational research itself. This critique isn’t unreasonable – though I’d apportion things a bit differently.

A real plus of the Dewitz and Graves article is that it has the research community shouldering some of the blame. I’d go even further. Researchers have produced too many investigations based on fuzzy reasoning and without adequate concern for applicability.

A particular worry is researchers’ continued failure to distinguish comprehension from learning to comprehend. No small difference that.

One of Michael Grave’s early studies is an example of what I’m talking about (Graves, Cooke, & LaBerge, 1983). That studied examined the influence pre-reading preparation (reviewing background knowledge, previewing key concepts to be presented in the text, preteaching vocabulary) has on comprehension. Students given this support comprehend a text better than do students without preparation.

This tells us nothing about how to make students better readers. Would a daily regimen of reading with lead to better independent comprehension? Possibly, but this study didn’t address that, nor did anyone else. I find it hard to castigate anyone for not scrupulously following such science.

Even when researchers have looked at comprehension instruction, the studies have almost always been so brief (6-8 weeks) it would be malpractice to base 13 years of comprehension instruction on those alone (something Dewitz and Graves properly complain about). Just because two months of a particular approach to instruction improved learning in a study, one should not conclude that several years of such teaching would continue to be either efficient or effective. Again, hard to criticize anyone for not adhering slavishly to that research.

At times I thought these authors were looking back with rose-colored glasses. Like them, I like the idea of having instruction, at times, focus on sets of related texts. However, claims that the science of reading has proven that approach to be best has no real foundation. If you doubt that go back and read the hemming and hawing over it in the Rand Report or look at the texts used in the bulk of comprehension studies (a large part of the research community apparently missed that memo). My point isn’t that there is no benefit to multi-text approaches, just that instructional research hasn’t shown that to be the best way to go – so it’s not the science of reading.

So, what about close reading?

The article says, “At the practical level, the instructional routine of close reading ignored years of research on comprehension instruction.” I don’t believe that to be the case – though I’ve pointed out the lack of research on close reading and have cautioned against investing too much time on it. As last week’s blog entry pointed out, I’m especially bothered by the misinterpretation of the close reading concept. Close reading is not a synonym for reading comprehension.

Unlike Dewitz and Graves, I don’t see close reading as an “instructional routine.” It is, rather, an approach to understanding text. The New Critics never talked about as “reading comprehension” but as a particular form of interpretation or criticism. They were encouraging a particular social response to text – an analytical one that seeks unity between what a text expresses and how it goes about expressing it. Close reading promotes attention to particular content and text features.

Dewitz and Graves cast the disagreement as being pedagogical, with research championing the role of prior knowledge and close reading advocating a laser-like focus on text. There is something to that – hence, my cautions to not overdo the attention to close reading (there are times when external information may be essential and times when it should be eschewed).

But there are interpretive benefits to treating a text as being self-contained object, separate from historical or cultural contexts. It makes great sense to teach students to try to understand a text through consideration of the words and structures in the text, as opposed to doing so with the external information that teachers may provide.

Prior knowledge plays a necessary role in comprehension (research says), and some of the rhetoric used to promote close reading made it sound like that wasn’t the case. However, prior knowledge is a two-edged sword.

Readers must both learn to use knowledge, and to suppress its application. Critical thinking requires that we not allow our assumptions, beliefs, presuppositions, or biases dominate our reading – and studies have shown that in at least some situations an instructional emphasis on prior knowledge may derail the comprehension process by allowing readers’ biases to run amok.

To me the real argument here is over conceptions of reading comprehension not instructional methods. My friend Jan Hasbrouck recently pointed out an apt quotation on this: “there is not...one consistent interpretation across studies of what it means to actually comprehend a text and what the outcomes of comprehension should and could look like..." (Smith, Snow, Serry, & Hammond, 2020).

Reading research has been a bit all over the map when it comes to what constitutes comprehension. Studies have usually ignored the types of outcomes mandated by Common Core; comprehension research hasn’t been much interested in critical reading outcomes, for instance.

Deciding what should be our desired educational outcomes is not an empirical research enterprise – those issues are bound up in our values (implicating philosophy, social class, religion, individual experience, and so on).

The role for science is to help us figure out how best to accomplish these goals.

Thanks for your letter, and Drs. Dewitz and Graves, thank you for your provocative article.

My take-aways: I’d oppose skipping close reading. I want kids to be close readers. I admire people who are close readers and I think teachers should strive to accomplish the standards their states have established.

But take a gimlet-eyed look at what it is that you are teaching. Is it really close reading? Or is it just a traditional questioning scheme that is now labeled that way?   

I would also encourage you to make sure your instruction is consistent with what we have learned from instructional studies. Unfortunately, following the science of reading research in this area is fraught because it mainly shows possibilities without offering any research-based guidance as to dosage or how best to combine these elements.

Comprehension strategy instruction is effective – at least in rather small doses (Shanahan et al., 2010). There are several studies showing that this teaching can be successful in the context of science or social studies instruction (e.g, Duke et al., 2021; Kaldenberg, Watt, & Therrien, 2015; Swanson et al., 2014) -- increasing knowledge and improving reading proficiency simultaneously.

Likewise, there are some studies (Murphy et al., 2009) showing that guiding students in deep conversations about the ideas in text may bear fruit (none specifically focusing on close reading, per se). Having students write about text seems to be similarly beneficial, perhaps for the same reasons. [One study has competed these deep discussions with explicit strategy teaching and found them to be equally beneficial – making it unclear whether we should teach both.]

Comprehension research has been supportive of teaching vocabulary and other aspects of written language (e.g., syntax, cohesion, discourse structure). I’d certainly find a place for that.

Finally, research has been accumulating showing the positive impacts of teaching students with texts that they cannot already read well. That is something required in most state standards but ignored in most classrooms. As with strategy instruction and the like – these studies don’t provide much direction as to the most productive pedagogical schedule of text complexity.

References

Dewitz, P., & Graves, M.F. (2021). The science of reading: Four forces that modified, distorted, or ignored the research finding on reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly. doi:10.1002/rrq.389

Duke, N.K., Halvorsen, A.-L., Strachan, S.L., Kim, J., & Konstantopoulos, S. (2021). Putting PjBL to the Test: The Impact of Project-Based Learning on Second Graders’ Social Studies and Literacy Learning and Motivation in Low-SES School Settings. American Educational Research Journal, 58(1), 160–200. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831220929638

Graves, M.F., Cooke, C.L., & Laberge, M. J. (1983). Effects of previewing difficult short stories on low ability junior high school students' comprehension, recall, and attitudes. Reading Research Quarterly, 18(3), 262–276. https://doi.org/10.2307/747388

Kaldenberg, E.R., Watt, S.J., & Therrien, W.J. (2015). Reading instruction in science for students with learning disabilities: A meta-analysis. Learning Disability Quarterly, 38(3), 160–173. doi.org/10.1177/0731948714550204

Murphy, P. K., Wilkinson, I. A. G., Soter, A. O., Hennessey, M. N., & Alexander, J. F. (2009). Examining the effects of classroom discussion on students’ comprehension of text: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(3), 740–764. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015576

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

Smith, R., Snow, P., Serry, T. & Hammond, L. (2021.) The role of background knowledge in reading comprehension: A critical review. Reading Psychology, 42:3, 214-240, DOI: 10.1080/02702711.2021.1888348

Swanson, E., Hairrell, A., Kent, S., Ciullo, S., Wanzek, J.A., & Vaughn, S. (2014). A synthesis and meta-analysis of reading interventions using social studies content for students with learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 47(2), 178–195.  doi:10.1177/0022219412451131

What are your thoughts about sound walls and word walls? I don't necessarily think these would replace a word wall...do you? The video and training can be found here for sounds walls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxV4Rq1F00M&feature=youtu.be My response was this: I think for oral language, phonemic awareness and phonics the sound walls are awesome, and very helpful visually for beginning readers to unlock how sounds, symbols and words are put together. I think these types of walls would be seen more in PreK, K and maybe 1st grade in the first semester. A word wall can be a broad term that can include multiple ways of highlighting words in the classroom. They can be used to highlight word families, word meaning, word patterns for spelling and for affixes, or even vocabulary terms students have learned. Usually when I think of word walls, one of the main focuses is either patterns, or meaning.

Shanahan response:

Word walls?… man, I saw a lot of word walls during the 1990s. Patricia Cunningham’s “four block” was very popular and many teachers (and administrators) thought the epitome of high quality teaching was best demonstrated by lists of alphabetized high frequency words hanging from the classroom walls (Cunningham, 1991).

To tell the truth, while I like many of Pat’s instructional approaches (like “breaking words”), I was not a big fan of word walls. The two major ways I saw them being used made no sense to me. Teachers, for instance, had students “reading” the words in unison to reinforce sight vocabulary. I put reading in quotes there because I’d watch the kids while they put on these performances. Often, they were mouthing without even looking at the words. Those word walls were an opportunity for the good readers to show off and for the poor readers to languish, a time waster at best.

The other popular use of the word walls was as spelling aides. During writing the kids could look up words they weren’t sure how to spell. In K-2 (the grades in which word walls were so popular), that’s not the best kind of spelling support. I’d much rather have kids try to spell words as they think they are spelled. That gives them a lot of practice with phonemic sensitivity and decoding/encoding and provides the teacher with diagnostic information. Copying spellings does little for building word knowledge.

Then I started to see some other uses for the word wall idea, often with older students. Those newer word walls focused on word meanings and I liked those a whole lot.

Your question, and those sound walls that you asked about got me thinking. As usual, my first concern was, “What does the research have to say?” That’s easy. Research is mute on this issue.

Although word walls have come in and out of fashion for 30 years, there isn’t a single published study on their effectiveness and the handful of relevant doctoral dissertations aren’t particularly helpful. I can’t tell you – based on any direct study —whether word walls, used in any way, are beneficial or not.

That’s important. What I will offer here will be opinions which may or may not be better than anyone else’s.

Let’s think about what a word wall may provide to learners.

A word wall can be just another display of information. Typically, such presentations list important points or reveal relationships (think of a list of classroom rules, a map of the United States with the states labeled, or a diagram revealing the parts of a cell or atom). That kind of thing can be a useful teaching tool, better than a whiteboard since it doesn’t have to be erased.

That, of course, was not what Pat Cunningham was going for. One of the ideas of the word wall was that it was developmental. It accumulated as kids learned – providing a motivational bump (“look at all the words you’ve learned”).

Teachers can provide a list of high frequency words (e.g., the, of, is, are, to) or lists of words that demonstrate particular spelling/ pronunciation patterns (e.g., can, man, pan, fan), morphological elements (e.g., s, es, ed, ing), or semantic relationships (e.g., transportation, air, land, water, boat).

Such displays have value but no more than a typical bulletin board or chalkboard display.

I suspect those sound boards that you asked about are mainly useful as an accompaniment to teacher-delivered instruction (more on that in minute).

Another possible value is that word walls may serve as memory supports; lists of information students might need to turn to in a pinch. The use of word walls as spelling resources are an example of that, as are the manuscript and cursive alphabets that have decorated classrooms over the past couple of hundred years.

Word walls tend to be pretty lousy memory aids when it comes to word reading because they don’t pronounce the words for the kids. If I come to “the” and can’t remember what t-h-e says, looking to the T part of the list and seeing “the” on the wall probably won’t ring any useful bells.

The “sound walls” you asked about are proposed as memory supports, reminders to kids about how to articulate the proper phonemes (language sounds) for the proper graphemes (letters and letter combinations).

They are certainly more supportive of turning letters into sounds than a traditional word wall.

But as a practical memory aid, they’re weak (more useful for the teacher as a guide to presentation than to the kids as a guide to reading words).

I guess the idea would be that when a student comes to a challenging word, he/she could go to the word wall, find the right combination of graphemes and examine the pictures of the articulatory apparatus in the hopes that replicating that shape would lead to proper sounding out of that word.

My take?

That’s far too cumbersome as a memory aid – about as practically useful as the lists of 3-cueing clues that some teachers provide: “if you come to a word you don’t know, look at the picture. If that doesn’t work, read to the end of the sentence…”

The problem is that these steps are neither much like real reading nor practical as efficient scaffolds.

Memory aids need to be easy to access or people just don’t use them.

I love reading French novels on my Kindle because I can look up definitions just by touching the words. I don’t like reading the paper versions of those books because I can get no flow – having to look things up online or in a paper dictionary is likely more efficient than a “sound wall” but even then, too distracting and downright unmotivating.

I’d rather that kids keep track of words that gave them a hard time. Then I can guide them to decode those words successfully.

Beyond being displays that can accompany teacher presentations or memory aids that kids can turn to when in need, word walls have one more possible benefit; a possibility noted in your letter.

Word walls can provide valuable opportunities for learning or self-teaching, if you will. Usually this use of word walls has been reserved for vocabulary (word meaning) learning.

The distinguishing characteristic of this third type of word wall is not between word meanings and word reading, however. No, the feature that makes this third type of word wall so interesting and potentially valuable is the children’s role in constructing them.

These word walls not only develop or grow as new information is presented to the children, but the children do much of the construction work themselves.

A couple of examples should suffice.

The first I observed in a classroom in Joliet, Illinois. Many vocabulary programs introduce words as semantic sets (e.g., words that describe walking or talking or transportation). That approach requires a program with lessons structured in that way. This teacher wanted to emphasize those semantic relationships but didn’t have such a program. She found a way to use word walls to get the kids to structure that knowledge themselves.

Each week as the kids learned vocabulary from their reading anthology, the teacher had her students determine the categories the words belonged to. They posted the words in those categories and as new words were added, they either grouped them into the existing categories or came up with new ones.

This system was terrific because it required students to constantly review the vocabulary they were learning and to make decisions about word relationships (a lot of thesaurus work took place!).

Although the teacher could use this display as part of a teaching presentation or kids could employ it as a memory aid to improve the diction of their writing, its real use was as an opportunity to socially-construct and reconstruct knowledge across a school year.

(In case you wanted to do something like this, the teacher did not have the kids list the words, but they used manila folders as the categories and affixed those to a bulletin board.)

The second example I drew from a journal on science teaching (Jackson & Narvaez, 2013; Thomas, 2016). These word walls are essentially graphic organizers; visual scaffolds that demonstrate the relationships among concepts. Originally, the idea of a graphic organizer was as a previewing technique in which the teacher (or author) would introduce the big ideas and their interconnections prior to having the students read about those ideas. Research back in the 1960s and 1970s found that those kinds of organizers didn’t support comprehension much, but having students construct their own organizers after the reading was more effective.

