Shanahan response:

Writing fluency is a slippery fish. Definitions of the term vary greatly within the profession (Latif, 2013). Not surprisingly, those differences in definition result in a wide variety of advice for teachers on how to facilitate fluent writing. Accordingly, researchers interested in the matter have spent most of their efforts towards figuring out what fluency is or its relation to writing quality.

Personally, I’m happy that anyone is paying attention to this at all. For a long time, the literature on children’s writing seemed to emphasize quality over fluency. This was done by promoting revision heavily, even in the primary grades. Revision is important, of course, but it only helps if you have gotten your ideas onto paper in the first place. Revising a blank page is an empty exercise.

National and state assessments don’t consider fluency issues directly either. They might get at it incidentally by marking a paper down if its ideas aren’t sufficiently developed. However, lack of development can be as evident in papers with lots of words/sentences as those with few.

I’ve long believed that writing fluency – as much as writing quality – should be a major goal in the early grades (my first publication in the field was about how I had successfully facilitated writing fluency in my classrooms). Over the past couple of decades there has been a growing body of research revealing the pivotal role that handwriting and spelling can play in writing fluency. Experience tells me that instruction in those can facilitate automaticity, but so can emphasis on invented or developmental spelling – reducing student anxiety about potential errors, while providing valuable practice with phonemic awareness and phonics at the same time. 

Researchers these days often divide writing into its components. For example, one popular model separates transcription (getting ideas onto paper) from the ability to generate or compose ideas in the first place (Berninger & Winn, 2006).

Sadly, studies that have tried to disassemble writing fluency have left us with a bit of a muddle. I think their expectation has been that fluent transcription includes “lower” skills like spelling and handwriting, while idea generation depends not on these mundane skills but on world knowledge and language proficiency. Things don’t divide up that neatly, however.

In that regard, writing fluency is a lot like reading fluency. For the youngest students and the poorest readers, reading fluency is largely the result of automatic decoding ability – but with development, some aspects of reading comprehension are implicated too (through prosody). Writing has a similar pattern of progression apparently, with printing and spelling sucking up much of the variance early on, but with executive function and oral language increasingly insinuating themselves into the equation as writers progress.

That shouldn’t be too surprising. There are many reasons people have trouble getting ideas on paper.

Kids often tell me that they don’t have any ideas, they don’t know what to write about. That may be an accurate appraisal of their situation, or a convenient excuse for avoiding what for them is an unpleasant and potentially embarrassing task (yes, there are both cognitive and affective reasons for balking at a white page). When students at any level voice this problem, I talk with them. Their ideas flow easily in our conversations but vanish in the monologic situation required of writing (Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Steinbach, 1984).

Another enemy of writing fluency is perfectionism. “If I can’t produce something perfect – that won’t embarrass me – I can’t possibly write.” Concerns about handwriting and spelling may limit fluency. Many kids hesitate when they come to a word that they think they can’t spell, or they engage in wasteful mental gymnastics trying to avoid expressing ideas that would require those words. That’s why taking the pressure off handwriting and spelling quality during drafting can support fluency.

Perfectionism raises its ugly head another way, as well. Writers often are impeded by premature and seemingly infinite revision and editing. They write a sentence, and then rewrite it. Young kids may manage to get a word on paper and then try to erase and improve it before they even get to a second word. This composing, decomposing, and recomposing prevents writing fluency and undermines writer confidence. Few things are more painful than watching a child tearfully laboring over his wordless paper, blotched and torn from such revision. Jacques Derrida referred to this as “interminable revision” and there are scads of electronic writing tools aimed at preventing the problem for adult writers (e.g., Write or Die, iA Writer, OmmWriter, Freewrite Smart Typewriter).

Handwriting issues are a big part of writing fluency early on, but its importance diminishes quickly (Juel, 1988). This may partly be due to the small or fine muscle demands of handwriting – though studies that replace handwriting with keyboarding have reported mixed results (Goldberg, Russell, & Cook, 2003; Spilling, et al, 2021). Sometimes keyboarding results in more fluent production of text and sometimes it doesn’t.

Given all that, what can you do to improve writing fluency?

1.     Teach handwriting and spelling explicitly. Such instruction has been found to improve both fluency and quality of writing (Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara, & Harris, 2012). In the early grades at least, I’m a big fan of combining phonics and spelling instruction. The idea is to teach these skills to the point of automaticity. The youngster agonizing over how to form the letter G is not thinking about the ideas that he/she wants to communicate to a reader.

2.     Lower the emphasis on spelling and handwriting during drafting. This may sound like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth – teach spelling but don’t require it – but that isn’t really the case. Handwriting and spelling facilitate communication. The more legible your handwriting and the more accurate your spelling, the more likely it is that readers will focus on your ideas.

However, when drafting, these skills don’t matter very much. Encourage (beseech, implore, beg) students not to worry about their spelling or handwriting while drafting. And don’t undermine this encouragement by spelling words for them or marking up their errors on an early draft.

Young kids benefit from trying to spell words because it requires them to analyze phonemic structure. Spelling instruction increases the body of knowledge that students use when they are trying to spell unknown words.  

3.     Discussion and planning can play an important role in writing fluency. Research has long found that getting kids talking about what they want to write about improves and makes more efficient the flow of ideas. For the youngest children, drawing about their topic can have the same kind of payoff. As children move up the grades, getting them to list or chart their ideas can help.

4.     Require a lot of writing. Students should be reading and writing throughout the day. They should be writing as part of reading, science, social studies, and math. As with any skilled activity, practice plays an important role – and given the learning benefits that writing about a topic can provide (Graham & Hebert, 2010) – writing should be a go-to-activity throughout the curriculum.

5.     Engage students in non-stop writing (Datchuck, 2017). The linguist S.I Hayakawa required his college freshman comp students to write – without stopping, rereading, revising -- for an entire class period. John Holt had his fifth graders doing the same for 15 minutes. As a primary grade teacher, my students wrote non-stop in multiple 1-2-minute intervals (Shanahan, 1977).

I’d provide a prompt and then have the students writing non-stop for 1 minute. Then I’d give their hands a rest and change the prompt and have them write for 90 seconds more. Finally, another break was followed by 2 more minutes of non-stop writing. Students who don’t know what to say next are to rewrite their last sentence until they have an idea (promoting the idea of thinking while writing as opposed to being a prelude to writing).

With the beginnings of three compositions in hand, students can begin to shape and improve their ideas. Sometimes I would have them pick the one they liked best for polishing. Or perhaps I would ask them to combine all three into a single paper. Over time, the students gained facility: they could generate a lot of sentences about an idea quickly, they could write and think simultaneously, and because of the limitations of such writing, they came to see the value of revision and editing.   

References

Berninger, V. W., & Winn, W. D. (2006). Implications of Advancements in Brain Research and Technology for Writing Development, Writing Instruction, and Educational Evolution. In C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of writing research (pp. 96–114). The Guilford Press.

Datchuk, S.M. (2017). A direct instruction and precision teaching intervention to improve sentence construction of middle school students with writing difficulties. Journal of Special Education, 51, 62-71. doi:10.1177/0022466916665588

Feng, L., Lindner, A., Ji, X.R., & Joshi, R.M. (2019). The roles of handwriting and keyboarding in writing: A meta-analytic review. Reading & Writing, 32, 33-63.