These science word walls are just that, graphic post organizers constructed by the students as they learn the science content. Thus, the teacher provides categories that organize the information (such as REFRACT – REFLECT, or a MATTER wall that has columns for mass, magnetism, density, physical state). The kids then add visual information to those categories to provide definitions, examples, and explanations of those categories or concepts. They do this by writing their own definitions, drawing pictures, making three-dimensional physical models and the like – using the wall to construct a science vocabulary that structures their understanding of the underlying relationships.

What sense do I make of all of that?

The original idea of word walls and sound walls is to help kids to read words. However, neither research nor logic is very supportive of the ways those tend to be used.

When teachers transform the word wall into a construction site that allows students to explore and demonstrate their understandings of word meanings and their relations, the result is more in line with research.

I suspect that teachers could easily develop those more productive kinds of word walls with a focus on decoding and word reading. By guiding students to build sets of words organized by spelling patterns (e.g., cone, bone, phone, tone), complete with exceptions (e.g., one, done). You might turn to Words their Way for ideas on how that might work (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2019). Or, you could use the kinds of morphological analysis devices (word sums and work matrices) proposed by Peter Bowers since they appear to provide a useful structure for helping kids to think about word pronunciations and meanings (http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/what-should-morphology-instruction-look-like#sthash.3N5pIOzY.dpbs).

Word walls that give kids an opportunity to structure their understanding of a domain (including the domains of spelling, word recognition, and word meaning) – are special and well worth investing in. If you use word walls that way, then build that wall!

References

Bear, D., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2019). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary and spelling instruction (7th ed.). New York: Pearson.

Cunningham, P.M. (1991). Phonics they use: Words for reading and writing. San Francisco: Addison-Wesley.

Jackson, J., & Narvaez, R. (2013). Interactive word walls. Science and Children, 51(1), 42-49. Retrieved April 12, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43176074

Thomas, A. (2016). Naming the solar system: Implementation of vocabulary strategies to improve scientific literacy. Science Scope, 39(8), 45-52. Retrieved April 12, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43827316

My 8-year-old grandson is a second grader who's been reading quite a while now. However, his reading diet comprises almost exclusively graphic novels, some of them intended for much older children, and he has little to no interest in making the transition to text-only books. We were all so pleased that he was an early reader, but now it's very hard to unstick him from the graphic novels he's so fond of. I would love to know your thinking about this and what might be done to bring him to the larger world of books.

Shanahan response:

You’ve raised a great question and one for which there is not much recent research. There have been many studies of kids’ reading interests, but for the most part they focus on what kids are interested in rather than on how to broaden those interests. Those older data suggest that boys about the age of 7 fall in love with comic books (these studies were pre-graphic novels) and that this infatuation peaks at about age 12 (Davila & Patrick, 2010). In other words, this may be a passing fancy, but not one likely to pass soon. The good news is that no one has found any relationship between interest in comics and reading levels, suggesting that such reading probably isn’t doing any harm (e.g., Lamme, 1976).  In the 1940s-1950s there were anxieties about the supposed maladies caused by reading comic books (e.g., insanity, immorality, illiteracy) but none of those panned out. Given the higher quality of the more recent graphic books, I expect those bad outcomes to be even more remote today.

Often, you’ll hear teachers say, “I don’t care what they read as long as they read.”  There is some truth in that. There are decoding or fluency benefits from practice reading. No reason to expect the word reading practice in graphic novels to have any less value than any other kind of reading. Research also indicates that graphic novels introduce a lexicon a bit more sophisticated or extensive than comparable traditional books for kids (Cunningham & Stanovich, 2001). I suspect the visual elements may even help your grandchild to gain access to those challenging words, too (Rothenberger, 2019). I know many graphic novel advocates make claims for the growing importance of graphics interpretation, but I’m not convinced by those arguments. The narrative pictorials in graphic novels look nothing like the graphic displays in scientific and engineering treatises or the complicated tabulations or statistical summaries that are so common in academic and technical texts; those skills are too different to facilitate any kind of transfer.

In the past, a legitimate complaint about comic books was their narrow fictional focus. Let’s face it, kids weren’t going to learn a lot about our social or natural worlds from Archie or Superman. Graphic books, these days, are not really a genre as much as a presentation format. Despite the term, “graphic novels” these newer graphic books are of a broader nature. Kids can still read graphic stories but there are lots of other choices, as well. That means that graphic novels won’t necessarily have to narrow your grandson’s exposure to rich content.

Unfortunately, graphic novel advocates ignore what those books don’t contribute. Despite a wider scope of content, they are still pretty narrow in presentation approach. A narrative told in dialogue supported by pictures is pretty different than what kids will find in traditional texts. Likewise, one hopes their children and grandchildren would develop an ability to sustain the kinds of attention and concentration demanded by the more extensive presentations of traditional text. Reading 15 words and looking at a picture, reading 12 words and looking at a picture, reading 1 interjection and looking at a picture… is quite a different challenge than reading hundreds and even thousands of words at a run. Such intellectual stamina isn’t likely to result from lots of graphic novel reading.

Reading graphic novels may do no harm, but it’s a kind of lost opportunity. Your grandson could be building a more complete foundation for his reading future by taking on a more complete reading diet. 

As a boy, I was a passionate reader, but I focused all of my reading energy on a narrow range of texts (usually baseball and presidents). That kind of topical narrowness has tradeoffs too. In terms of vocabulary, for instance. That focus increases the number of times particular words and phrases are used and that increases the odds of learning them (I certainly understand the “infield fly rule” and know what a “delayed double steal” is all about) – but it also limits the vocabulary the reader is exposed to –Reading about baseball or any other topic is great, but constrained reading habits are a lost opportunity.

That’s what I think is happening with your grandchild. He is getting reading practice without all the benefits that are possible.

1.     Level with him. Don’t vilify the books he loves. Make sure he understands your concerns. He might love ice cream. Nevertheless, I’m sure he knows that a steady diet of ice cream is not good for him. Explain to him the range of books available and the benefits of experiencing a wider range of possibilities. Some he’ll love, some he’ll tolerate. He’ll gain insight from all of them. Letting him know about that will allow him to look out for himself in this regard.

2.     Add magazines to the equation. Boys not only love graphic novels. They often enjoy magazines. There are a bunch available these days and one of things that I love about magazines is they show up regularly in the mailbox. If he is drifting into only reading graphic novels another option shows up regularly. 

3.     Read a book together. Regular books can seem formidable. One way to reduce this sense of being overwhelmed is to make it a social activity. I think for many adults, book clubs and book discussion groups serve this function. With 8-year-olds, a parent (or grandparent) may be the best game in town. Take turns reading chapters to each other – and use it as a great bonding activity.

4.     Reward him for reading other texts. Build these rewards into the reading itself. For instance, If he reads a particular book you might have a video night (the video of that book) complete with pizza and popcorn. Or a book on ice skating or roller skating might turn into a family expedition. A book of science experiments may lead to the creation of a working volcano or a pot of slime.

5.     Gift books may help. Gift books are not always read, of course; neither are they always neglected. A gift book at holiday time or birthday should represent what you hope for him.  

6.     Broaden the graphic books diet. Make sure he is being exposed not just to graphic stories but to graphic history and science as well. 

7.     Try transitional graphic novels. I love Brian Selznick’s books… they are graphic novels, kind of. Their pictures contribute to the narrative, but the stories are not told in dialogue. I have come to think of them as transitional graphic novels. A related idea is to find non-graphic novels that are related to graphic novels, sort of “a make your own transition series.” See, for instance, https://www.provolibrary.com/blog/1769-helping-kids-transition-from-graphic-novels-to-novels 

Good luck.

References

Cunningham, A.E., & Stanovich, K.E. (2001). What reading does for the mind. Journal of Direct Instruction, 1(2), 137-149.

Davila, D., & Patrick, L. (2010). What children have to say about their reading preferences. Language Arts, 87(3), 199-210.

Lamme, L.L. (1976). Are reading habits and abilities related? Reading Teacher, 30(1), 21-27.

Rothenberger, K.A. (2019). The effects of reading graphic novels on the vocabulary acquisition of students with learning disabilities. Unpublished Master’s thesis. Caldwell University.

I agree with you about the need for basing what we do on research.  But what do you do for the things for which there is no or limited research? For example, what about Orton-Gillingham instruction, what is the best way to sequence phonemes for teaching, or how specifically should background knowledge be taught? What about research that is evolving so that we do things a certain way and then refine these (say with Ehri's & Gonzalez-Frey's recent work in SSR) -- what about all the time that we did the practice the other way? There are some topics with so much research that we can’t digest all of it, and other topics with no research or with ambiguous results. How do we follow the research?

Shanahan’s response:

Yes, I’m a proponent of using research to make instructional decisions. Let’s start with that.

First, I want to make good decisions for kids. I seek practices that have unambiguously helped them to learn to read better. I can put more trust in an instructional practice found to be effective again and again under close analysis. If those other educators could make that work, I could too. That’s better than buying what the district next door bought!

Second, I want to be able to act without everything being a big megillah. Reading is a contentious field, and our crazy arguments rightfully cause parents to worry about whether we are making the best choices for their kids. Physicians and engineers don’t always get it right, but they have methods for determining acceptable practice. In reading the serve often goes to the loudest, kids’ literacy learning be damned. Consistent standards of evidence make educational decision making more professional – fostering confidence rather than disgust and despair.

An argument against a research-based approach is that it supposedly undermines teacher authority. Yep, there are some who believe teachers should make all classroom decisions (e.g., Diane Ravitch). That includes the idea that the best education comes from teachers who shrug off the curriculum and author all their own lessons. Think of Robin Williams (Dead Poet’s Society) encouraging kids to tear up the school’s poetry anthology; now that’s inspired pedagogy.

Your question lets the air out that teacher-as-inspired-genius complaint.

The fact is, as with physicians, no matter how explicit or thorough any research-based standards of practice might be, there’ll always be plenty of consequential decisions for the teacher that must be based upon their judgment and experience. As standards of practice in medicine have become more certain through empirical study, physician decision making has actually increased in significance.

I have no problem with the those who improvise when there is no sound research to go on, what else can we do? But I rage at states, districts, and schools that mandate an improvisation as if guessing on scale ensures success.

Variations in practices can help us to determine which choices are best – as long as we’re aware that we’re improvising and pay attention. What kills me is that so often authorities in their fervor to advance an approach (or to defend a wobbly decision) claim it to be research-based, when it was really more a child of logic, a hunch, or susceptibility to a really great sales pitch.

I lose patience with those “thought leaders” who proffer their darling approach under the guise of research. These days that happens a lot. There is ton of research showing the benefits of explicit phonics instruction. When someone is arguing that phonics is beneficial, and they cite research studies and government reports I’m on board. But once they’ve made that argument and have convinced an audience that systematic daily instruction in decoding in grades K-2 is the way to go, they don’t know when to stop. They keep going without any acknowledgement that the claims that follow lack the same evidential pedigree…. with assertions about what they may sincerely believe in but about which they should be confessing a lack of certainty: the value of tracing in the teaching of decoding skills, advanced phonemic awareness instruction, decodable text, the most effective sequencing of skills, sound walls, and so on.

The same nonsense accompanies nostrums for reading comprehension or fluency – substantial research evidence supporting a basic premise allied with specific practical recommendations with a decided lack of convincing or relevant research support (e.g., extensive comprehension strategy teaching, front-loading of background information about a text prior to reading, thematic units, weekly fluency tests, individual conferencing, and so on). Discerning readers may look at that parenthetical list and protest, “isn’t there research on reading strategies or background knowledge?” There is, of course, but not research that shows how much strategy teaching is beneficial or whether providing background knowledge has anything but transitory effects. It certainly improves comprehension of a specific text, but we have no idea what that means to students’ reading ability in the long run.

There is nothing wrong with making any of these claims – as long as they are proposed along with an open admission that there is no proof that they work. Lack of evidence doesn’t mean something doesn’t work, only that we don’t know. That admission is important because we can only respond professionally if we know when something has worked consistently in the past and when it is just somebody’s hunch.

Too often I hear from teachers and principals distraught over the local ineffectiveness of an approach that they’d been led to believe was research based. They are often told that the failure is due to their shoddy implementation. That happens, of course, but I’m more likely to buy that charge if the practice has consistently worked elsewhere in the past. If there is no rigorous evidence that the practice has ever worked then maybe the fault is neither in us nor in the stars.

Basically, if there is no research on a particular practice – feel free to adopt it but keep a close eye on it and be ready to adjust accordingly.

As for keeping up with the research? No one can read the 1000+ relevant research studies published each year. Even if we could, it would not be a good idea to adopt those results into practice immediately. Most studies in education tend to be small, and single studies are rarely determinative. It is wisest to limit data-based decision making to topics on which sufficient data have accumulated to justify pedagogical action – responding to each new study as published would lead to changing your policies every 27 minutes. We use research to increase the certainty we can invest in our actions, not for the sake of novelty.

Practical advice on how to monitor and use research evidence?

1.     Monitor some of the better research journals just to see what topics they are addressing. Some of the best journals to watch for reading research include Journal of Educational Psychology; Reading Research Quarterly; Reading & Writing Quarterly; Review of Educational Research; Scientific Studies of Reading. These aren’t the only journals that publish high quality reading research, but they’re among the most rigorously reviewed and widely cited by scholars in the field.

2.     Pay particular attention to research reviews and meta-analyses that synthesize bodies of research. The benefit of that approach is that you get the combined power of an entire collection of research rather than one particular study; that should reveal to you both the average outcome but also the variations in results that has been obtained. Effective approaches may vary in how often they payoff.

3.     When you read research make sure you understand what they were studying (and what they weren’t). As noted earlier, a lot of comprehension research examines how we can facilitate comprehension of a particular text. That is not unimportant theoretically. However, it isn’t the same thing as finding that an approach helps kids to read better independently.

4.     There are many kinds of research, all of it potentially valuable. If your goal is to determine what to teach or how to teach something, then you need to depend upon evidence that shows whether a practice can benefit learners. Focus on instructional research; studies that consider the impact of teaching. Indeed, there are other kinds of research that may be provocative (that study with the cool multicolor fMRI pictures, for instance) – as interesting as such research may be, it usually has little value for prescribing effective teaching practice.

5.     When there is no research? Get professionals together and think it through. Whatever courses of action you agree upon, make sure folks understand the reasoning (rather than the evidence) behind the choice. That makes it easier to change course up the road if things don’t pan out. If you can’t agree on a course of action, perhaps set up your own local study to see if it even matters. If it doesn’t, let teachers and principals improvise.

6.     Finally, that research says something is advantageous doesn’t mean it will work for you. If you rely on meta-analyses to set a policy or practice direction, I’d suggest going back and reading some of the individual studies included in the meta-analysis. I do that to determine whether the approach worked in situations like mine and to get clues about proper implementation (“Gee, the successful programs provided 18 hours of training for each teacher, and I didn’t budget for any of that, yikes.”)  Knowing those specific articles can have another payoff as well. Sometimes the researchers may publish a practice-oriented version in a journal like the Reading Teacher; the research article proving that it works and the practice article giving details as to what it really was.

I am searching for what to do with repeated reading as a whole class, in every content area, in grades 6-8. Next year, we have 60% of our students at "at-risk" or "some risk" according to aReading (FastBridge). It recommends Repeated Reading for many of our students, so that will be our school-wide intervention: science, social studies, math, and ELA with grade-level text for every repeated reading we do in our classes. I'm torn on the grade-level text because we have kids who will not be able to read the text fluently at all. They will be reading with their peers. No one would blithely advise that teachers assign frustration level text if they had experience taking data as a behavior consultant and saw in a classroom that students either "act out" or "tune out" as soon as they cannot do work with 80 - 85% accuracy......or if someone gave them a text with every fourth word in black and then expected them to extract meaning from the text.....or if they tested adults who had struggled in reading and listened to them cry about the humiliation encountered in school when teachers gave them frustration level text. Giving students frustration level text only reinforces that guessing. Would giving the kids a text that is more challenging than their current instructional level instead of blanket grade-level texts in all of their classes be effective? I understand the research on it, but it's always a little different in how the same research can be applied in a real-life classroom.

Shanahan response:

I feel your pain, but as you point out, the research supports it (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; NICHD, 2000)– there were real kids in those studies; and my personal experiences in many of the situations that you described support it as well.

It’s evident you are very concerned about your students.

However, I think you’re so focused on bad instructional practices that have often been inflicted in the name of reading instruction (or fluency instruction) without considering how to do these things effectively.

If we did the same thing with phonics, vocabulary, or reading comprehension instruction we would never teach anything.

Indeed, it is sensible to teach text reading fluency to middle schoolers (and high schoolers) class wide (Rasinski, Padak, & McKeon, 2005), and I’ve worked with more than 100 secondary schools that did this so successfully that it helped raise their reading achievement. And, no there was no increase in discipline problems or absenteeism – just the opposite … when kids know they are making progress they tend to be more engaged in school.

First, let’s talk about why it makes sense to teach fluency at these age levels and how widespread this instruction should be. The ability to read text accurately (attending to the author’s words), with automaticity (doing so without much conscious attention), and with prosody (making the result sound like language -- putting the pauses in the right place, responding to the punctuation and so on) continues to improve through about 8^th grade for the average reader (Hasbrouck & Tindal, 2017) – and that means in a typical school almost half the students will be significantly below average. That is important because fluency has been shown to have a causal impact on comprehension (Breznitz, 2005), though the impact of fluency certainly declines over the grades (by 8^th grade fluency differences still explain roughly 25% of the variation in reading comprehension – not as much as in Grad 2, but not nothing either).

That’s the reason research has usually found that teaching students to read more fluently has a clear and consistent influence on their reading comprehension (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; NICHD, 2000). Studies show that having students read texts aloud with feedback and repetition can improve reading, as long as they are not already proficient with the texts that they practice on (hence, the point of “frustration level” text). There is some research suggesting just getting kids to read a lot silently on their own can have a similar payoff – but getting kids to do such additional reading is usually not under the teachers’ control.

You point out that when you test students, they are uncomfortable reading challenging texts, and that singling students out in class for such reading can have long term negative effects on their desire to read. I don’t disagree with either of those points, so let’s not embarrass them – let’s just teach them how to read more fluently – and, yes, that will involve having them read aloud some grade level texts that will be hard for them. (You might think that is cruel, but it is no crueler than giving a child an injection to cure or prevent a harmful disease. And, frankly, if it’s done reasonably well, it really isn’t that uncomfortable).

The analogy I usually use to discuss this is drawn from basketball. If you have ever been to a basketball game or watched one on television, you will notice that near the end of the game, there is often an effort to foul the worst player on the other team. The idea is to get him to take free throws (that he is expected to miss) so that the team that fouled him can get the ball back.

Think of what that situation is like from the point of view of the player. Everybody’s eyes are on him. Lots of people are rooting for him to fail. They might even be laughing at him. All the spectators behind the hoop are waving their arms and screaming to try to distract him so he’ll screw up.

If you think about it, that is what oral reading is for lots of boys and girls. They know they aren’t good at it, and now everyone is going to get to watch them screw up. And, yes, the other kids do laugh and tease, and sometimes they even try to upset the performance. What a miserable feeling. No wonder some carry that angst into adulthood with them.

Given all of that, I would say that it is critical that you take round robin reading out of the equation. I don’t want that student reading aloud to the group under those kinds of conditions. It can’t help much, and it is likely to do harm.

Let’s think of another example from basketball. At the beginning of the game, or more accurately, just before the beginning and just before the second half begins, all players on both teams are on the court. They are all warming up. There are more than 20 players out there and there are probably 12 balls or more flying around at any given time. Everyone is shooting. Some players go to a particular part of the floor and practice from there. Some shoot layups to loosen up. Balls are flying everywhere, the often hit off of each other. When a player misses, no one gets upset. No one gets embarrassed. Even the benchwarmers who may miss several shots don’t seem to care. Their feelings aren’t hurt, they don’t quit the team, there are no tears – but everyone is practicing.

That’s the nature of appropriate fluency instruction.

That’s one of the reasons I’m such a big fan of paired reading. There might be 12 balls in the air (I mean, books being read) at one time. Half the kids are listening, and half are reading; and very quickly those places get switched around which simply means everyone in the class is trying to figure out how to read this text appropriately, so that it makes sense.

Here are 10 pieces of advice on teaching fluency to older students:

1.     Set a goal for the number of minutes to be devoted to such practice weekly schoolwide. Then get each department to commit to taking on a set portion of these minutes. Fluency practice doesn’t work as well in math as the other subjects, so keep the numbers low there (higher than zero, but much lower than what kids are to experience in classes that have more continuous text to read). If students are reading above the 8^th grade level, I wouldn’t bother with this – they can be exempted. Each teacher is then committed to providing some number of minutes each week in their classes; let the teacher figure out the best way to organize this… some might want to spend a part of each class on fluency work, while other teachers might want to segregate this to particular days of the week. Don’t undermine your effort by making it difficult for teachers to meet the instructional goals of their content area.

2.     Explain to the students what is going on. Tell them fluency is important, tell them the books are getting harder and harder each year as they advance through school and that fluency practice is one way to increase their ability to handle such materials independently Tell them that they are going to be asked to read aloud at times, not to embarrass them but to give them the practice that will make them better readers. Stress that they will not be asked to read anything aloud to the group with everyone listening and that almost everyone will be practicing and helping each other to figure out the best way to read these texts. It is practice, not performance. They are to try to improve and the better they get at it, the less practice that will be needed.

3.     Assign partners for paired reading work. It takes too long to have kids make these placements and that kind of thing is just another source of embarrassment. Change the partnerships daily, rotating pairings through the class. That way, everyone gets to benefit from the really helpful partners, and everyone shares the burden of the partners who aren’t very helpful. It also allows the teacher to avoid partnerships that he/she suspects will be problematic – like pairing up two boys who just had a fight in the lunchroom, or pairing up the particularly self-conscious boy with the prettiest girl in class, etc.

4.     Have students take turns reading short portions of the text – like a paragraph at a time but have them read and reread the text until it sounds acceptable – acceptable means that they aren’t making a lot of word reading mistakes and that it sounds like language.

5.     The teacher needs to be involved, too, coaching the coaches and intervening when someone is having trouble. I’ve seen teachers bail when this activity is taking place, but that’s when the teacher really needs to be involved. Often, when I’m in that role, by the time I get to the third kid I find some repeated vocabulary problem that allows me to stop everybody to explain that word, etc. so everyone can progress more quickly.

6.     Remember this is teaching time. Offer kids supports that will help them to succeed. Some teachers like to read the introduction aloud to the students and provide some explanation to contextualize the content they’ll be reading about. Others pre-introduce some vocabulary they anticipate will be a barrier -- not just telling definitions but getting students to say the words. Another particularly helpful support is to parse the text, so kids know where the pauses go.

Some teachers will have students practicing a paragraph once or twice silently before reading it to a partner or having the kids take the first swing at figuring out where the pauses go. The point is to improve these students reading, not just to do repeated reading (that’s an activity rather than the point).

7.     Add a comprehension step. For example, provide a question the students are supposed to answer about each paragraph.

8.     If you have any special resources – a push in teacher, a parent volunteer, pre-student teachers from your local university, or some students from the Young Teachers Club – then you can pair your lowest readers with them. This isn’t a punishment; this simply increases the amount of time these students get to read – they don’t have to split the time with a partner – which can translate faster progress.

9.     Make sure the student know they are working with grade level materials – and that if they can read that well, you will try to provide them with even more challenging texts. Struggling readers are often embarrassed that teachers try to protect them from embarrassment by putting them in books so easy that they are embarrassing. Often with secondary students, if you want them engaged, go harder not easier – kids are willing to work hard if they feel respected and they balk when embarrassed.

10.  It helps if students can see progress. Letting them know how many words correct they were able to read initially in their history book or how their prosody rated in their science book. Another way to do this is to have the students record their initial performance s(no one has to hear but the student and, perhaps, the teacher). Later in the year, doing another recording and comparing these should help kids to see success.

Those considerations can make this a much more successful effort. Finally, I would caution you not to overdo it. Fluency is important, but so is vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing. Each of those should get similar amounts of emphasis in a program aimed at improving reading achievement with older students.

References

Breznitz, Z. (2005). Fluency in reading: Synchronization of processes. London: Routledge.

Hasbrouck, J. & Tindal, G. (2017). An update to compiled ORF norms (Technical Report No. 1702). Eugene, OR, Behavioral Research and Teaching, University of Oregon. 

Kuhn M.R., Stahl, S.A. (2003). Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 3–22. 

National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Rasinski, T., Padak, N., & McKeon, C.A. (2005). Is reading fluency a key for successful high school reading? Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(1), 22-27.

I teach kindergarten. Our school recently purchased the XXXX program for teaching decoding. I don’t like it as much as the program we had. One of the ways our previous program was better than XXXX is that it included pictures for each of the phonemes. The new program does not have those pictures and I think that is a real problem. Is there any evidence that I’m right that I could take to my principal? The other teachers agree with me.

Shanahan response:

I hate that question and I wish you hadn’t asked it.

Oh, sure it’s a practical question. And as a former first-grade teacher I get why you’d ask.

But it points out an error I have made in the past.

When I used to prepare primary grade teachers that question came up sometimes. And, I answered it… incorrectly.

I answered it on the basis of logic, a dangerous approach.

“Professor Shanahan is it a good idea to use pictures when you are teaching letter sounds?”

“No, impressionable young preservice teacher. It is a bad idea. Children have to learn the letters and the sounds. Adding a picture to that equation means that there is just one more thing the kids have to memorize. It is hard enough to memorize 52 letters, and 44 sounds, without having to memorize 44 pictures to go with those sounds.”

I love that answer. It makes so much logical sense. I sure sounded wise to those young women (and the occasional guy).

And, yet, I was wrong.

The research these days shows just the opposite. Using what are referred to as “embedded mnemonics,” that is pictures that remind the children of the letter sound, actually improve learning. Across various studies (Ehri, 2014; Ehri, Deffner, & Wilce, 1984; McNamara, 2012; Schmidman & Ehri, 2010) it has been found that such embedded mnemonic pictures can reduce the amount of repetition needed for kids to learn the letters and sounds, with less confusion, better long-term memory, and greater ability to transfer or apply this knowledge in reading and spelling.

Art Credit: The example of a visual mnemonic for teaching decoding was provided by the artist Cat MacInnes, from www.spelfabet.com.au/materials” 

If one relies on data – rather than reasoning – the answer is kind of a no-brainer — it is a good idea to use embedded mnemonics. It looks like, at least with regard to this feature, your previous program was better than the new one.

But let’s be careful with this. What’s good in this case (the use of pictures) is not such a great idea when you are teaching words. Research has long shown that when teaching words kids do better with just the letters without any pictures.

Why would that be?

The pictures have been found to distract from the information that you need to remember a word. In that case, students don’t need a visual mnemonic -- they need to focus their attention on the combination of letters. That’s what you want them to look at. If they spend time examining the picture instead of the letters, they are less likely to learn the word.

With something as specific or one-dimensional as a letter or a phoneme, an embedded picture provides a useful mnemonic (memory support), neither distracting students from what needs to be learned or overwhelming memory. With more complex or multidimensional items it is better to focus student attention on analyzing the parts. That’s why, when I’m teaching kids to read some high frequency words, I have them look at all the letters and spell the word and try to write it from memory.

But when it comes to teaching letters and sounds, no question about it, use embedded mnemonics. They work.

And, as for answering questions about what works in reading? An instructional approach is not "best practice" just because it makes sense. That's why we use research. A lot of times, those things that are sensible are, well, not a great idea!

References 

Ehri, L.C. (2014) Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning, Scientific Studies of Reading, 18:1, 5-21, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Ehri, L. C., Deffner, N. D., & Wilce, L. S. (1984). Pictorial mnemonics for phonics. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(5), 880–893. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.76.5.880

McNamara, G. (2012). The effectiveness of embedded picture mnemonic alphabet cards on letter recognition and letter sound knowledge. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Rowan University.

Shmidman, A., & Ehri, L. (2010) Embedded picture mnemonics to learn letters. Scientific Studies of Reading, 14:2, 159-182, DOI: 10.1080/10888430903117492

Teacher question: I’m curious. What does the research say about the lengths of text segments in a guided reading lesson? How many pages should kids read prior to our discussions? I teach third grade.

Shanahan response: 

Great question. Unfortunately, in this era of the “science of reading” there is no research-based answer. No one, as far as I can tell, has bothered to study the question though it has been an issue for at least a century.

What do we know?

Studies of how kids do on reading tests show that there are real differences in the reading stamina they exhibit. Some readers start out fine, but as a test goes on, they wear down. They simply can’t sustain the attention and energy required to read well for the full length of the test. Kids from different countries differ in their psychological endurance during reading (Borgonovi & Biecek, 2016). Another study found that text complexity and length interacted to impact reading comprehension – longer texts were harder than shorter texts and length multiplied the impact of complexity factors (Mesmer & Hiebert, 2012). 

Why would that be?

Apparently, longer stretches of text can be more complex linguistically. For example, the longer a written argument the more elaborate can be its premises and the interconnections among its parts. Linguistic studies have looked at longer versus shorter texts and there is a tendency for greater linguistic sophistication, complexity, and subtlety in the longer ones.

That’s cool. But it doesn’t really help. The reason is that it has nothing to do with the role that length may take in teaching. It provides no clue about how best to chunk those instructional texts. A long text that is cut into three pieces wouldn’t be linguistically simpler than it was originally, but such dividing might play an important role in learning.