Goldberg, A., Russell, M., & Cook, A. (2003). The effect of computers on student writing: A meta-analysis of studies from 1992 to 2002. Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 2(1), 3–50.

Graham, S. (2009-2010). Want to improve children’s writing? Don’t neglect their handwriting. American Educator, 20-27,40

Graham, S., McKeown D., Kiuhara, S., & Harris, K.R. (2012). A meta-analysis of writing instruction for students in the elementary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104, 879–896.

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437-447.

Kent, S., Wanzek, J., Petscher, Y., Al Otaiba, S., & Kim, Y. (2014). Writing fluency and quality in kindergarten and first grade: The role of attention, reading transcription, and oral language. Reading & Writing, 27(7), 1163-1188.

Kim, Y.G., Gatlin, B., Al Otaiba, S., & Wanzek, J. (2018). Theorization and an empirical investigation of the component-based and developmental text writing fluency construct. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 51(4), 320-335.

Latif, M. (2013). What do we mean by writing fluency and how can it be validly measured? Applied Linguistics, 34(1), 99-105. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams073

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017). Invented spelling in kindergarten as a predictor of reading and spelling in Grade 1: A new pathway to literacy, or just the same road, less known? Developmental Psychology, 53(1), 77–88. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000179

Scardamalia, M., Bereiter, C. and Steinbach, R. (1984), Teachability of Reflective Processes in Written Composition. Cognitive Science, 8, 173-190. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0802_4

Shanahan, T. (1977). Writing marathons and concept development. Language Arts,

Spilling, E.F., Rønneberg, V., Rogne, W.M. et al. (2021). Handwriting versus keyboarding: Does writing modality affect quality of narratives written by beginning writers? Reading & Writing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10169-y

I know you typically don’t talk about specific programs, but I really would like to know your thoughts. I had always wanted more training in a structured literacy program/approach. I always thought Wilson, and specifically OG approaches, were the gold standards. More recently, I began reading about programs labeled as speech to print. Proponents of speech to print methods claim it is much faster to teach kids to read (and spell) than OG based approaches. Is there research to support this? Are these studies comparing programs based on OG (that mainly follow a more print to speech approach) and programs that are more specifically speech to print? Thank you!

Shanahan response:

You are correct that I usually don’t comment on specific programs. However, I am willing to talk about research on programs or the consistency of certain parts of a program with research.

Let’s start with the claim that Orton-Gillingham (OG) and programs closely derived from it being the “gold standard.”
To me the gold standard for an instructional program would be an approach that consistently results in positive learning outcomes and that outperforms competing methods. This outperformance would be demonstrated by direct research comparisons, or by meta-analyses summarizing a bunch of disparate but relevant comparisons. Basically, a gold standard approach would result, on average, in greater amounts of learning.  

If OG is the gold standard of decoding instruction, then it should reliably do better than other approaches to explicit decoding instruction.

Back in National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) days, we analyzed the effectiveness of phonics across 38 experimental and quasi-experimental studies (that looked at 18 different curricula). Our conclusion was that phonics added a valuable ingredient to literacy teaching, and that programs that included explicit systematic phonics generally outperformed those that did not.

What about different types of phonics teaching? We made some of those comparisons, too. For instance, synthetic phonics (reading words from individual letters and sounds) resulted in higher average effects over analytic phonics (focused on syllables, morphemes, and use of known words as analogies), but this difference wasn’t statistically significant. In other words, those different approaches did about equally well.

We didn’t compare individual phonics programs with each other.

There were usually only 1 or 2 studies of most programs. That Phonics Program A outperformed its poorly specified comparison group a bit more than Phonics Program B outperformed its, isn’t the kind of evidence on which I want to make decisions.

One exception to this was OG approaches. There were enough of those to compute a meaningful estimate of overall effectiveness. Although there were both with positive and negative results, I didn’t push for such an analysis because I suspected the results would be misleading. When OG failed, it was usually with severely disabled populations. OG did not do particularly well in those cases (despite contrary claims), but would alternative approaches have done better?

Over the past 20 years, more research has accumulated, and OG now has its very own meta-analysis (Stevens, Austin, Moore, Scammacca, Boucher, & Vaughn, 2021). That study found OG to be effective but with rather modest benefits – lower effectiveness than was reported for the average phonics study in the NRP report.

So much for being the gold standard!

Orton-Gillingham procedures are no more effective than any other explicit systematic phonics instruction – despite the religious fervor of some of its advocates.

Of course, those true believers, argue against the data:

“They didn’t look at the right version of OG.”

“I do it a little differently than others and it really works well for my kids.”

“The newer trainers aren’t as good as the past ones, so they probably studied teachers who weren’t well trained.”

There is no reason to believe that those things are any more (or less) true of OG than any other approach – and the more studies that accumulate the less likely it matters. If it’s so hard to find a potent version, then we shouldn’t expect widespread success.

We don’t have direct comparisons of OG with other phonics approaches, but generally it looks like it can work as well they do (or, sometimes, not as well).

Which moves us on to the second point – the one about speech to print approaches to phonics.

I’ve oft grumbled about the lack of evaluation of individual features of complex instructional programs. Research may affirm the benefits of a program without revealing its active ingredients.

You’d think with all the interest in phonics these days there would be many such studies exploring the implications of sound tracing, analytic/synthetic approaches, grapheme-phoneme sequences, inclusion of morphological analysis, decodable text, emphasis on consistency versus flexibility, print-to-speech/speech-to-print approaches, dosage variation, and so on.

Unfortunately, there are few research comparisons of print-to-speech and speech-to-print. There is relevant information about that difference, just nothing definitive yet.

Historically, phonics programs tended to emphasize print-to-speech. Kids are taught to identify letters, to link sounds to those letters, and then to sound out words by sounding each letter. That instructional sequence is in the same order as the process readers must use during reading: look at the letters and use that information to generate a phonological representation.  

It seems reasonable to teach students explicitly what we eventually want them to do. However, advantageous curriculum designs do not necessarily mirror their end points so closely. Engaging in a process like reading and learning to read are not the same thing.

Perhaps the opposite – starting with phonemes and pronunciations and connecting those to letters and printed words – might be a good idea. It’s possible that trying to spell and write words does more to enhance phonemic awareness and it may somehow make the phonology more prominent or easy to perceive (Wasowicz, 2021).

The earliest evidence I know of on this was reported by Jeanne Chall (1967). In her qualitative review of research on phonics, she concluded that programs with spelling, writing, and/dictation did better than those without.

I followed up on that in my reading-writing relationship research in the 1980s. I found spelling and decoding to be closely related, even when a lot of other variables were available to suck up the variance (Shanahan, 1984). Later, Ginger Berninger and her colleagues followed up on that with an even more ambitious effort they found the same thing (Berninger, Abbott, Abbott, Graham, & Richards, 2002).

Marilyn Adams (1990) and Linnea Ehri (1997) both theorized on that possibility as well, and Steve Graham reported a meta-analysis on spelling instruction that found spelling to improve reading – probably because of its contribution to decoding (Graham & Santangelo, 2014).