There are also those studies showing that length impacts reading comprehension itself – how well the students understand the texts. All things being equal, comprehending a long text poses greater psychological demands on readers than shorter texts. Text length may affect memory, reasoning, inferencing, and even motivation.

But again, that doesn’t help. That text length affects comprehension says nothing about how to enable students to do better with longer texts.

Back in the 1920s, when basal readers introduced teacher’s editions with prefabbed lesson plans for the first time, the idea of dividing stories for discussion became a thing.

They didn’t rely much on research in those days. I found a couple of old studies on dividing texts for discussion, and they reported conflicting results. One study said that asking questions throughout led to higher comprehension and another said it was better to group the questions at the end. The differences weren’t great either way. Nevertheless, the basals broke stories into parts – with kids reading longer segments of text as they proceeded up the grades.  

First grade stories were shorter than those aimed at older kids. And, the discussion segments were graduated, too. Beginners would read a page (perhaps 1 or 2 sentences) and then discuss. Older students might be asked to read 2-4 pages at a time, with considerably more words on each page.

Does that “gradual increase” approach work? Does it “stretch” kids out?

I suspect that it does and that we could do that better but could find no evidence either way.

Some authorities claim it is best to have kids read books rather than selections because of the need to build stamina. There is no question that reading 100 pages instead of 10 should increase the stamina building opportunity. However, it is kind of like working on somebody’s running by starting with a marathon. The well-developed runners may love the challenge, but the beginners may be intimidated.

The idea here – as with other well-known endurance tasks – is that stamina is learned, and rarely results without intentional effort. The focus of the advice provided here is on the silent reading of students in Grades 2-3 and up.

Consistency 

If you want kids to build reading stamina, they must read.

They must read pretty much every day.

However, this need be “accountable” reading. Developing the ability to sustain reading focus depends on more than just reading a lot of words. Here, I’m not talking so much about kids reading on their own as I am about having kids read in reading class, social studies, science, and so on.

Start with rather short sections of text: a sentence, a paragraph, a page. Monitor student success with these brief reads (I encourage kids to write answers to questions so I can determine who is comprehending well and who is not).

I often visit classrooms where kids aren’t expected to read. Text is there, but it is read aloud round robin fashion with the teacher telling kids what it means. Or, even when a text is read silently by the kids, there may be little real effort to determine how well they understood what the text said or what barriers to understanding they may have confronted. Such reading is a task, it gets completed, but it probably contributes little to learning.

It’s great if you can get kids to read on their own beyond this sanctioned reading. Have kids keep a book available for any down time in the classroom, such as when an assignment has been completed and they must wait for the others. Certainly, encourage and support kids’ reading at home, too, making it a regular part of their own personal lives.

Increasing Demands

The amounts of text that students are asked to read should increase gradually.

This increase should take place in two ways. First, the text segments that students are asked to read prior to any discussion or other activity should be lengthened. Second, the amount of classroom reading expected each week should go up, too.

I’d suggest having a spring goal for second graders of about 400 words per segment. Early in the year, you might start out having kids read a paragraph and then discuss. Over the following 30 weeks you’d increase, a little at the time, the amounts of text that students would be expected to read.

My goal for Grade 3 would be 500-600 words at a time, and for Grade 4 perhaps 700 or 750.

Those would be good targets since they would enable most students to meet the demands of accountability testing (think of those text lengths as your end of year goals).

Remember the students must comprehend well. Let’s say that your students read one paragraph at a time, and they’ve nailed it with good comprehension. It would make sense to increase the segments to 2-3 paragraphs. If they comprehend those, terrific. But if they don’t, then you might have to drop back a bit and increase more slowly.

I would also strongly recommend that you let the kids in on what you are up to and talk about the importance of sustained concentration. Give them some guidance (it can help to say the words in your head, or it can help if you stop at the end of each sentence/paragraph and think about what that meant, then read some more). Encourage the students to talk about issues like mind wandering and how to resist that or what to do when they are not understanding.

Lengthening the segments doesn’t change the amount of reading. A separate consideration is how to increase the amounts of reading expected each week.

Marathon runners in training increase their distances about 5-10% each week. Increasing the amounts of reading by 4-5% weekly across a school year would be almost imperceptible initially, but like compound interest, it would pay off in the long run. If students are in school 30 hours each week, then expecting 1-2 hours per week of real accountable reading doesn’t seem onerous or out of line, even in the primary grades. (In fact, it sounds like too little!)

Harder Shorter Sprints

Another trick of endurance runners is that they punctuate their longer, easier runs with shorter more demanding ones. These sprints make them stronger.

Speed isn’t our training issue in reading (though it can be a valuable outcome of this practice), but text difficulty levels are.

Let’s say your third graders are reading off and on throughout their school day and in reading class they can handle 300-word grade-level text segments as well. I’d suggest once or twice a week having an exercise in which the students read one or two 50–100-word text segments from a fourth- or fifth-grade book.

I wouldn’t just spring this on the kids, I’d tell them what I’m up to. Their speed is not the issue, but high comprehension is, so they should slow down as much as they need to and work hard to make sense of the text.

These “crunches” provide wonderful opportunities for learning. I’m certain the kids will want to talk about new vocabulary, or the sentences that really slowed them down, and what to do about those.

The challenge level of these exercises will provide students with a renewed confidence when they get back to more appropriately leveled texts.

There are lots of ways to organize these challenge exercises, but however you do it, think of the marathoner’s mantra, “longer/easier, shorter/harder.” When you are going to do a distance run or a long read, you want the workload to be relatively easy. Conversely, when you are trying to build strength – like taking on a much harder text – you want the amount of sustained work to be lessened.

Take a Break

If you want to build stamina in your students, then you must create an environment in which pressure and maximum effort is intermittent, not constant. Runners and cyclists work hard, but they also do cross training and take days off. The body can only take so much punishment.

What is true for the body is true for the mind.

Students need to be expected to work hard – sometimes. But they also need breaks and opportunities to engage less intensely.

There are lots of ways of organizing a school day. One that I would suggest is to look for those periods of time in the day that take the kids’ heads a whole different direction – like art, music, or physical education. If your students are going to play active games in the gymnasium at 11:00AM, then why not schedule an intensive reading session just before that?

Or, after several weeks of increasingly demanding text segments punctuated with challenge drills, what if you just did a week in which kids were expected to manage their own reading with few external educational demands?

Good readers can read significantly lengthy texts while sustaining attention and holding key information in memory. They manage to do this not just with texts that they find easy or that they enjoy reading, but with those they will need to read to succeed academically and in other social and professional venues. Teachers should operate more like strength and conditioning coaches, helping students not only to know more, but to develop the stamina needed for success. Researchers also need to come up with better ways of accomplishing the stamina goal than the suggestions provided here.   

References

Borgonovi, F., & Biecek, P. (2016). An international comparison of students' ability to endure fatigue and maintain motivation during a low-stakes test. Learning and Individual Differences, 49, 128–137. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2016.06.001

Mesmer, H. A., & Hiebert, E. H. (2015). Third graders’ reading proficiency reading texts varying in complexity and length: Responses of students in an urban, high-needs school. Journal of Literacy Research, 47(4), 473–504. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086296X16631923

I’ve been hired as a high school reading resource teacher. The school has a lot of commercially prepared intervention programs. Which ones would you use? Any other advice for me?

Shanahan response:

First things first.

I’d look at my data to find out how far behind my students are.

High school teachers often tell me that they have beginning readers in their classes, but when we look at the kids’ data, we find that just isn’t the case (most of the time).

Not that these students read well.

But most high school teachers aren’t equipped to distinguish a fourth-grade from a first-grade reader. Since both those students would struggle mightily with a high school textbook, the distinction doesn’t matter much to the classroom teacher.

For the resource teacher, however, it is a bigger deal. Those super low students would likely need explicit decoding instruction and they might even qualify for some more intensive special education assistance.

In my experience, super low readers do exist in high schools, but usually in fairly small numbers. Those aren’t the kids who will be your main clients. They do need very basic reading instruction with a heavy focus on decoding and should be placed in a special class for that.

Your caseload will more likely skew towards those with instructional reading levels ranging from 4^th-8^th grade (the lower achieving your school is, the larger the proportion of students that will be in the lower half of that range).

I don’t make recommendations of commercial programs (conflicts of interest) so can’t help you there. There are a couple of good guides out there (Deshler, 2007; C. Shanahan, 2005), though they are getting a bit long in the tooth. Also, I’d recommend that you evaluate those programs against the What Works Clearinghouse guidance.  

Other advice?

I’d advise that you skip the intervention package.

I’m not against commercial programs in principle, but I don’t think they’ll provide your students with best support.

I was an elementary resource teacher and remember it vividly. The kids struggle with reading in their classes, so a teacher refers them for extra reading help. The resource teacher tests the kids and then teaches reading to them at their supposed reading levels. That may mean that a fifth-grade student works on second and third grade reading passages in the resource room. The resource teacher is happy with the youngster’s performance, but the teacher and student are frustrated because the classroom struggle goes on despite the reading help.

Being perfectly honest, I doubt that you’ll raise many students from a fourth-grade to a ninth-grade reading level this semester!

Studies suggest that reading interventions with high school and college students simply don’t have much of an impact on their learning (Bohr, et al, 1994; Kemple, et al, 2008).  

What would I do?

I’d try to teach reading using the books those students need to read in their other classes.

To make this work, I’d have to coordinate with the content teachers.

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve decided to focus on teaching kids to read with their social studies texts this report card marking. I’d need to know which chapters and other texts the students were going to cover over the next 9 weeks. Getting specifics about the planned schedule is important because I’d want to address those texts prior to their introduction in the classroom.

Doing that puts would put these students on a more equal footing in their classes. It also might reduce some of the anxiety these students often feel about their classroom work.

What would I do with these texts?

The same things that I’d do if you were working from a commercial program.

I’d teach vocabulary explicitly, focusing on words from those social studies texts.

I’d teach oral reading fluency, using the texts students will be expected to read in class.

I’d teach reading comprehension with those materials, too – analyzing text structures, practicing summarization strategies, and discussing and writing about the content.

Students with that support from the resource teacher should be more likely to succeed in their content classes – since they’d get a double opportunity to learn the materials from those classes, and there is no reason to believe that this teaching wouldn’t improve their reading levels simultaneously.

Often interventions undermine kids’ self-confidence. Just assigning them to a remedial class may be enough to make them assume that the school thinks they’re stupid. Then, the resource teacher, trying to improve their reading levels, introduces a fifth-grade book (a “baby book” for a 14-year-old) and the students both feel insulted and dumb as dirt (Lupo, et al, 2019).

The approach that I’m recommending doesn’t have that problem. It would simultaneously build reading skills, improve content learning, and increase academic confidence. The use of classroom texts should provide these students both with respect and a double dose of the classroom text coverage.

Yep, in high school, I’d create a class or two for those kids who needed basic decoding instruction. But for the others, my focus would be on enabling them to take on the high school curriculum more successfully through their reading. My program evaluation would look at both the students’ pre- to post-reading levels AND their classroom grades.

Good luck. Have a productive year.

References

Bohr, L., Pascarella, E., Nora, A., Zusman, B., Jacobs, M., Desler, M., & Bulakowski, C. (1994). Cognitive effects of two-year and four-year colleges: A preliminary study. Community College Review, 22, 4-11.

Deshler, D.D. (2007). Informed choices for struggling adolescent readers: A research-based guide to instructional programs and practices. Newark, DE: International Literacy Association.

Kemple, J. J., Corrin, W., Nelson, E., Salinger, T., Herrmann, S., & Drummond, K. (2008). The enhanced reading opportunities study: Early impact and implementation findings (NCEE report no. 2008-4015). Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

Lupo, S., Tortorelli, L., Invernizzi, M., Ryoo, J.H., & Strong, J.Z. (2019). An exploration of text difficulty and knowledge support on adolescents’ reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(4), 2019.

Shanahan, C. (2005). Adolescent literacy intervention programs and chart. Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED490970.pdf

I am reaching out to see if you can clarify for me and possibly point me in the direction of a resource(s) where I can read more about the differences between predicting, inferring, and drawing conclusions. Our curriculum was developed in house and is very skill/strategy based. 
In Virginia, our state tests operationalize reading in the following way:

• predicting is making an informed guess about what happens next using text evidence and schema 
• inferring is reading "between the lines" to a given point in text using text and schema to understand what is happening in the text 
• drawing conclusions is projecting forward using text and schema 

Shanahan response:
I’m happy to distinguish these three concepts, but it won’t help.

It won’t help you teach better.

It won’t help your students read better.

You are interests in making sure you are appropriately teaching these reading skills so that your students will comprehend well. But the problem is teaching those skills aren’t likely to do that.

Only one of these has a clear research record (inferencing) and that operationalization is gobbledygook.

Written messages – texts – are not so complete or explicit to allow readers to make full sense of them without filling some gaps or making some connections. Authors don’t tell everything. They imply an awful lot. Inferences are used to make sense of those implications.

But inferences are complicated.

There are lots of ways to characterize inferences… as demonstrated by the late Tom Trabasso.

There are, for instance, forward and backward inferences. Predictions and drawing conclusions are usually examples of forward inferencing. Readers draw a forward inference based on the textual information provided up to that point in the text. Backward inferences require that the gap be filled by information an author hasn’t yet revealed. Forward inferencing requires that you remember enough information the author provided so that when something is lacking you can fill the gap. You can’t possibly know where the author is going to leave gaps, so the more coherent and complete your memory is the smoother things are going to go. Backward inferencing is more complicated because you must spot the gap and realize that you don’t know how to fill it; then you must be vigilant for the needed info when it arises.  

Another way to think about inferences has to do with the source of the information needed for filling the gap or making the connection. The critical information may have been provided by the author earlier in the text or it may come from readers’ own prior knowledge. Frequently, the information may come from both (and perhaps it will be necessary to coordinate information from more than one bit of the text).

Here’s a fairly simple example:

            Mary and John went to the movies.

            He asked her if she wanted popcorn.

Figuring out who asked who seems rather straightforward, but how do you go about it? You must first recognize that it isn’t entirely clear who was doing the talking, and then you must draw on your knowledge of the world. In our culture, people named John are usually boys so John must have asked Mary about the popcorn. This required information from working memory (sentence 1) and the reader’s world knowledge.

A third way to think about inferences is the functions that they fill. The John and Mary sentence would be an example of inferences used for text connection or slot filling. This is how we make cohesive links; these inferences fill a linguistic function, connecting chains of synonyms that operate across a text.

But inferences play other functions, too.

Look at this example:

He plunked down $10.00 at the window.

She tried to give him $5.00 but he refused to take it.

So, when they got inside, she bought him a large bag of popcorn.

To grasp this requires an inference that they must be at the movies. Making that inference transforms this into a scene that most of us could visualize.