That’s all fascinating, but it’s indirect. It suggests value, it doesn’t prove it.

Not everyone agrees with that conclusion. Louisa Moats (1998, 2005, 2010), for example, has several publications that treat this as a settled matter, claiming speech-to-print to be most effective. Her reasoning hasn’t convinced me, and yet preponderance of current data are certainly on her side.

Perhaps the closest thing we have to a direct test of the proposition is a meta-analysis of 11 studies (Weisler & Mathes, 2011). It concluded that instruction that integrated encoding into decoding instruction led to significantly higher reading achievement. Still not the strongest evidence – because it combined investigations that compared encoding with decoding (Christensen & Bowey, 2005) along with those that compared encoding instruction with things like extra math lessons (Graham, Harris, & Chorzempa, 2002).

At some point – any decoding program must focus on print-to-speech, since that is what we do in reading. However, I think there are real benefits to be derived from activities like invented spelling, spelling instruction, word construction from sounds, and so on – in any phonics program. Speech-to-print activities appear to increase learning. My advice: get a phonics program that includes such activities or layer them into a traditional print-to-speech program (including OG).

References

Adams, M. (1990) Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Berninger, V. W., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Graham, S., & Richards, T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35(1), 39–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/002221940203500104

Chall, J.S. (1967). Reading: The great debate. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Ehri, L. C. (1997). Learning to read and learning to spell are one and the same, almost. In C. A. Perfetti, L. Rieben, & M. Fayol (Eds.), Learning to spell (pp. 237-269). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing, 27, 1703-1743. DOI:10.1007/s11145-014-9517-0

Moats, L.C. (1998). Teaching decoding. American Educator, 22(1), 1-9.

Moats, L. C. (2005). How spelling supports reading and why it is more regular and predictable than you may think. American Educator, 29(4), 12-22, 42-43.

Moats, L. C. (2010). Speech to print: Language essentials for teachers. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.

National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read : an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Shanahan, T. (1984). Nature of the reading-writing relation: An exploratory multivariate analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, 466–477.

Stevens, E.A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A.N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397-417.

Wasowicz, J. (2021). A speech-to-print approach to teaching reading. LDA Bulletin, 53(2), 10-18.

Weiser, B., & Mathes, P. (2011). Using encoding instruction to improve the reading and spelling performances of elementary students at risk for literacy difficulties: A best-evidence synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 17-200.

 Shanahan’s response:

Man was I surprised. I’d already spoken to the principal about the school curriculum. He’d given me an overview and assured me that what his teachers needed was training in academic language and how to ask high level comprehension questions. The speaker at a professional conference had stressed the importance of those in high poverty schools and the principal was convinced that was the road to higher test scores.

I’d asked about how much reading instruction his students were receiving in phonics and fluency, and he assured me those were already addressed. “No, the problem is those higher-level thinking skills that our students lack.”

I told him that I thought I could help but that I wanted to be sure. “Could I visit some classrooms before I decide?”

What I saw wouldn’t surprise me now, but at that time I was gob smacked.

The teachers’ lesson plans showed a lot of reading instruction. My classroom observations showed something else. Much of the instructional time wasn’t used for instruction at all. The teachers spent a big chunk of time on “sustained silent reading” and they read to the children quite a bit, too. All the classrooms had multiple reading groups. That meant that the boys and girls did a lot of worksheets to keep them quiet while the others were reading with the teacher.

The small group teaching entailed little more than reading a story together out of a textbook, with quite a bit of round robin reading. I guess that was the fluency work.

Oh, and the phonics instruction?

There was some but that was pretty thin gruel, too.

The teachers would hand out a couple of phonics worksheets from the textbook program. She’d read the directions to the class and have the kids fill out the pages and then she’d score them and hand them back. Phonics assignments more than phonics instruction. I don’t know what the publisher had in mind, probably not what the students were getting.

I didn’t keep track at the time. In retrospect I’d guess those kids got about 5 minutes a day of phonics (and as for quality of instruction, please don’t get me started). The same point could be made about the “fluency work.” Round robin reading rarely gives kids more than a minute or so of practice. Across a school year, that would amount to less than 3 hours of oral reading practice if done daily!

In other words, these children weren’t getting much phonics or fluency teaching.

These boys and girls needed to learn how to read. Nevertheless, no one was teaching them very much.

Students could practice but practicing what you don’t know how to do is not especially effective.

The principal was right. They weren’t getting much help with academic language or higher order thinking. But that wasn’t their problem.

You asked, “how much phonics should you teach?” Certainly, more than these kids were getting.

The National Reading Panel concluded that students benefited from explicit phonics instruction. It didn’t determine how much phonics might be beneficial (it did say that phonics from kindergarten through second grade was a good idea).

In response to your letter, I took another look at those 38 studies. Eighteen of them gave information about dosage. They all were successful. That is, the kids who got those amounts of phonics outperformed the ones who weren’t getting that instruction.

These daily amounts ranged from 15 to 60 minutes per day.

Since the phonics instruction in all these studies was beneficial, you could say 15 minutes per day is enough, and maybe it is. But I’d lean towards the averages. There are different ways to calculate averages. In this case, they all came out to around 30 minutes per day (the mean was 34.4 minutes, and the mode and median were both 30).

Does that mean every child needs 30 minutes of explicit phonics teaching every day?

Not necessarily. Carol Connor found she could divide first-graders based on their decoding proficiency. Those who could decode well already, did better working on more advanced reading and writing activities. Those not so proficient did best with explicit phonics teaching. Her study gives lie to the notion that there is no cost to teaching phonics to kids who can already decode well. What that means is that some kids would get more phonics and some would get less.

Also, even with 30 minutes of decoding instruction each day there are sure to be kids who need even more (decoding is a bigger challenge for some). Those kids might receive in-class or pull-out interventions added to the daily classroom phonics instruction.

I required 30-45 minutes of such instruction when I was director of reading in the Chicago Public Schools. We aimed for 2-3 hours per day of reading and writing teaching, so we devoted a quarter of the whole to making sure kids could read the words. Obviously, there is more to teaching reading than that, but 25% is a considerable commitment. Over three years (from kindergarten to grade 2), that would mean roughly 270 hours of decoding instruction would be available to all students (with some kids getting less due to their burgeoning proficiency and some others getting more –beyond the classroom -- due to their particular needs). In the long run, that’s more time than any of the studies have provided and certainly more than I often see in the classrooms that I visit.

What counts as decoding instruction?

That will vary a bit from grade level to grade level. Kindergartners need to be taught the letters (lower case and capitals, names, most common sounds, how to write them).

Kids must perceive the sounds within words if they’re going to link them with letters, and phonemic awareness instruction aims to accomplish that. I would definitely make that part of my decoding instruction, too.

As the kids progress up the grades, spelling patterns and their pronunciations become an issue.

Phonics instruction should teach kids to hear the sounds, to recognize the letters or spelling patterns, and then to connect the sounds and the letters/spellings. They need a lot of practice with those elements within words and some reading practice with them, too (that’s where decodable texts come in handy – as part of the phonics instruction).