This kind of inference allows the reader to create a model of what is going on. Other inferences have other purposes (e.g., explanatory, predictive, associative).

What’s my point?

Only to show the difficulties and complications inherent in the inferencing process during reading.

Given the different ways inferences work – requiring recognition of different kinds of omissions or implications, depending on information drawn from different sources (e.g., working memory, background knowledge), accomplishing different interpretive goals, and operating in different ways – what are the chances that you could teach students to infer effectively?

One wonders whether there is any sense to distinguishing inferences, predictions, and conclusion drawing. Do these odd distinctions (without psychological reality) help or hinder kids? My bet is that they learn to ignore such nonsensical teaching.

Nevertheless, many experts claim that asking students inferential questions improves their reading comprehension. Research hasn’t been especially supportive of those claims, however.  Although we can ask questions that require inferences, that doesn’t mean answering them would have any discernible impact on future inferencing. Inferences are too complex and multi-faceted and texts too diverse to allow such teaching to help.

It’s not that questions cannot or do not shape readers’ attention during reading. Just that inferences by the descriptions provided couldn’t possibly do this.

An example from the research is a study done by Reynolds and Anderson. They found that if they asked questions about the quantities expressed in a text, readers started paying more attention to the quantitative info during future readings.

That makes sense.

I remember blowing a midterm in a history class. I hadn’t recognized that the prof wanted the dates of the events we’d studied. My attention shifted to the dates after that, and my final exam went much better. Questions tip kids off as to what information is important and studies show that such guidance is effective because it gets the readers to spend more time on certain information.

That can only work in those cases in which the information is recognizable. As a reader, I had no trouble recognizing the historical dates, so devoting more attention to them was a breeze. Telling kids to pay attention to inferences, to practice answering drawing conclusion questions, or making predictions during reading aren’t likely to provide much of a learning payoff since this guidance fails to direct students to specific workable actions that they can take during reading.  

It is possible to improve reading comprehension through some kinds of inference training, but not the general kind emphasized in state standards.

For instance, when reading fiction, it is important to consider the characters’ motivations. What do they want? What are their goals? Why are they taking those actions?

Students can be taught about motivation and the importance of this can be stressed instructionally. Students can learn to ask themselves why characters do what they do and to pay attention to how they know that. If the author tells such information explicitly, they should pay particular attention to that. If the author doesn’t reveal what is driving a character’s action then an inference is needed.

Likewise, students can be taught to do something similar with causation when reading science. In this case, there are even signal words that can tip a reader off to causes and effects (e.g., because, so, consequently, therefore, thus, since) and distinguishing words that refer to other kinds of relationships (e.g., correlated, similar to, associated). Again, the reader needs to learn that such text demands special attention to cause and effect, whether the author states it explicitly or depends upon the reader to recognize that relationship.

Those earlier-mentioned lexical or cohesive inferences (e.g., repetitions, synonyms, pronouns) can be taught, too. Teaching students to track a character or idea across a text to support comprehension is doable and it is successful at improving students’ ability to comprehend. Learning to connect pronouns, even in the earliest grades, can have real payoffs.

Essentially, I’m suggesting treating inferencing not as a skill but as a strategy for intentionally making sense of text. Students who take specific steps to consciously identify motivations, causes, and linguistic connections are likely to comprehend better. Those taught to “infer” by the definition you provided would not.

Reading comprehension instruction should focus on guiding students to think actively about the ideas in text. Previewing predicting, self-questioning, visualizing, rereading, identifying text structure have all been found to be beneficial because they prescribe actions that encourage students to spend more time thinking about the ideas in texts. Teaching students to identify certain kinds of information when they read – information that is actually identifiable in lots of texts – can help as well (that’s where inference training succeeds).

(Prediction is an odd duck. I would recommend it as a strategy for motivating oneself through a text, but not one that I would want to question students on to evaluate their prediction ability. I can’t think of many texts in which predictions are truly important to gaining meaning. And, with regard to drawing conclusions, no studies of inferencing or comprehension have pursued that colloquial terminology).

References

Baumann, J. F. (1986). Teaching third-grade students to comprehend anaphoric relationships: The application of a direct instruction model. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(1), 70-90.

Cain, K., Oakhill, J., & Lemmon, K. (2004). Individual differences in the inference of word meanings from contexts: The influence of reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, and memory capacity. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96, 671-681.

Elleman, A.M. (2017). Examining the impact of inference instruction on the literal and inferential comprehension of skilled and less skilled readers: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(6), 761–781.

García?Madruga, J. A., Elosúa, M. R., Gil, L., Gómez?Veiga, I., Vila, J. Ó., Orjales, I., . . . Duque, G. (2013). Reading comprehension and working memory's executive processes: An intervention study in primary school students. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(2), 155-174.

Hamada, A. (2015). Effects of forward and backward elaboration on lexical inferences: Evidence from a semantic relatedness judgement task. Reading in a Foreign Language, 27(1), 1-21.

Magliano, J.P., Trabasso, T., & Graesser, A.C. (1999). Strategic processing during comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(4), 615-629.

Reutzel, D.R., & Hollingsworth, P.M. (1991). Reading comprehension skills: Testing the distinctiveness hypothesis. Reading Research & Instruction, 30(2), 32-46.

Reynolds, R.E., & Anderson, R.C. (1982). Influence of questions on the allocation of attention during reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(5), 623-632.

Trabasso, T., & Magliano, J.P. (1996). Conscious understanding during comprehension. Discourse Processes, 21, 255-287.

Thanks to William Conrad for his gracious assistance in identifying photographs with young African American readers. His assistance is greatly appreciated.

Shanahan responds:

Over the past three decades research has shown that people read differently in the different disciplines. Historians, for instance, read different kinds of texts, for different purposes, and they weigh evidence differently, and focus on different kind of information in the texts that they read than do literary critics or scientists.

Reading starts out pretty generalizable. The skills we use to decode text are the same no matter what you read. The same can be said about the basics of comprehension. Informational texts in grade 2 are like each other in most respects, no matter what field of study the information is drawn from.

But as text gets more sophisticated things start to diverge. Content is not the only distinguishing feature of science, mathematics, history, and literature texts.

These differences appear to be linked to how knowledge is created in the different disciplines and the nature of the knowledge created. Historians devote what, in other disciplines, may seem to be inordinate amounts of time focused on the varied perspectives of participants in and observers of historical events. Scientists, on the other hand, don’t pay much attention to those kinds of differences, but focus on methodological rigor and replication.  

As a result of all this, most states have disciplinary literacy standards for grades 6-12. We want our kids to read at high levels and that means being able to read like historians, mathematicians, scientists, and literary critics.

Terrific.

But what about elementary school?

Should elementary school teachers teach disciplinary literacy?

Possibly a little, but, in the main, my answer is no. It doesn’t make sense to teach disciplinary literacy until kids are confronting the demands of truly disciplinary texts. This might start to happen in the upper elementary grades, which is why I say, “a little.” But most of the reading time in social studies, science, and math class should be more basic than that.

The main contribution that elementary teachers can make is to get kids ready to take on the rigors of disciplinary literacy by the time they reach middle school and high school. Here are some of the things you can do to smooth the path to disciplinary literacy success:

1.     Build basic literacy skills.

When I speak to high school teachers, their number 1 complaint/concern are the kids who can’t read well enough to participate fully in disciplinary learning. Too many kids are allowed to slip through the cracks. They are just too far behind by the time they are expected to take on disciplinary reading demands.

To accomplish sufficient elementary reading levels, kids should get a strong dose of decoding instruction in the primary grades. In studies of successful phonics instruction, kids were usually provided about 30 minutes per day of such teaching. Likewise, readers benefit from substantial oral reading or text reading fluency.

Unfortunately, too many children spend grades 2-5 focused on books that are too easy to ensure a sound flight path to disciplinary literacy. The idea of placing kids in below grade level books because they can already read those seriously disadvantages them.  We need to teach students to comprehend texts that they may not already be able to read well, that will give them the best chance of being ready for middle school and high school reading.

2.     Develop content knowledge.

I often hear elementary teachers say that the only thing that matters is that their students learn to read. That’s too limited a view of reading. Reading depends on knowledge and too often the time devoted to social studies, science, and the arts are squandered. Study after study shows how little our kids know about geography, history, science, and the like.

Teachers need to be pro-knowledge. The more kids know about their social and scientific worlds the brighter their future possibilities. We need to make sure that elementary content classes are worth something. Protect the time devoted to them, monitor kids’ learning of that content, and provide frequent and ongoing review.

3.     Expose kids to informational text.

With young children, the emphasis of shared reading and reading instruction is usually on stories alone. That’s a big mistake. When you’re choosing books to read to kids, consider a broader range of choices – choices that would expose kids to a broader range of texts. (I vividly remember reading Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man to my young daughter.) Think about this, too, when stocking classroom libraries or selecting reading programs. And, when it comes to the texts in social studies or science classes do more than round robin reading; actually, teach the students how to read those books and don’t just tell them everything the books say. Give them a real chance to acquire knowledge from their reading (and rereading), rather than treating the reading as a time-filling activity.

No, elementary teachers aren’t responsible for teaching students the unique or specialized of reading in the different disciplines. But they are accountable for preparing students, so they’ll be ready to learn those things in middle school and high school. For too many students, those things aren’t happening. We can do something about that.

My school district has recently departmentalized first and second grades. The students seem very young to have two teachers and move classes mid-day. It also seems that early literacy should stretch across the school and not only be taught during an ELA block. I’m interested to know your thoughts.

Shanahan responds:

This strikes me as a singularly bad idea.

In fairness, I know of no studies on the effectiveness of the practice (in terms of kids’ learning) at these early grade levels, but this appears to be the result of no researcher thinking this to be even a remotely good idea worth evaluating.

There are several studies of departmentalization with older students (Grades 4-8). At those grade levels there are some arguments for the practice. The major one being that given a burgeoning curriculum, students are better served by teachers who are especially well versed in science, math, social studies, and literature. Teachers can’t be expected to have a sufficient depth of knowledge on all of these topics, so departmentalization allows us to divide and conquer. It’s the same basic argument that supports departmentalizing in the high school and college.

Of course, as one travels down the grade levels this depth of knowledge contention deteriorates.

I’m willing to accept that Ms. Smith knows more about pre-algebra than Mr. Jones, and that he is much more familiar with YA literature than she. Kids would likely be better served if those teachers spent the whole day teaching their expertise and knowledge.

You have another think coming, however, if you think I’d endorse the idea that Ms. Smith knows so much more about counting and 2-place subtraction problems that she should spend her time devoted only to teaching 6- and 7-year-olds arithmetic. In my book if Mr. Jones hasn’t mastered those basic aspects of the number system, he should hang up his spikes and enroll in the best elementary school he can find.

A recent interview study queried 12 primary grade teachers about the attractions of departmentalization (Strohl, Schmertzing, & Schmertzing, no date). Some of them held forth about how it allowed them to focus in areas in which they possessed greater depths of knowledge and to teach better. There were no data supporting these assertions.

Studies of the matter in the upper grades and middle school level – those grades for which I conceded there could be some educational benefit to the approach. Repeatedly, these studies have found no consistent advantage in disciplinary teaching over self-contained classroom instruction for kids’ learning (Baroody, 2017; Chennis, 2018; Kent, 2012; Mitchell, 2014; Skelton, 2015, Yearwood, 2011). Given this lack of benefit, it is hard for me to credit those claims of improved primary grade effectiveness. It seems highly unlikely to me.

Another benefit of departmentalizing that teachers noted was that it reduced their workload. They only had to develop half as many lessons as in the past. I suspect this is the real attraction of the practice. The upper elementary studies suggest some rather modest improvements to lessons but not enough to improve either reading or math achievement (Baroody, 2017). In other words, the saved time isn’t usually invested in the development of more powerful or personal lessons.

But remember, those data are from studies with older kids. Instruction generally has bigger impacts on learning with younger kids (and less so with older ones). There are problems with departmentalizing that appear more threatening with the young’uns.

The most obvious of these drawbacks is the loss of instructional time to transitions. Whether it’s the teachers or the kids who end up moving, it takes time away from teaching – which has been found to have negative impacts on learning in those early grades (e.g., McLean, Sparapani, Toste, & Connor, 2016). McGrath and Rust (2002) reported that transitions in departmentalized settings take significantly longer than within class transitions and that these time differences mattered in the learning of upper elementary students.

Another real caution is the social-emotional aspects of learning. The relationship among teachers and students is an important determinant of learning at all levels, but particularly in the early years (I was called “Mommy” often enough as a first-grade teacher to sensitize me to this issue). Peeling those little ones away from the teacher for several hours a day runs the risk of diminishing classroom warmth and the closeness of the relations between teachers and students; relations research has identified as being important to academic achievement (Bryce, Bradley, Abry, Swanson, & Thompson, 2019; Hughes, & Kwok, 2007; López, 2012; Wilson, Pianta, & Stuhlman, 2007). Not surprisingly, early childhood experts tend not to be proponents of this organizational scheme.

In terms of reading instruction, teachers need the flexibility to provide extra help along the way, to prevent kids them from falling behind.

It takes substantial amounts of time to coordinate information among teachers so that no child slips through the cracks, and because of this such monitoring tends to be suppressed. Monitoring kids learning and providing extra support to meet their varied needs just doesn’t happen much in departmentalized schools. 

Even in the upper grades, a major complaint teachers have about departmentalization is the loss of flexibility.

I look at a change like this and ask myself,

(1)   Will it increase or decrease the amount of reading instruction?

In this case, I think the answer is that it will reduce the amount of teaching the students will receive.

(2)   Will it increase or diminish instructional attention to key areas of reading? My answer is that it won’t likely affect this at all.

(3)   Will it improve or weaken the quality of the teaching that students receive? My hunch here is that it may do some real harm, reducing the warmth and inclusiveness of primary grade classrooms, and tying the teachers’ hands when it comes to monitoring and responding to children’s extra learning needs.

Given those answers, I’d not willingly adopt such an approach.

If teachers are feeling overworked with too much to plan, I’d be looking at what could be done to support them better (e.g., shared planning times, textbook program adoptions, professional development, reductions in load, administrative analysis of how teachers use their planning time, better routinization, etc.).

Those approaches might help, and they run less risk of lowering reading achievement or limiting possible future gains. 

In summary, as far as I can tell, there is no research into the effectiveness of departmentalization in grades K-2. Accordingly, the best I can do is to venture an opinion. For the reasons given, I think it a bad idea. The plan isn’t worth the sacrifices that the children must make. Because there have been no direct studies of the learning outcomes of this in the primary grades, this response is based the generalization of other research (such as studies of departmentalization in the upper grades and studies of positive social environments in the primary grades) and upon my 50+ years in education, including as a first- grade teacher.