Instruction should emphasize using this knowledge of letters and sounds to decode words and to write or spell them, too (reading and spelling are closely connected). Decoding words and spelling words should take up a big part of the phonics instruction real estate.

Finally, good phonics instruction must nurture a sense of flexibility. Kids who come to see these letter and sound relations as “rules” don’t do as well as those who see them as possibilities or alternatives.

Thirty minutes per day on that kind of learning in Grades K through 2 is a wise investment.

Perhaps you’ve heard of those 10-minute phonics programs? Given the evidence, they don’t seem like such a good idea to me. – more like a patch on deficient reading program than a serious effort to meet kids’ learning needs. Thirty minutes a day makes sense to me, I hope it does to you.

I’m surprised that you don’t write about screening and monitoring tests. I’ve been a teacher for 24 years (first-grade) and I’m considering an early retirement. It seems like I’m supposed to test my students more than teach them. We just test and get ready for tests. I feel so sorry for the boys and girls. I want to teach reading, not FSF, ISF, PSF. NWF, WRF, ORF, LNF. Help me, Dr. Shanahan. Is this what’s best? Is this really a part of the “science of reading”?

Shanahan response:

I feel your pain. When I was a first-grade teacher, we didn’t have all those tests. It certainly made my life easier.

But did that lack make children’s education any better? That’s the real question.

Over the past couple decades such testing has insinuated itself into many primary grade classrooms, often because of policy mandates from above.

Twenty years ago, Reading First (a part of the “No Child Left Behind” federal legislation) was the main source of these testing mandates. These days it’s more likely to be the state Dyslexia Screening laws. Many school districts have taken up these tests on their own, as well.

No wonder. The scheme makes sense. There’s a logic to it.

We test kids at the beginning of the school year to find out which essential skills they have yet to develop. As the school years proceeds, we then re-evaluate to see how the kids are progressing. Teachers, based on the tests, are to differentiate and provide reteaching, and some kids may get extra help through instructional interventions beyond the classroom. The idea is commendable because it strives to keep students from falling behind.

What does research have to say about this approach?

First, there are the studies of the tests themselves. These days, there is a slew of such measures that probe into proficiency with letters, phonemic awareness, decoding, oral reading fluency, and spelling (curriculum-based measures) or that try to predict later reading performance. Studies show that many of these short tests are both valid and reliable. Not that research hasn’t identified important limitations, too – including their shortfall with some populations, such as English Learners (Newell, Codding, & Fortune, 2020); reliability problems when administered by teachers under normal classroom conditions (Ardoin & Christ, 2008); and the so-called false positives issue which often leads to the overidentification of reading problems – meaning some kids get extra instruction when they don’t need it (Compton, Fuchs, Fuchs, Bouton, Gilbert, Barquero, Cho, & Crouch, 2010).

That means such tests can do a good job, but that they sometimes don’t. Still, even with these snags, it appears that they are up to the job for which they are intended (January & Klingbell, 2020; Petscher, Fien, Stanley, Gearin, Gaab, Fletcher, & Johnson, 2019).

So far, so good.

Second, there are studies of various early interventions. Again, there has been substantial study into whether remedial interventions help kids to progress. Several programs that deliver targeted instruction to low readers have been found to be successful.

That’s even better.

Given that there are valid tests and effective interventions out there, you’d think there would be strong evidence supporting programs of early identification and differentiation of instruction.  

That’s where things get complicated.

Because, in fact, the evidence supporting the use of such testing to improve reading achievement is neither strong nor straightforward. The pieces are there, but the connections are a bit shaky.

You don’t have to take my word for it.

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) issued a relevant practice guide, Assisting Students Struggling with Reading: Response to Intervention (RtI) and Multi-Tier Intervention in the Primary Grades (Gersten, Compton, Connor, Dimino, Santoro, Linan-Thompson, & Tilly, 2008).

That guide recommended that students be screened and monitored in reading. The WWC (part of the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education) evaluated that recommendation and concluded that it was supported by moderate research evidence. Studies showed that such testing could be implemented successfully.

The panel also recommended that, based upon the data from these tests, students should be provided with differentiated reading instruction. The WWC concluded that there was minimal research evidence supporting this recommendation (at that time, they could only cite a single correlational study that suggested the possibility of effectiveness). In other words, there wasn’t convincing proof that teaching in response to testing improved student learning.

Don’t bail yet – that was almost 15 years ago, and things do change.

Given that I started looking for more recent evidence. In some states, these policies have been in place for quite a while, so maybe public data could provide some clues. Also, what about new studies over the past decade?  

Unfortunately, public data hasn’t been especially informative. Since 2006, National Assessment (NAEP) scores have languished (and even fallen a bit recently). But I could find no analyses that linked implementation of these testing policies to reading performance in the various states. Likewise, as far as I could determine, no state has even bothered to monitor whether these laws are helping kids to learn better. (When I’m contacted by groups wanting my help in getting their states to adopt early reading assessment policies, I always ask how it has gone in states that have those policies already. I have yet to find someone who had any idea.)

The largest study of Response to Intervention (RtI) or Multi-Tiered Response efforts – early assessment and intervention is a big part of those – wasn’t encouraging either (Balu, 2015). That national study compared learning results of schools that had such programs with those that didn’t. Startlingly, first graders did worse in the test-and-differentiate schools than in the business-as-usual schools. You can read too much into that result given some gaps in the study. Nevertheless, those results aren’t exactly a glowing endorsement of the instructional practices that you’re finding oppressive.

I polled some colleagues who are big fans of these screening/monitoring assessments. They steered me to the studies they cite in their presentations and publications. I looked. There were some terrific studies that provided strong supporting evidence for the test-and-differentiate idea (Carlson, Borman, & Robinson, 2011; van Geel, Keuning, Visscher, & Fox, 2016; Stecker & Fox, 2000), but they weren’t reading studies. The best evidence on this approach comes from math, a different thing altogether. The Carlson study considered both reading and math, but only reported significant positive results on the math side. Oops.

That’s frustrating.

There has been some recent academic research that has been more supportive, however.

For instance, one study found that assessment-based differentiated reading instruction in Grade 3 had a positive impact on fluency, but not on reading comprehension (Forster, Kawohl, & Souvigneir, 2018). The fluency gains were stable over two years. The lowest readers gained the major benefits of the practice, and teachers needed significant support to make it work (including special instructional materials). The researchers concluded that providing test data to teachers alone was not an effective approach, and they reinforced this claim with conclusions drawn by other researchers from other studies. For instance, Lynn Fuchs and Sharon Vaughn – big supporters of the early assessment approach – concluded that “differentiated instruction is beyond the skill set of even the most proficient teachers” (2012, p. 198). So, at least some positive results.

More persuasive evidence was provided by several studies reported by Connor and her colleagues (Connor, Morrison, Fishman, Crowe, Al Otaiba, & Schatschneider, 2013; Connor, Morrison, Fishman, Giuliani, Luck, Underwood, et al., 2011; Connor, Phillips, Young-Suk, Lonigan, Kaschak, Crowe, Dombek, & Al Otaiba, 2018; Connor, Piasta, Fishman, Glasney, Schatschneider, Crowe, et al., 2009). They found that they could successfully raise first and second grade reading achievement through assess-and-differentiate efforts; identifying who needed more decoding tuition and then keeping those kids under close teacher supervision so that they would progress in phonics (while providing the more advanced students with independent reading work and experience).

As powerful and persuasive as the Connor data are – and they are persuasive to me – it is important to note that this team did much more than turn test data over to teachers and hope for the best. No, they developed a proprietary algorithm that they use to determine the appropriate data-based response to student needs. “Taking these results together indicates that predicting appropriate amounts and types of instruction is not as straightforward as has been previously suggested” (Connor, et al., 2009, p. 93). In fact, they concluded that without their algorithmically based approach some students would likely receive too much decoding instruction, while others would certainly receive too little. That means that early testing can have positive learning outcomes, but only if the results of those tests are weighed appropriately, not something easy for individual teachers to do.

Finally, there is a recent meta-analysis of 15 studies of reading interventions with a “data-based decision making” component and their effects on struggling readers in grades K-12 (Filderman, Toste, Didion, Peng, & Clemens, 2018). The effect sizes for these interventions were small but significant. Six of the studies allowed for comparisons of interventions with and without data-based decision making (again, with small positive effects for using the assessments as the basis of teaching).

My conclusions, from all this evidence, is that it is possible to make effective the kind of assessment that you are complaining about. However, it should also be evident that such efforts too often fail to deliver on those promises.

One of the problems is that there is simply too much testing – especially for the students who aren’t low achieving in reading (VanDerHeyden, Burns, & Bonifay, 2018). That WWC Practice Guide referred to earlier called for three testings per year, but in many jurisdictions, kids are getting far more than that – and the frequency of testing is not necessarily linked to any need for information – if you know a youngster is struggling with phonemic awareness, why not just teach more of that rather than testing the student over and over?

Another problem is that teachers can find it challenging to administer so many tests under classroom conditions. Not only does it undercut the amount of instruction, but it can be tough to provide a valid assessment of phonemic awareness or oral reading fluency when students or teachers struggle to hear each other. In my experience, the best data is produced when test administrators are brought in to take on this burden. I know I trust such data more (and so does the Institute for Education Science in the research studies that they support).

Finally, translating test data into properly and productively differentiated instruction is not the no-brainer that policymakers and school administrators seem to presume. They budget for the tests, and then  provide little or no professional development, guidance, or material supports to make these efforts effective (and Dyslexia Screening laws don’t address what it takes to make these laws work either).

My opinion? Your school is trying to go in the right direction. Help them. Screening and monitoring kids’ early literacy skills can be worthwhile.

The amount of screening and monitoring testing needs to be strictly limited, however.

In many schools/districts/states, we are overdoing it! The only reason to test someone is to find out something that you don’t know. If you know students are struggling with decoding, testing them to prove it doesn’t add much.

The point of all this testing is to reshape your teaching to ensure that kids learn. Unfortunately, these heavy investments in assessment aren’t always (or even usually) accompanied by similar exertions in the differentiation arena.

Talk to your principal, or your district’s curriculum or special education administrators. Request professional development – with classroom demonstrations, in-class coaching, and joint planning – to help get your head back in the game. The reason you became a teacher, I bet, was that you wanted to help kids. This testing could be part of that, but you can’t do that without support. I bet your colleagues would benefit from that, too. 

References

Ardoin, S.P., & Christ, T.J. (2008). Evaluating curriculum-based measurement slope estimates using data from triannual universal screenings. School Psychology Review, 37(1), 109-125.

Balu, R., Pei, Z., Doolittle, F., Schiller, E., Jenkins, J., & Gersten, R. (2015). Evaluation of Response to Intervention practices for elementary school reading (NCEE  2016-4000). Washington, DC:  National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Carlson, D., Borman, G. D., & Robinson, M. (2011). A multistate district-level cluster randomized trial of the impact of data-driven reform on reading and mathematics achievement. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 33(3), 378–398. doi:10.3102/0162373711412765

Compton, D.K., Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L.S., Bouton, B., Gilbert, J.K., Barquero, L.A., Cho, E, & Crouch, R.C. (2010). Selecting at-risk first-grade readers for early intervention: Eliminating false positives and exploring the promise of a two-stage gated screening process. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102(2), 327-340.

Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., Fishman, B., Crowe, E. C., Al Otaiba, S., & Schatschneider, C. (2013). A longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled study on the accumulating effects of individualized literacy instruction on students' reading from first through third grade. Psychological Science, 24, 1408–1419.

Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., Fishman, B., Giuliani, S., Luck, M., Underwood, P. S., et al. (2011). Testing the impact of child characteristics X instruction interactions on third graders' reading comprehension by differentiating literacy instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 46, 189–221.

Connor, C.M., Phillips, B.M., Young-Suk, G.K., Lonigan, C.J., Kaschak, M.P., Crowe, E., Dombek, J., & Al Otaiba, S. (2018). Examining the efficacy of targeted component interventions on language and literacy for third and fourth graders who are at risk of comprehension difficulties. Scientific Studies of Reading, 22(6), 462-484.

Connor, C. M., Piasta, S. B., Fishman, B., Glasney, S., Schatschneider, C., Crowe, E., et al. (2009). Individualizing student instruction precisely: Effects of child X instruction interactions on first graders' literacy development. Child Development, 80, 77–100.

Filderman, M. J., Toste, J. R., Didion, L. A., Peng, P., & Clemens, N. H. (2018). Data-based decision making in reading interventions: A synthesis and meta-analysis of the effects for struggling readers. Journal of Special Education, 52(3), 174–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022466918790001

Forster, N., Kawohl, E., & Souvigneir, E. (2018). Short- and long-term effects of assessment-based differentiated reading instruction in general education on reading fluency and reading comprehension. Learning and Instruction, 56, 98-109.

Fuchs, L. S., & Vaughn, S. (2012). Responsiveness-to-Intervention: A decade later. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 45(3), 195–203. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219412442150

Gersten, R., Compton, D., Connor, C.M., Dimino, J., Santoro, L., Linan-Thompson, S., and Tilly, W.D. (2008). Assisting students struggling with reading: Response to Intervention and multi-tier intervention for reading in the primary grades. A practice guide. (NCEE 2009-4045). Washington, DC: National Center for Edu­cation Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications/practiceguides/.

January, S.A., & Klingbeil, D.A. (2020). Universal screening in grade K-2: A systematic review and meta-analysis of early reading curriculum-based measures. Journal of School Psychology, 82, 103-122.

Newell, K.W., Codding, R.S., & Fortune, T.W. (2020). Oral reading fluency as a screening tool with English learners: A systematic review. Psychology in the Schools, 57, 1208-1239.

Petscher, Y., Fien, H., Stanley, C., Gearin, B., Gaab, N., Fletcher, J.M., & Johnson, E. (2019). Screening for dyslexia. Washington, DC:  U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy. Retrieved from improvingliteracy.org.

Stecker, P. M., & Fuchs, L. S. (2000). Effecting superior achievement using curriculum-based measurement: The importance of individual progress monitoring. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 15, 128–134.