References

Baroody, A.E. (2017). Exploring the contribution of classroom formats on teaching effectiveness and achievement in upper elementary classrooms. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 28(2), 314-335.

Bryce, C. I., Bradley, R. H., Abry, T., Swanson, J., & Thompson, M. S. (2019). Parents’ and teachers’ academic influences, behavioral engagement, and first- and fifth-grade achievement. School Psychology, 34(5), 492-502.

Chennis, S.T. (2018). The impact of traditional and departmentalized classroom instructional settings on fifth grade students' reading achievement. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Liberty University.

Hughes, J., & Kwok, O. (2007). Influence of student-teacher and parent-teacher relationships on lower achieving readers' engagement and achievement in the primary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(1), 39-51.

Kent, K.P. (2012). Self-contained versus departmentalized school organization and the impact on fourth and fifth grade student achievement in reading and mathematics as determined by the Kentucky Core Content Test. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Louisville.

López, F. A. (2012). Moderators of language acquisition models and reading achievement for english language learners: The role of emotional warmth and instructional support. Teachers College Record, 114(8), 1-30.

McGrath, C.J., & Rust, J.O. (2002). Academic achievement and between-class transition time for self-contained and departmental upper-elementary classes. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 29(1), 40-43.

McLean L, Sparapani N, Toste JR, Connor CM. (2016). Classroom quality as a predictor of first graders' time in non-instructional activities and literacy achievement. Journal of School Psychology, 56, 45-58. doi: 10.1016/j.jsp.2016.03.004.

Mitchell, V.T. (2014). Departmentalized or self-contained: The relationship between classroom configuration and student achievement. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, California State University, Fullerton.

Skelton, C.R. (2015). The effects of departmentalized and self-contained structures on student achievement. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Mississippi.

Strohl, A., Schmertzing, L., & Schmertzing, R. (No date). Elementary teachers’ experiences and perceptions of departmentalized instruction: A case study. Journal of Case Studies in Education

Wilson, H. K., Pianta, R. C., & Stuhlman, M. (2007). Typical classroom experiences in first grade: The role of classroom climate and functional risk in the development of social competencies. The Elementary School Journal, 108(2), 81-96.

Yearwood, C. (2011). Effects of departmentalized versus traditional settings on fifth graders’ math and reading achievement. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Liberty University.

What’s your biggest pet peeve?

People who ask a question just so they can answer it.

Yep, I’m the punchline. I’m asking this question only so I can answer it. Though I hope this stimulates you to add your own.

Pet peeves are, by their very nature, complaints. Of course, no one wants to hear a lot of whining these days. If they did, they’d be on Twitter or the U.S. Senate.

Given that, I’ve split this rant into two parts. Yep, I’ll provide 5 pet peeves about reading education this week, and the remainder next time.

Pet peeve #1: Balanced literacy proponents who either don’t tell what must be balanced or whose conception of balance is woefully unbalanced.

Many districts brag that they offer “balanced literacy” programs. Balance, according to my dictionary, is a condition in which “different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.” That suggests to me that a balanced literacy program is one in which the various elements of literacy are accorded equal amounts of instruction. Or, failing this, that the amounts of time devoted to each is based on something that would suggest they are in correct proportion.

What elements are balanced in balanced literacy?

According to one guide, there must be a balance need be between reading and writing instruction, teacher-directed and student-directed activities, and skills-based and meaning-based approaches (Frey, et al., 2005).

Many schools try to provide 90 minutes of daily reading instruction and 30 of writing. Such a schedule obviously fails to accomplish that reading instruction-writing instruction balance.  

The idea of balancing teacher- and student-directed activities causes me some concern as well because of the research on the issue. Carol Connor and her colleagues found that students are likely to need more of one of these than the other. More learning accrues from explicit teaching than from discovery learning or independent practice (e.g., Foorman, et al., 2006; Gallagher, Barber, Beck, & Buehl, 2019). Rupley, Blair, & Nichols, 2009), at least for struggling students (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004; Connor, Morrison, & Petrella, 2004). Balancing teacher and student-directed activities seems like a good way to hold back some kids, particularly the most disadvantaged. That can’t be good.

Then there is that third balance, the idea of balancing skills-based and meaning-based teaching. I assume that means half the instructional time is for phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, handwriting, and oral reading fluency, and the rest is devoted to guided reading, shared reading, independent reading, writing, oral language and the like. With 2 hours of ELA time, that would give students an hour of skills and an hour of meaning. Given various models of reading, that kind of balance makes sense, but to tell the truth I rarely see that amount of skills teaching in any of the balanced literacy schools that I’ve visited. Despite the balanced label, skills tend to get short shrift in these classrooms.

I hunted up some more recent descriptions of “balanced literacy” on the Internet. One site says a balanced program “strikes a balance between both whole language and phonics.” I’m not sure what they mean by whole language, but an hour of daily phonics instruction would be excessive (NICHD, 2001). That site goes on to indicates that there are 5 components of balanced literacy (read aloud, guided reading, shared reading, independent reading, word study). That suggests neither a time and attention balance or a devotion of time to word study that would be consistent with the research (successful phonics programs typically deliver about 30 minutes of such daily teaching).

            Another Internet site indicates that the balance is of “explicit skill instruction and by the use of authentic texts.” This seems an echo of Michael Pressley’s claim, “Skills instruction and holistic reading and writing are balanced” (Pressley, Mohan, & Fingeret, 2007). Another site calls for a balance among reading workshop, writing workshop, and word work.

            I quit looking at that point. I’m sure if I would have continued, I would have found even more versions of what needs to be balanced in a balanced literacy program.

            From this is should be obvious that balanced literacy isn’t really a thing. It’s a shell game. Given that no one agrees on what the necessary components are or what balance even means, it is just another of those feel-good terms – socially appealing – but with no real meaning. Advertisers like the term because it “counter[s] consumers’ negative emotions” while requiring nothing (Labroo & Rucker, 2009).

            That’s why I get peeved about the use of the term balanced literacy without any meaningful explanation of its meaning. It sounds reassuring to parents, but often just camouflages the fact that key aspects of the literacy program will get inordinate amounts of attention at the expense of other things that could greatly benefit the children’s progress.

Pet peeve #2: Calls to end the Reading Wars.

I love the idea of peace. A world without reading wars would be lovely.

I honestly believed the two years I contributed to the National Reading Panel would help bring an end to those wars more than two decades ago.

The latest breakout of these skirmishes seems attributable to Emily Hanford’s (2018) radio documentary that called out the reading profession for phonics neglect. She showed, through an examination of various surveys and teacher and parent interviews (Joshi, et al., 2009), that many kids weren’t getting much phonics. That led to public outcries, particularly from parents of struggling readers and to state legislation requiring more phonics.

Perhaps the reading field should not have been surprised about the inattention to phonics. We should have been aware of this given the popularity of reading programs (Education Week ) that included no phonics (e.g., Units of Study) or the decoding instruction of which is poorly aligned with the research (e.g., Guided Reading).

The Hanford documentary focused attention on this widespread neglect, and one may have presumed that the professional community would have endorsed the idea phonics that requires a clear place in primary grade reading instruction.

Instead, they seem to have been grieved by the complaints. Professional responses have included claims that teachers are already teaching phonics universally (denial); that this push for phonics is illegitimate because it comes from journalists and parents (anger); that there are lots of other ways to teach reading (bargaining); and now is the time to find some way to end these reading wars (depression).

Many fine scholars have been publishing pieces revealing the importance phonics – along with other aspects of reading that must be taught (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018; Duke & Cartwright, 2021).

These reviews are correct that reading is complex, that there are many skills and abilities that must be nurtured if students are to become readers, and that phonics is only one of these. But pointing that out seems more like a fair warning to not overdo phonics rather than an effort to address its recent neglect in American reading instruction.

Those who profess to want to end the reading wars seem to think the best way to do that is for the pro-phonics people to stand down, so that the anti-phonics people can continue to dismiss the impressive body of research supporting its teaching.

My peeve here is that we need less angst over the wars and more emphasis on what a solid, comprehensive, research-based reading program would look like. Such a program would include a lot more than phonics, but the in the primary grades, phonics and phonemic awareness would get more than the 5-10 minutes often accorded to it.

Pet peeve #3: Educators who seek research to support their actions, rather than to determine them.  

I get far too many letters from school board members, superintendents, curriculum directors, and school principals asking for my help with a new program or policy they have recently adopted. Usually, they have made some decision or choice, and when the time came to implement it, they ran into some pushback.  

Their missives to me ask if I know of any research that could be used to support their action.

This offends me even when I would have endorsed the action they’ve taken.

That they made a sound decision by accident is not heartening.

Educators who must make major decisions that will affect student learning should review the research first and then make an informed decision. Asking a buddy in the next district if their recent implementation went well (e.g., no complaints) is not a sufficient basis for establishing a new policy or buying a major new program.

Putting the research horse before the adoption coach is one way of increasing the chances that we will improve students’ reading achievement (and avoid those surprising pushbacks that often accompany bad decisions).

Pet peeve #4: Teachers who claim that 2-minute individual conferences promote the same depth of thinking as a 20–30-minute group/classroom discussion.

Too many teachers have been led to believe that they can effectively guide students to deep understandings of text or proficient strategy use through brief one-on-one conferences.

There is no research supporting this weird idea. I can’t even understand how anyone might think it could be true.

My hunch is that these teachers have never, themselves, participated in any kind of rich, rigorous discussions of literature or “great books.”

I checked online and across the country there are incredible opportunities to participate in such book discussion experiences. Check with your local university extension program or your public library. These days there are even online opportunities.

When teachers see what a high-quality discussion group can do with a book, and how much it stretches your own thinking, they are amazed. I took part in a film discussion group this summer (thank you, Stanford University) and every week I was staggered by the insights and observations of the teacher and other participants who saw things that I failed to ken.

Brief individual conferences do little more than allow teachers to determine whether the kids have read the text. But they do little to go beyond superficial responses to text. Probing below the surface takes time and it benefits from the diversity of reactions from a group of readers.

Pet peeve #5: Teachers who become enamored with one or another aspect of literacy instruction.

Teachers devote more time to areas of a curriculum with which they are comfortable, and less to those areas about which they know less or care less (e.g., Blank, 2013).

Let’s say Mrs. Anderson loves science. The boys and girls lucky enough to get into her class are going to do a lot of science this year. Conversely, those assigned to Mr. Ferguson may get little more than the occasional foray into the science textbook (perhaps for some round robin reading).

This happens with reading instruction, too. Some teachers don’t teach fluency because it’s too noisy or because teachers may be uncertain about how to teach it. With other teachers, fluency may be front and center.

When a teacher lacks confidence in an area or has antipathy towards some part of the curriculum, it is startling how often it just doesn’t get addressed. It may be in the lesson plans, but it evaporates from the life of the classroom, as other lessons go long and take its place. 

Teachers need to develop schedules that devote attention to all the major components of reading. Not time devoted to different instructional activities (e.g., guided reading, word study, shared reading, conferencing, independent reading) but time aimed at accomplishing specific learning goals (e.g., vocabulary, comprehension, writing, fluency, decoding).

Then teachers need to provide that instruction, even for the less favored goals. If something gets shortened up today because another lesson went long, you redress the difference tomorrow.

Doing that means many teachers will need to teach some things they struggle with. Instead of avoiding what you don’t like, those are the areas where there is a need to bone up; talk to some colleagues, arrange visits to other classrooms, work with the reading specialist, read a book.

But don’t skip what you don’t feel like teaching or that you don’t feel comfortable with.

I’m peeved because that kind of curriculum slighting ends up slighting the students.  

That’s it for today. Those five peeves are what are making me a grumpy old man this week. Next week there’ll be five more.

Feel free to add your own complaints to the comments section.  

References

Blank, R.K. (2013). Science instructional time is declining in elementary schools: What are the implications for student achievement and closing the gap? Science Education, 97(6), 830-847.

Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5-51.

Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., & Katch, L. E. (2004). Beyond the reading wars: Exploring the effect of child-instruction interactions on growth in early reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 8(4), 305-336.

Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., & Petrella, J. N. (2004). Effective reading comprehension instruction: Examining child x instruction interactions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(4), 682-698.

Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly.

Frey, B., Lee, S., Tollefson, N., Pass, L., and Massengill, D. (2005) Balanced literacy in an urban school district. Journal of Educational Research, 98(5), 272-280.

Foorman B.R., Schatschneider C., Eakin M.N., Fletcher J.M., Moats L.C., & Francis D.J. (2006). The impact of instructional practices in grades 1 and 2 on reading and spelling achievement in high poverty schools. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 31, 1–29.

Gallagher, M. A., Barber, A. T., Beck, J. S., & Buehl, M. M. (2019). Academic vocabulary: Explicit and incidental instruction for students of diverse language backgrounds. Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 35(2), 84-102.

Hanford, E. (2018, September 10). Hard words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read? Minneapolis, MN: American Public Media. https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read

Joshi, R. M., Binks, E., Graham, L., Ocker-Dean, E., Smith, D. L., & Boulware-Gooden, R. (2009). Do textbooks used in university reading education courses conform to the instructional recommendations of the National Reading Panel? Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(5), 458-463.

Labroo, A., & Rucker, D.D. (2009). Balance in advertising. Kellogg Insight. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.

Pressley, M., Mohan, L., Raphael, L. M., & Fingeret, L. (2007). How does Bennett Woods Elementary School produce such high reading and writing achievement? Journal of Educational Psychology, 99(2), 221–240.

Rupley, W.H., Blair, T. R., & Nichols, W.D. (2009). Effective reading instruction for struggling readers: The role of direct/explicit teaching. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 25, 2-3, 125-138.

As promised, here are five more.

Pet Peeve #6:  Research claims based on the wrong kinds of research.

Recently, a claim of mine was challenged on Twitter. Someone pointed out that there was research supporting an approach to literacy teaching that I had deprecated. He essentially, wrote, “You’re wrong. Research shows that this approach works.”

The right and wrong of this exchange isn’t important here (though I was right). But it reveals a basic communications problem inherent in literacy discussions.

What does it mean to say that an instructional approach “works” in the teaching of reading?

The problem is that there are two different meanings.

“It works” can mean that kids (or some kids) can or will learn to read from some teaching approach. If that approach is used, many children are likely to become readers.

That’s the meaning that many practitioners think of.

Another possibility, however, is that the approach works better than another. That’s what researchers usually mean.

For instance, when we do studies evaluating the effectiveness of an instructional approach, we must show that it outperforms something else. These days studies compare the approach in question with what are referred to as “business as usual” approaches (BUA). If we can’t demonstrate that students do better than with BUA classroom practices, then the practice doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean that no one learns anything from it, just that they do no better than they would without it.  