VanDerHeyden, A.M., Burns, M.K., & Bonifay, W. (2018). Is more screening better? The relationship between frequent screening, accurate decisions, and reading proficiency. School Psychology Review, 47(1), 62-82.

Could you tell us how to teach “Executive function skills”? We don’t teach them at our school, and our core program doesn’t emphasize them. However, the graduate program I’m in says they are important. Our school district emphasizes the reading rope, and it doesn’t even mention executive function. But my professor showed us the “Active View of Reading Model” which does include it. Which of these is the science of reading and what should I be doing to teach executive function? I teach third grade.

Shanahan response:

Let’s first try to figure out what executive function is. Basically, the term executive function (EF) refers to a set of neurocognitive processes that we use for self-control or self-regulation. People have goals, they plan, they coordinate their actions, they focus their attention and shut out distraction, they adjust their focus and emphasis, and so on. EF is the boss man (or woman) in your head that takes charge of regulating your behavior and directing your attention and so on.

At the general level – and my description was pretty general – there isn’t much disagreement about EF. However, when you drill down you start finding nagging discrepancies and contradictions. For instance, when I was in grad school a hot topic was metacognition, our awareness and management of our own thinking. Studies at that time showed that good readers monitored their reading – their metacognition was on the lookout for mistakes and misunderstandings so it could unleash fix up strategies (e.g., “I don’t get it, I should reread that part”).

These days, not all treatments of executive function include metacognition (Roebers, 2017). Some EF experts don’t mention it at all, and others claim it to be a separate category of self-regulation, though why we’d have multiple guys/gals in our heads taking on those kinds of problems I don’t know.

Another puzzler has to do with the role of “working memory.” Working memory is the limited capacity system that holds information temporarily while we think about it. That’s where we figure things out and solve problems and so on. Most or all definitions of EF include some prominent mention of working memory.

But there are disagreements about what that entails. Working memory can only manage a small number of items at a time – and that capacity is more due to neural architecture and genetics than training. It seems contradictory that executive function would be focused on working memory given that it is out of conscious control. Nevertheless, there have been many studies aimed at increasing the capacity of working memory as a way of addressing executive function.

Another way to conceptualize working memory is as a cognitive system that includes not only a limited capacity processor, but also the attentional processes that determine what enters working memory, our abilities to rehearse and otherwise renew information so it doesn’t disappear before we’re done with it, ideas about how to chunk information or move it along to long term memory, and so on. Those attention and memory management tools certainly seem to belong to EF.

If you look at that “Active View” model that you mention (Duke & Cartwright, 2021), you’ll see that its authors lump several processes together under “self-regulation,” including motivation, executive function, and strategy uses (not just comprehension strategies, but the ones we use when decoding or dealing with word meanings).

That model ignores metacognition (though the article mentions a study that included comprehension monitoring in its model), and it separates executive function and reading strategies (though they are each listed within the self-regulation category).

One thing is clear, even across a variety of definitions: executive function is closely related to reading ability. Students who demonstrate the best working memory, cognitive flexibility, self-control, and so on tend to be the best readers.

With that information on the table, let’s turn to your question about teaching. You wanted to know how to teach Executive Function in reading, but there is an even more fundamental question that must be asked. Can we teach EF?

The answer to that question may depend to some extent upon what you include in the EF drawer.  

If you focus on something like working memory capacity, you’ll likely conclude that EF can’t be taught or that it can’t be taught sufficiently well to allow someone to read or learn to read any better (Melby-Lervåg, & Hulme, 2016). I was able to find one study in which general EF instruction had impacted reading achievement (Johann & Karbach, 2020), but it wasn’t clear to me why this general flexibility training affected some reading tasks but not others (it improved student ability to choose words to fill blanks in sentences, but not reading comprehension or word reading ability), why only a game version of the training had any impact on reading, or whether the results were replicable.

On the other hand, if you include items that are more of the “applied EF” or “reading specific EF”, then the possibilities are greater. I myself would include all those monitoring skills and reading strategies as part of EF, since EF is intentional and strategic in nature.

However, if you set those aside, the pickings are much slimmer, but Duke and Cartwright (2021) point out one really interesting example. Cartwright (and her colleagues) conducted a series of studies in which children in grades 2-5 learn to respond to words flexibly – sorting them both based on letters and meaning – which improved word reading abilities (Cartwright, et al., 2020). (The kids would sort words into a 2 X 2 matrix, with two meaning categories and two spelling patterns… words that begin with B are placed in the B column, but some of these words may be foods and others are toys, so “bread” must be put in both the B column and the food row, etc.).

Whether that training is leading to greater cognitive flexibility generally (executive function), or whether it is only helping kids to be more flexible in the specific task of switching between decoding and word meaning in reading I don’t know. I presume the latter and suspect that in the long run, we won’t be trying to teach EF but rather EF-like abilities specific to reading. (Either way it’s a cool instructional task that would be easy to adopt into classroom practice and the results were impressive.)

The reason for my EF skepticism has much to do with “learning transfer.” Getting people to apply their learning to tasks, problems, and situations very different from the ones that were the focus of their training is difficult and rare in all aspects of learning.  

Fundamentally, EF is bound up in intentionality and self-regulation.

When it comes to teaching reading, we want kids to try to learn. That’s why it can be so helpful to be specific about learning goals and why giving kids a clear idea about the purpose of lessons is so beneficial.  

When it comes to reading, we want kids to try to understand texts based on their reading of an author’s words. That’s why classroom culture needs to convey a deep commitment to meaning in reading and writing.

Providing tools for solving problems and a sense of the conditionality or the need for flexibility is critical. For instance, teaching kids a phonics pattern like VCVe should include attention to words that don’t follow that pattern (done, come, gone) as well as guidance towards flexibility (“if you try the long vowel and it doesn’t make sense, try some alternatives”). Likewise, comprehension strategies need to be applied in different ways depending upon how difficult a text is or its length, and instruction should give students the opportunity to gain such insights.

What I’m arguing against here is a set of lessons on Executive Function.

What I’m arguing for is that we encourage students to be intentional, purposeful, goal oriented, self-aware, flexible, and strategic. Instruction should consider the role that EF must play in all aspects of reading. If something needs to be learned to the point of automaticity, then students should know that, and they need to know why drill and practice might play such a big role in those instructional activities. Likewise, if a skill needs to be applied conditionally, then students should be taught where to direct their attention to make the appropriate determination.

At this time, we don’t have any set of executive function skills that if taught generally will improve reading achievement. Teaching the specifics of these EF skills within reading as they apply to reading is what is called for.

Oh, one more thing. Your school and your graduate program may not be as far apart as you fear. The reading rope was created by Hollis Scarborough in the 1990s to illustrate some of the complexity of reading and learning to read, organizing a set of skills efficiently into a single-page graphic (Scarborough, 2001). At that time, there were only a handful of studies on executive function within reading. Since 2000, that change; there are now hundreds of such studies. Not surprisingly, Scarborough added that variable to her model later on (Cutting & Scarborough, 2012). Both the rope and the active graphics are useful conceptions for conveying some broad ideas; don’t expect either to provide a comprehensive representation of all that is known about reading, nor a roadmap for what to teach.

References

Cartwright, K.B., Bock, A.M., Clause, J.H., Coppage August, E.A., Saunders, H.G., & Schmidt, K.J. (2020). Near-and far-transfer effects of an executive function intervention for 2nd to 5th grade struggling readers. Cognitive Development, 56, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2020.100932

Cutting, L.E., & Scarborough, H.S. (2012). Multiple bases for comprehension difficulties: The potential of cognitive 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 (pp. 101–116). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Duke, N.K., & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. doi:10.1002/rrq.411

Johann, V.E., & Karbach, J. (2020). Effects of game-based and standard executive control training on cognitive and academic abilities in elementary school children. Developmental Science, 23(4), https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12866

Melby-Lervåg, M., & Hulme, C. (2016). There is no convincing evidence that working memory training is effective: A reply to Au et al. (2014) and Karbach and Verhaeghen (2014). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(1), 324–330.

Roebers, C.M. (2017). Executive function and metacognition: Toward a unifying framework of cognitive self-regulation. Developmental Review, 45, 31-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2017.04.001

Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (vol. 1, pp. 97–110). New York, NY: Guilford.

Why don’t you like independent reading? It only makes sense for students to practice reading if they’re going to get good at it. My students live in poverty. They won’t read at home, so I provide 20 minutes a day for them to just read. Practice makes perfect, you know.

Shanahan responds:

You’re right about the importance of practice. Practice has value in the development of any skilled activity.

I have no doubt that reading practice plays a role in making kids better readers.

I don’t oppose encouraging students to practice their reading. However, as a but I do believe in making instructional time as productive as possible. Just sending kids off to read is not likely to pay off as the other alternatives.

There has been a lot of research into the kinds of practice that improves performance.

We now have a pretty good idea on what effective practice looks like (Ericcson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993).

Unfortunately, your 20 minutes of daily independent reading doesn’t resemble that picture to any degree.

Effective practice, for instance, is purposeful, intentional, or deliberate. It doesn't include just aimless engagement in an activity. Effective practice focuses on what it is the student is trying to improve.

My wife is a pianist. She practices a lot. By that I don’t mean she sits around playing the piano all day. No, she works on certain pieces of music – or even parts of those compositions. She selects music that places certain demands on her and then works on them over again and again to master their intricacies.

Similar examples can be drawn from athletics. The most effective hitters in baseball don’t just “take batting practice.” They practice trying to hit the fast ball up and in or the curve down and away. Much is made about how many swings some hitters take. Pete Rose reputedly took 500 swings per day. But amount of practice may distract from the purposefulness of the effort. Rose didn’t just swing – he took the swings that could improve his hitting in a particular way.

Free reading, independent reading, sustained silent reading, drop everything and read time… all emphasize the idea that kids should be reading. There is some doubt about how much students really read during these periods (Stahl, 2004), but even if they are reading, there is nothing deliberate about it. What are they working on? What is it that they are trying to learn? Which texts have they chosen that will allow them to work on whatever that may be?

Let’s face it. There is nothing purposeful or deliberate about free reading. There is nothing wrong with that, unless the reason for the practice is to make the students better readers.  

There are other features of productive practice, too.

Perhaps, your approach reflects some of those.

For instance, it helps if the skill to be practiced is broken into manageable parts. That allows a lot of repetition of key features or especially difficult parts of the skill.

That seems logical for improving a skill, but it isn’t an accurate description of the kind of practice that free reading provides.

Another important feature of effective practice is feedback in the moment. Errors creep into any skilled performance, so having a knowledgeable coach or partner who can monitor the practice and provide guidance in how to improve makes a big difference.

But, again, the classroom practice that you ask about is notable because of its independence of that kind of teacher involvement. At best, a teacher might speak briefly to a child several minutes (or even days) after the practice. If the child is self-aware enough to recognize what he/she is struggling with, and open enough to share it with the teacher, and articulate enough that the teacher understands what happened, then possibly some productive feedback can be provided. That's unlikely, however.

When I look at the average effect size of various instructional routines for teaching decoding, fluency, and comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000), I come up with .40 approximately. The same kind of exercise within classroom independent reading is .05-.10 (Yoon, 2003). That means that the payoff from teaching is 400-800% better than the payoff from having kids go it alone.

Similar imbalances exist between practice in music or athletics and practice in educational tasks like reading or math. The educational payoffs tend to be relatively tiny; about 4-5 times less effective than in those other activities (Macnamara, Hambrick, & Oswald, 2014). (Evidently, we need be careful of those kinds of sports or music analogies since the nature of what needs to be practiced is so different).

What’s interesting is that those practice routines that research has identified as being powerful look a whole lot more like good reading instruction than free reading. Think about the kinds of reading that students engage in during guided/directed reading or repeated reading. There are clear purposes for the reading, the text is chosen for its appropriateness to those purposes, the reading takes place in relatively brief segments, the teacher monitors student success and provides feedback.

In those teaching contexts, a good deal of reading should take place. Not only in the reading class, but in social studies, science, and other subjects, too. Students should be reading at school throughout their day, week, and year. A 30-minute reading comprehension lesson should involve at least 15 minutes of reading; maybe more.

By all means, encourage your students to read for pleasure, too. Help them find books they might be interested in. Give them opportunities to share their reading experiences with other kids in class. Provide guidance to parents to support home reading. Offer advice on home reading routines (the wheres, the whens, the whys, the hows).

But cherish and protect your students’ instructional time. There isn’t enough of it. School is a good place to make kids stronger readers.

Don’t make the students’ independent reading part of your daily classroom schedule. Teach and guide your students so that it becomes part of theirs.

(Oh, and I don’t buy the idea that kids from low-income families won’t read. They will with the right guidance and support and if they can become proficient readers, which is why their instructional time is so precious. The argument that these kids will do better if you reduce their opportunities to learn just doesn’t bear scrutiny.)

References

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Romer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363 

Macnamara, B.N., Hambrick, D.Z., Oswald, F.L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608-1618.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810

Stahl, S.A. (2004). What do we know about fluency? Findings of the National Reading Panel. In P. McCardle & V. Chhabra (Eds.), The voice of evidence in reading research (pp. 187–211). Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes. 

Yoon, J. (2003). What a meta analytic review of three decades of SSR says about reading comprehension. Journal of Curriculum & Evaluation, 6(2), 171-186.

At our middle school, two-thirds of our students are not proficient readers (55% of them read below the 30^th percentile). Our staff decided that to help address this problem all our students would engage in repeated reading in each core content class once a week. This would be done with grade-level text. Teachers read the passage, students choral read with teacher, and then students read with a partner. That's it. We have been told that this way of repeated reading will help our students improve their phonics and fluency. I'm not in full agreement with this, but we have been told it is a required whole school intervention. Could you shed some light on this for me and the others who think this is not the best bang for our buck? What about explicit phonics instruction?

Shanahan response:

This is really two questions: one about the best way to meet secondary students’ reading needs and one specifically about the value of teaching fluency. I’ll try to answer both.

As for your middle school’s unfortunate reading levels, fluency instruction may be part of the solution, but it will probably be insufficient, especially if implemented in the way that you describe.