In my Twitter argument, my antagonist referred to some observational studies which made no comparisons at all. The studies provided detailed descriptions of how reading was taught in some high achieving schools. The conclusion was that these were effective practices since the kids were learning so well.

The problem with that conclusion is that it ignores all other sources of learning.

Control groups and comparison groups are what allow us to separate out influences like maturation and out-of-school experiences.

I checked out one of those observational studies and found that the family incomes in those schools were 42% higher than the averages, and 150% more of the parents were highly educated professionals (e.g., doctors, lawyers, professors than would be typical. Do you think there is any possibility that the parents may have had something to do with their children’s remarkable success?

Observational studies have a purpose, but it is not to determine whether a teaching approach provides learning advantages.

Teachers may make the same mistake when evaluating their own efforts. They may conclude that an approach “works” solely based on personal experience. They can see that their students are learning, but their observations cannot reveal why. Without a comparison group we can’t know if kids would have done even better with some other approach.

Please don’t argue for the superiority or relative value of any kind of instruction without appropriate comparative data.

Pet Peeve #7:  Teaching reading comprehension by asking certain kinds of questions.

Here is another issue that I get a lot of mail about. Principals (and sometimes teachers) are often seeking either testing or instructional materials that will allow them to target specific reading comprehension standards or question types from their state’s reading assessment.

Those requests seem to make sense, right?

They want to know which comprehension skills their kids haven’t yet accomplished and asking questions aligned with those skills should do the job, they presume. Likewise, having kids practice answering the kinds of questions the tests will ask should improve reading comprehension performance. Again, it looks smart. It seems like a great idea to have kids practice answering those kinds of questions they’ll have to answer on the state tests.

My mama told me that just because something seems right doesn’t make it right.

She was right in this case. There is no evidence that these so-called comprehension skills even exist. There is, in fact, considerable evidence that they don’t (Shanahan, 2014; Shanahan, 2015).

Study after study (and the development of test after test) for more than 80 years have shown that we cannot even distinguish these question types one from another. Likewise, there is no evidence that we can successfully teach kids to answer the types of questions used on tests.  

If you really want your kids to excel in reading, get them challenging texts. Then engage them in discussions of those texts. Get them to write in response to the texts. Reread the texts and talk about them again. Come back to them later to compare with other texts or have them synthesize the info from multiple texts for presentations or projects.

Ask them questions that are relevant to the understanding of those texts. Don’t worry about the question types. Worry about whether they are arriving at deep interpretations of the texts and whether they can use the information. Reading comprehension is about making sense of texts, not about answering certain types of questions.

Pet Peeve #8:  Teaching reading with books that are too easy.

One problem with this peeve is that what I’m complaining about has a bit of truth behind it.

The original idea of teaching with “instructional level” texts was reasonable enough. If kids find reading too difficult, they won’t engage in it, and if they find it too easy, they won’t gain much from engaging in it. There are research studies on teaching (not necessarily the teaching of reading) that say that if there is too much difficulty, students withdraw rather than learning (difficulty and learning). Protecting against that problem makes sense.

How to ensure that learning is neither too onerous nor inconsequential? Answering that question is where things went afoul.

We got too formulaic. We set text placements mechanically, with no real justification. For years, teachers have been told to place kids in texts they could read with 95-98% accuracy and 75-89% reading comprehension. I’ve long criticized those levels as being too easy (Shanahan, 2019; Shanahan, 2020. They put kids in books that they can already read reasonably well.

There are other things we can do to ensure success without putting kids in such easy books.

How about placing kids in challenging books and then providing adequate scaffolding and support so that they are not overwhelmed?

Recently, proponents of some of these instructional level schemes have started telling their adherents that the proper book level for kids is one in which they can read 90% of the words correctly (instead of the previous 95%). That should provide a shift to harder books, but an arbitrary one at best (and one in no better alignment with research findings). Even more important, there are no studies showing that this kind of book matching is beneficial. Most important though, this arbitrary change provides no direction as to how to provide students with appropriate and adequate supports for reading these harder books successfully.

Too many kids are being taught reading today with books they can already read reasonably well. As long as that continues, it will be difficult if not impossible to raise national reading levels.

Pet Peeve #9:  Efforts to control the difficulty of children’s independent reading.

Just as the instructional level idea has limited kids’ opportunity to learn from reading instruction, there are efforts afoot to limit the challenges of children’s independent reading.

Personal reading should be personal.

Limiting students’ reading choices to texts at Level H, and so on are boneheaded. There is no research supporting these prohibitions. I often hear from parents who are upset that their children aren’t allowed to read books that interest them because the books are supposedly too hard.

Some commercial programs direct teachers to curb kids’ ambitions in this regard, and others that do so through the use systems of testing, point assignments, and rewards.

Rather than limiting kids to books they can read easily, it would be better to study the research on motivation which suggests that curiosity and challenge can be real motivators.

Pet Peeve #10: Those who promote the “science of reading” but then sneak in approaches not supported by research.

I’m a big science of reading instruction guy. I’ve been chagrined as American reading scores have languished while students from other nations have progressed. It is especially upsetting given the reading proficiency gaps that divide us racially, linguistically, and economically.  

The best way to raise achievement is to adhere to the research; to provide students with the approaches found to be most effective in terms of promoting learning.  

It has been great to hear parents, school boards, and state legislatures calling for reliance on the science of reading.

However, not everyone who promotes that idea is especially serious about it. For example, they’ll insist that phonics instruction is supported by science (indeed, it is), but then sneak in stuff like sound walls, decodable text, and extra heavy doses of phonemic awareness instruction with no science in sight.

Nothing wrong with arguing for any of those practices, but there is a real “truth in advertising” problem when those are advanced under the science of reading flag.

Such promotions should carry disclaimers that separate out the science from the ideas that the promoters happen to like.

Some experts who play this game tell me that they know there isn’t evidence supporting their contentions. But they argue that it is okay to do so since “it is logical” that their nostrums work. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but they still should separate out their claims, rather than misleading parents, practitioners, and policymakers.

What is the “science of reading?”

That depends on who you talk to. There is no agreed upon definition. Nor is there any official body like the Académie Française that can dictate a meaning by fiat. Last year, Reading Research Quarterly published a science of reading issue (it blossomed into two with more than 50 articles). There weren’t 50 definitions, but it was close.

The disagreements turned on two points: the role of instructional research and the scope of reading covered.

Some use the term in reference to neurological and cognitive science studies of how brains process written words (e.g., Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene or Reading at the Speed of Language by Mark Seidenberg). The problem with that approach, as valuable as those studies are, is that it ignores instructional research – the studies that consider the impact of how and what we teach. That approach wouldn’t bother me if its purveyors weren’t trying to tell us what and how we should teach without attention to instructional studies.

No one in medicine would willingly apply basic scientific findings to medical practice without some intermediary tests of effectiveness and safety. Imagine, for instance, physicians administering COVID vaccines without proof that they work. Despite careful attention to basic research, only about 10% of medical therapies ever make it all the way through the testing process. “Can’t miss” hypotheses based on terrific basic science research often fail to work in medicine and there is no reason to think it would be any different in reading education. A century of failed hypotheses in teaching (e.g., right-handedness training, learning styles, programmed readers, eye training) should disabuse us of this idea (Shanahan, 2020).

To me, a science of reading – if we are talking about education – requires that our prescriptions for teaching be tempered by rigorous instructional evaluations. If a claim hasn’t been tried out and found effective, then the claims – no matter how heartfelt – aren’t part of reading science.

Basic research shows that phonological activation takes place when people read words silently and simulations are showing that computers’ responses to words are affected by the statistical properties of the words they process. Such findings suggest that readers look for visual patterns when they read and that reading requires that those patterns be processed phonologically. That’s fascinating, but it doesn’t reveal how we can best teach reading.

As cool as those studies are, I don’t argue for explicit systematic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction because of them. I advocate such teaching because there are more than 100 studies showing that it improves kids’ learning (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008; National Reading Panel, 2000). Those brain studies strengthen the case admittedly, but without them I’d still support phonics. Conversely, if I only had the brain evidence, then no deal – not enough support for me to include that in my teaching routine.

When someone tells you what to do in the classroom based on what they think a “science of reading” shows, be skeptical. Ask to see the research that shows that teaching those things or in those ways improves learning.

The other definitional disagreement has to do with the scope of what counts in a science of reading. Historically, that term was used to refer to word reading (“decoding” in current parlance) – a tradition that goes back more than 200 years. Current claims align well with those historical uses. If someone says your school isn’t aligned with the science of reading, they likely mean that you are not teaching phonemic awareness and phonics in the ways that they think you should.

There is nothing wrong or misleading about using the term that way. If my child had dyslexia and he was being taught to guess words based on the pictures – an approach inconsistent with the basic science but also with the instructional science – I’d complain. That a science of reading or, more properly, a science of reading instruction includes much more than that wouldn’t mean that I was being misleading – only that I was applying a general category to a specific case.

Many of those Reading Research Quarterly articles were aimed at trying to expand the scope of how science of reading is currently being discussed. It’s great to try to reveal the entire scope of evidence that is encompassed by science of reading, unless the point is to distract folks from ensuring their kids get explicit phonics teaching.

I make that point because I know of no one who uses the term science of reading to exclude research on vocabulary, reading comprehension, domain knowledge, or oral language, no matter how narrowly they may be using the term in a specific instance. Reading researchers shouldn’t feel threatened when parents try to make sure that a particular part of the research is applied and applied well.

In case that isn’t clear: Indeed, a science of reading instruction includes more than phonemic awareness, letter name learning, phonics, decoding, and text reading fluency. But importantly, a science of reading includes all of those aspects of reading, as well.  

How Does Science of Reading Differ from National Reading Panel?

The last time these science of reading debates broke out was in the 1990s. That time, the federal government intervened. The term then was not “science of reading,” but “scientifically-based reading instruction (SBRI).” That term focused specifically on instructional studies and provided a specific legal definition of the term; then scientists were empaneled to determine the scope of the matter based on research reviews.

I served on that panel. That effort led to strong public support for explicit teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Based on those reviews, the feds adopted policies that promoted such instruction in the primary grades. At that time, fourth grade reading achievement rose in the U.S. – something we haven’t seen since those policies were allowed to lapse.

To me, the National Reading Panel results are part of a science of reading. But remember that was carried out in the late 1990s. During the past two decades research has expanded and we know more about what should be included in a science of reading instruction. Topics like writing and spelling to improve reading, text complexity, teaching reading comprehension within science and social studies, differentiation of instruction, quality of instruction, and text structure have all generated extensive bodies of research since the Panel closed its books. (A science of reading is always a moving target since knowledge is always conditional and research is always ongoing).

How do I know if an instructional program or approach is part of a science of reading?

This question comes up a lot these days. And no wonder.

A couple of weeks ago I issued a blog that explained that some widely touted practices are not part of a science of reading. You wouldn’t believe the messages that I received from people angry with me for daring to write that. They assured me that those practices were part of the science of reading, and they knew it because they believed it.

I asked an author of a programs touting some of those practices under the science banner.

She knew there was no research supporting what she was selling as “science of reading,” but she defended her approach since it was “just logical that those things work given the science.”  

She may or may not be right about that. I don’t know. I do know that my hunches, biases, deeply held beliefs, and inklings aren’t science – and I don’t know how hers get to be so sanctified.

In this case, she not only was embracing practices that haven’t yet been studied, but those which research hasn’t supported.

Unfortunately, the only real protection against that kind of logical overreach is caveat emptor, buyer beware. When someone tells you that something is part of the science of reading, you need to ask for the study or studies that proved that to benefit learning. Finding support for those claims shouldn’t be on your shoulders but on theirs.

The lack of research supporting an instructional approach is NOT proof that an approach does not work. It may work, even if it hasn’t been tested yet. Lots of time it’s necessary to stretch research findings beyond what was directly studied. There is no other information to go on.

There is nothing wrong with advocating or adopting instructional approaches without evidence – as long as everyone recognizes that to be the case. When untested practices are promoted under the guise of a science of reading, it isn’t okay. It’s dishonest, false advertising, fake news; it’s just another case of someone trying to manipulate you to do what they want you to do.  

I’m not saying that there aren’t balanced literacy fanatics who cheer when I tell the truth about something like that (I wish they were as happy when I explain why it’s a bad idea to teach kids to guess words from context in place of reading).

Okay. I say there is no evidence for teaching advanced phonemic awareness and some readers are ticked off and dismissive and others are chanting, “Hooray for our side.”

But this hypothesis– that we may need to teach advanced PA – is too important to leave in this fog of virtue signaling and side choosing. 

This idea of advanced phonemic awareness was popularized by David A. Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Cortland. David has had a long career in school psychology and academia and may be the best-read scholar when it comes to things alphabetic.

How better to evaluate this idea than to turn to the source himself? He, more than anyone, knows from whence it came and the evidence, if any, that supports it. We recently spent a couple hours exploring these issues, and I reread the relevant portions of his landmark, 2015, book. Essential of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties.

David thought a major clarification was needed. In his 2015 book, he used the terms “phonemic proficiency” and “advanced phonemic awareness” interchangeably to refer to a cognitive or linguistic skill. He never used these terms to refer to any specific instructional activities. Nevertheless, many educators have conflated advanced phonemic awareness with the notion that certain teaching activities, namely phoneme deletion and substitution, were required. That notion came from some readers of his book, not from David. He never claimed that all kids needed to be engaged in deletion or substitution tasks.

This misunderstanding has led David to abandon the term “advanced phonemic awareness” altogether. He still refers to the underlying ability that all students must develop as phonemic proficiency. When suggesting relevant instructional activities, he describes them specifically (e.g., blending, segmentation, deletion, substitution). The point is to distinguish the ability that students must learn from the instructional activities we use to promote that ability.

More interesting are his insights regarding phonemic proficiency.

He begins with Linnea Ehri’s theory of orthographic mapping. That theory “explains how children learn to read words by sight, to spell words from memory, and to acquire vocabulary words from print” (Ehri, 2014, p. 5). Basically, young readers need to develop sufficient knowledge of the letters and phonemes so that printed words and spelling patterns can be connected with phonological representations in the mind. It is these phonemic representations that are the anchors that secure that information in memory.

Readers only briefly and occasionally “sound out” words when they read. That would be too slow and laborious (a fact that troubles balanced literacy proponents). Orthographic mapping, like any kind of fast mapping (the concept was drawn from the language learning literature) is about getting information into memory quickly and effortlessly.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Ehri champions teaching letter names, spelling, and phonemic awareness so that students can fully segment (analysis) and blend (synthesis) the sounds. This means they could separate words into their phonemic parts proficiently and reassemble them. Those abilities play an obvious functional role in orthographic mapping. As the National Reading Panel reported, teaching PA improves reading achievement (NICHD, 2000).

That’s where most of us leave it and why I dared question claims that students may require more PA than that. And, that’s where it gets interesting…

You see, David isn’t like most of us. He didn’t see that research as complete. Oh, he bought into the idea that kids needed explicit instruction in PA, he just wondered if that was sufficient for everyone.

No idle wondering was this.

It led him back through a plethora of studies to see what was going on with kids who didn’t succeed and why some word-reading interventions ended up with better results than others.

He concluded that some kids with core phonological processing deficiencies needed more help developing these phonemic anchors. Meeting typical early learning criteria (e.g., knowing letter names and sounds, segmenting words phonemically) simply were not getting these children far enough.

Studies have reported that older students demonstrate much greater phonemic proficiency than younger students. That means the ability continues to grow beyond the period of explicit teaching that is now often provided in grades K-1. We have long known that PA and reading are reciprocal – PA development improves early reading and reading practice extends PA.

Kilpatrick’s hypothesis is that for most kids, developing PA to the point where they can fully segment words is all that is needed to get things rolling—the PA automaticity that supports orthographic mapping naturally develops from there. He concludes that “business as usual” reading and spelling instruction and reading and writing practice are all that are needed to keep PA proficiency developing. Except…

Except for those kids with core phonological deficits . . . the ones who simply don’t get enough PA support from usual reading experience. They would, he hypothesizes, benefit from from more extended PA instruction to promote the phonemic proficiency displayed by typical readers. The point of this isn’t to engage kids in particular kinds of practice (e.g., deleting phonemes, adding phonemes, reversing phonemes), though engaging in some of them may be part of such practice – David thinks that could be beneficial. No, the purpose is to enable orthographic mapping.

Is this a goofy theory? I didn’t think so, but who am I? I, again, went to the source. Who would have better insight into the value of this hypothesis than Linnea Ehri?

She has a somewhat different conception of the form that this advanced development may take but she agreed with many (most) of his predictions of what would work and with whom and why it would matter. So, not a crazy idea at all. (Maybe those people who claimed me to be an idiot might be onto something.)

Remember, however, my complaint about “advanced PA” wasn’t about its potential accuracy or its value as a hypothesis that could help advance our understanding. No, my problem was with folks who were extending PA instruction in the classroom for everyone, states adopting more extended or rigorous PA standards for all, and the like. Kilpatrick agreed with this concern. He said most students should not require this degree of PA training. He wasn’t abandoning the idea that students needed phonemic proficiency that exceeded the abilities to segment and blend, just acknowledging that those extended levels of proficiency develop naturally in most students. (Remember, his 2015 book was focused on struggling readers.) 

What of all of that?

David did look at a lot of studies and his ideas did emerge from the patterns he noticed in the word-reading intervention literature. To many that would seem to make his claims research-based and scientific. But a direct study that compared the efficacy of different kinds of PA instruction would be needed to convince the scientific community. David believes that the patterns he identified in existing studies provide valuable clues about best practices, not this is a “fully established scientific finding.”

For instance, Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winning physicist wrote: “When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.”

That just means that you need to test those patterns that you think you saw in the original data. In this case, if you taught PA to the point that some kids could do those more complex phonemic manipulations while staying to segmentation and blending with the others, you’d find out whether that kind of teaching was advantageous. It might be, but until such studies are done, we won’t know.

I wondered how Linnea Ehri felt about that. One could understand she might choose to embrace David’s hypothesis as a way of advancing her own theory.

Her response?

“David’s hypotheses need to be tested directly with controlled studies that examine whether training improves phonemic proficiency, the involvement of grapho-phonemic proficiency, and whether this facilitates sight word learning in typically developing readers and struggling readers.”

Nothing self-serving there. Just a scientist frankly evaluating the science.

Oh, and, perhaps more on point, is David Kilpatrick’s own take on the matter:

“We completely agree that a study is needed in which the only difference between groups is the nature and extent to which phonemic skills are developed. Indeed, that was supposed to happen last year with 200 severely reading disabled students. But due to COVID-19, that got scrapped.”

Maybe, I’m not the idiot or whole language devotee some of you presumed.

Where does that leave us?

1.     Kilpatrick, Ehri, and Shanahan agree that there is substantial evidence showing a clear benefit from explicitly teaching young readers to perceive the sounds (phonemes) within spoken words and to link these sounds with letters and spelling patterns. Getting kids to the point of full segmentation in PA is a reasonable goal for regular classroom instruction.

2.     We agree that the engine of learning words is not rote memorization but a deep knowledge and proficiency of phonemes and letters in words.

3.     We also agree that there are some students who manage to accomplish those levels or degrees of PA efficiency but for some reason still fail to accomplish orthographic mapping.

4.     We all agree that more needs to be done for those kids, but here there are some variations in our thoughts about what is needed.  

5.     Kilpatrick has a cool theory that suggests that instruction could profitably automatize phonemic analysis skills – enabling orthographic mapping. That instruction would not be for all students but only for those who don’t get to that point of “sight word” reading. We all agree that his idea may be correct.

6.     We also all agree that this idea is worth testing and that until it is tested, it has the status of a sensible data-based hypothesis, but that it is not a proven method for improving reading achievement. Until there is such evidence, “advanced PA mandates” and the like is the work of politicians and salesmen rather than scientists and educators.

Oh, and given the unfortunate misuse of the term “advanced phonemic awareness,” let’s join David and abandon its use. Rest in peace, advanced phonemic awareness.

Thanks, David and Linnea. Your generosity in helping me with this blog entry is deeply appreciated. Your integrity and deep devotion to a true science of reading is laudable. Of course, if I’ve gotten anything wrong here, that’s on me – not you.

No one gets too bent out of shape if I talk about little kids working on their oral reading, but when those young’uns reach 9- or 10-years-old that presumably is baby stuff.

I get why that is.

First, the research on fluency instruction has focused heavily on two groups: kids in grades 1-4 and remedial readers in grades 1-12 (NICHD, 2001). I can’t tell a 6^th grade teacher that there is research showing that if she devotes sufficient time to fluency her students will do better with reading comprehension. My own professional practice suggests that it can be powerful but that’s a different level of support.

Second, round robin reading has given oral reading a bad name. Most teachers have memories of hating round robin when they were kids, so being enlightened they avoid oral reading at much cost. Kids should be able to develop fluency from silent reading practice. Unfortunately, you can’t tell if kids are making progress unless you listen to them read and it is hard to intervene and help without that kind of monitoring. Practice can “make perfect” as the old saying claims but it often doesn’t. (Given this, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that research has found the amount of oral reading practice in high school is correlated with reading achievement gains more closely than the amount of in class silent reading practice (Stallings, 1980).

Third, older kids will often resist. One of my least favorite instructional activities (Popcorn) sometimes results in kids balking: “You can call on me, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to read aloud to the class!”

Recently, I’ve astonished some teachers and district administrators by encouraging fluency teaching with older kids. They are getting a lot of pressure these days to emphasize phonics – yeah, phonics in regular high school English classes (which I think is lunatic) and they have no idea that oral reading fluency instruction has been found to improve kids’ word reading and decoding. Many of these kids have had a ton of phonics instruction and don’t know how to apply it. Fluency instruction began with the notion that such practice would enable the application of what the kids had already learned about letters, sounds, spelling patterns.

Don’t get me wrong. There definitely are a relatively small number of high school kids who would likely get some benefit from explicit phonics. That instruction, however, should be relegated to remedial reading or special education, not the English class. Likewise, the idea of English classes devoting some of their valuable minutes to morphological study – which can impact decoding – makes great sense, too. That should be a regular part of the vocabulary teaching that should be going on.

Nevertheless, fluency training can have a remarkable impact on kids’ reading comprehension in the upper grades – most likely by consolidating what those kids have already learned about decoding along the way.

Let me define and explain a few basic ideas about fluency and then the rest of this blog is aimed at providing instructional advice on fluency teaching with older students.

Fluency refers to the ability to read text accurately, with automaticity, and with proper expression (NICHD, 2001). 

Accuracy is about reading an author’s words. If you don’t do that, then miscomprehension may occur. Students must get into the habit of respecting authors. That means reading the words that the author put on the page, rather than replacing them with context-based guesses as to what may have been meant. Words matter and becoming an effective reader requires reading the author’s words; not substituting them with our own.

This word reading must be accomplished with automaticity. That means reading the words accurately without conscious attention. Automaticity is usually estimated by tracking reading speed. If a student reads text too slowly, comprehension deteriorates. Adult proficient readers read text aloud at about 166-178 words correct per minute (Baer, et al., 2009). Fourth graders who read at fewer than 100 words correct per minute tend to be “below basic” in reading comprehension. Reading so slowly makes it difficult to integrate information. By the time you get to the end of the sentence, you’ve likely lost the thread of the first part.

Proper expression is important because there are many aspects to translating text that are not on the page. Except for punctuation, authors do little to help readers to group words together, pause appropriately, or raise or lower pitch. If you don’t get those things right it can be difficult to understand.

Here are some activities that have been used successfully in upper elementary, middle, and high school.

Instructional Activities Aimed at Building Fluency

Paired reading: Pair students up. Have them take turns reading the text to each other. One student read a page or paragraph and the other gives feedback. Then the students switch roles. During this activity, the teacher circulates throughout the room, giving feedback as needed. Link some comprehension work to this. At the end of each section of reading, have the students determine the main point(s) of that section or compose a good test question about that part of the material.

Repeated Reading: Students read aloud a portion of text (perhaps a 100-word chunk, or the first couple of paragraphs). The teacher or another student gives feedback, and the student tries it again. This repetition continues three times or until the student can read it with 99% accuracy, at more than 100 words per minute, and with expression that suggests successful comprehension (White, et al., 2021). This can be combined with paired reading. Repeated reading is especially valuable with content materials. Understanding such texts often requires this kind of intensive rereading anyway, so the rereading is appropriate.   

Pause, Prompt, Praise: Not all students are great fluency partners. PPP provides some support in this area. Partners and teachers are encouraged to give students some slack if a mistake is made. Let the student read to the end of the clause or sentence and see what they do.  Better readers try to fix the mistake. That’s the pause. But if a student can’t remedy the error (or doesn’t notice it), then provide a Prompt. If the mistake doesn’t make sense, then give some feedback about meaning.  If the word read doesn’t look or sound like the word in the book, then direct the student to look more closely. If the student can’t fix the error after one prompt, tell them what the word is. Finally, for anything done well, provide praise.

Recorded Readings: Students can make progress without much individual feedback. Consider having students record oral reading for homework. Have them read an assigned portion of text (no more than 5–10 minutes worth). To complete the assignment successfully, the students will likely need to practice prior to recording. Teacher can spot check these to check on performance. Again, it is a good idea to link to some comprehension tasks.

Chunking:  Studies suggest that chunking can be helpful with older students. In this, the teacher initially provides text with phrasal boundaries marked. Students of all ability levels tend to get a boost from this material. After they have had some practice reading materials so marked, then give them unmarked texts and have them working in teams or individually to identify phrasal boundaries.

Here are some FAQs about Fluency Instruction

Do all high school students need work with fluency?

No, not all older students need fluency work.  Some students are particularly good at fluency. If students can read grade level text with a high degree of accuracy, speeds of about 150 wcpm, and with proper expression, then fluency instruction/practice is a time waster. As kids progress through the grades, the proportion who are sufficiently fluent increases. Fewer students should require fluency work as time goes on.

Our students are getting low test scores in reading comprehension.  Why no focusing on rather than fluency?

Low comprehension scores can result from many things. One of those things is fluency. For those kids, improving fluency has a direct positive impact on their reading comprehension.

How much fluency teaching should we provide?

I recommend up to 30 minutes a day of fluency instruction.  But remember, this is across all classes.  If every middle school or high school class provided 10 minutes of fluency work once or twice a week, that should do the trick.

Isn’t oral reading embarrassing for struggling readers?

Fluency work is a kind of practice activity, not much different from Lebron James shooting free throws to get ready for a big game. Practice isn’t embarrassing, as long as everyone recognizes it as practice. Most students enjoy the fluency work as it is involving, and they can see their own improvement. Avoid situations like round robin, in which a student is supposed to perform before the group or the whole class. But having everyone or half the class reading aloud at the same time does not get the same push back that more performance-oriented tasks do.

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 make sense in a content classes like science or math?

Yes. It is important that students learn how to read those books well. If students are to become independent learners in algebra or chemistry, they must read those texts fluently.  Technical subjects require that students read texts intensively, rereading some parts again and again. Unfortunately, many high school students read this material once for gist only.  Fluency work can become a powerful way for teaching students how to understand these materials.

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

Research on these techniques has found them to improve word reading, fluency, and reading comprehension. Whatever it is that students learn from fluency training with particular texts has been found to transfer to their performance with other texts.

References

Baer, J., Kutner, M., & Sabatini, J. (2009). Basic reading skills and the literacy of America’s least literate adults: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Stallings, J. A. (1980). Allocated academic learning time revisited, or beyond time on task." Educational Researcher 9 (11):11–16.

White, S., Sabatini, J., Park, B. J., Chen, J., Bernstein, J., and Li, M. (2021). The 2018 NAEP oral reading fluency study. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics.

Several years ago, I started to recommend literacy charities. Since then, each year, I comb through the Charity Navigator ratings to identify 4-star rated programs that are national or multi-regional in scope. The charities listed here (and that will continue to be listed on my site for the next 12 months https://shanahanonliteracy.com/charities) provide books and other literacy services, are transparent in their reporting, and spend all or most of the money that they collect on their missions rather than on overhead. If you donate to these organizations, good literacy things happen. (I have no connection to any of these organizations).

This year for the first time, with the help of Charity Intelligence Canada, I have included two Canadian charities as well for my many Canadian readers.

There are lots of worthwhile local literacy charities, too. I’m in no position to monitor and evaluate those, but consider turning some of your generosity towards them as well.

Please be generous, be safe, and have a wondrous and literate holiday.

U.S. 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 three-quarters of 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 52 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 held a book. Each book will be read repeatedly. 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.

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. They have distributed 7,000,000 books over the past 20 years!

Room to Read. Room to Read believes that World Change Starts with Educated Children. It envisions 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. The literacy programs that they support around the world have served 20 million children and they have distributed more than 32 millions books.

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! 

Canadian Charities

CODE. CODE promotes every child’s right to read. It works in partnership with locally-based organizations to promote local literacy education efforts around the world. They have helped more than 10 million children to gain access to better reading and writing education, supporting literacy programs, research initiatives, and literary awards. CODES literacy efforts provide teacher professional development and equip teachers with culturally-relevant children’s books and learning materials to nurture reading and writing skills in young students.

First Book Canada. Over the past years, First Book Canada has distributed more than 1.3 millions of high-quality age-appropriate books to 500,000 children who would not have access to books otherwise. Their programs focus on getting books into the hands of children growing up in poverty.