That 55% of your students are below the 30^th percentile on some reading test, tells me that you have a serious problem, and such problems deserve a serious response from serious people.

But those test data don’t reveal what the problem is.

There are many reasons students in grades 6-8 may not read well. Decoding problems, perhaps. Or difficulties with fluency. Poor vocabulary and weak morphological skills? Maybe the students lack reading stamina, knowledge of written language, or adequate reasoning ability. Maybe, they can read, but don’t want to. And, of course, the problem could be some mix of all those possibilities.

Years ago, I would have said, “avoid phonics instruction.” Studies then had concluded that phonics at those grade levels didn’t pay off.

Then, I was on the National Reading Panel, and we found studies that showed phonics instruction could improve the decoding abilities of older students but without positive impacts on reading comprehension or spelling. I took that to mean that it was reasonable to address the phonics needs of older students in pull out interventions, but that phonics alone would be pointless (these kids would need vocabulary and comprehension – a conclusion consistent, I thought, with the work of Charles Perfetti who claimed that there was more to reading words than decoding). Accordingly, I invited Don Deshler to provide advice in this space about high school phonics instruction, and Marilyn Adams chimed in on the success of her program for doing just that (you can look it up).

More recent studies have reshaped my thinking again. One study has been especially influential in that regard (Wang, Sabatini, O’Reilly, & Weeks, 2019). They administered reading tests to tens of thousands of students in Grades 5-10. Not a nationally representative sample and not a widely used battery of tests either (Reading Inventory and Scholastic Evaluation – RISE). Nevertheless, the findings are provocative.

This study reported that a significant percentage of the middle and high school students had very low levels of decoding ability – 30% of the students in their sample, though it should be remembered that this was an especially low reading population.

The cut point or threshold they used to identify this 30% was interesting. They found that especially low decoding ability didn’t correlate with reading comprehension. When students got above a certain point in decoding, there was a correlation.

They divided their sample of students at that inflection point and that’s where things got interesting.

The students who scored below that point made essentially no learning progress in reading across the school year, no matter the students’ grade level.

The percentage of students in need of explicit decoding instruction in your school may be lower than in that study. Nevertheless, I’d worry a lot about those kids who perform below that decoding threshold. I would be surprised if they got much from the fluency training that you describe.  

The original theory of oral reading fluency instruction (which I attribute to Carol Chomsky) was that some students who had adequate knowledge of the orthographic-phonemic system couldn’t implement it during reading. Fluency instruction was for those children who tested high in phonics but low in reading.

The Wang et al. study suggests to me that Chomsky may have been on to something. Students below the decoding threshold would gain little or nothing from fluency work, while those above it could benefit. The National Reading Panel found that fluency practice had a positive impact on reading comprehension, but even a bigger payoff for word reading, including decoding. That is, the kind of fluency practice you describe can improve decoding ability (perhaps because it helps students to develop automaticity with those phonics skills).

The pattern identified in the Wang study seems to fit with a lot of other facts. For instance, it might explain why it has been so difficult to obtain positive results from secondary school reading interventions. Those studies usually lump all kinds of low readers together. The presence of the below threshold readers could exert a misleading drag on the effects of vocabulary, language, or strategy interventions – since the low decoders wouldn’t be able to benefit yet from such teaching.

Also, even if phonics interventions for older students targeted those below-threshold kids specifically, the results would likely be disappointing. Remember, students didn’t benefit from other instruction until they exceeded the threshold. That would mean that reading gains would not be likely until sometime after the intervention was completed, long after typical post-testing in research studies (or intervention programs).

In any event, those results suggest that some of your students will probably require explicit decoding instruction. Further testing would be needed to determine who they were. Fluency practice can have positive impacts on decoding but perhaps mainly for students who are at a high enough level of decoding ability.

Other students might need greater attention to vocabulary, morphology, written language analysis, comprehension strategy work, and/or world/domain knowledge development. Fluency practice won’t help with any of those deficiencies either.

Fluency instruction has been found to improve reading achievement, so providing some fluency support should have some value (though what you describe isn’t encouraging).

Modeling can be helpful (a teacher reading the text prior to the students’ attempt to read it) but reading a whole passage doesn’t provide much memory support. I’d suggest limiting that modeling, making it briefer and more targeted. If the students have trouble with a sentence, read that to them, and then have them give it a try.

Paired reading can be helpful, too, if the other students provide feedback. Teachers need to involve themselves in this process, since not all students are well-equipped for it. I recommend pairing students strategically to make sure that those struggling get the needed support or that no student always gets stuck with the partners who won’t or can’t help.

I would encourage all the teachers to use these practices in class but give them control over when they do this. Perhaps everyone should sign onto a certain number of minutes of fluency each week (and make it enough minutes that the students will get several such experiences weekly).

Finally, motivation is important. Explaining the point of fluency work to the students matters. Tim Rasinski strongly encourages activities like Radio Reading and Readers’ Theatre as engaging versions of fluency. Such motivation can be overdone in my opinion (because it can take too much time), but goosing things up occasionally makes sense.

The simple answer is that fluency practice can be beneficial for your students. It will help those who have fluency problems. But what’s going to be done with the kids with other reading needs?

References

Chomsky, C. (1976). After decoding: What? Language Arts, 53 (3), 288-296, 314.

Wang, Z., Sabatini, J., O’Reilly, T., & Weeks, J. (2019). Decoding and reading comprehension: A test of the decoding threshold hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(3), 387-401.

I would love to see a blog post on whether to teach sight words/high frequency words, and if there is any useful reason to track whether a student is learning them. My teachers are still teaching them in K and 1st, but more through reading and spelling them, decoding, and encoding them, in and out of text, and not by memorizing their shape. Yet, they are unsure of whether it is worth it to track which words they've learned and how much intervention to provide based on that data.

Shanahan responds:

The short answer to both of your questions is, “yes,” but let’s make sure everybody gets this right.

What is sight vocabulary?

Sight vocabulary refers to all the words a reader can read or recognize immediately without hesitation or apparent sounding or mediation.

What are high frequency words?

High frequency words are those that appear relatively often in written or oral language. Frequency is determined by counting the words in texts.

Aren’t sight words and high frequency words the same thing?

No, it’s important to distinguish these terms. Their confusion may lead to some unfortunate misunderstandings. For example, it may suggest that only certain words can be sight words – that isn’t the case. Any word can become a sight word, no matter its source or frequency. Or it may suggest that readers only need a small collection of sight words, 100 or 220 words. The real goal is much more extensive. Or it could lead some to think that rote memorization is the main way to remember words. That’s not the case either.

What is the best way to learn sight words?

When I was a first-grade teacher I noticed that early in the year my students had trouble remembering new words. We’d review and review, and the next day, the kids often didn’t remember them. Later in the year, I’d introduce new words and that was all it took for many of my students. They seemed to remember those without any effort. What a change!

That means my students weren’t only learning words; they were learning how to learn words. Later, researchers (e.g., Ehri, 1998; Ehri, 2014; Share, 2004) provided more systematic proof of what I’d witnessed and more elaborate theoretical explanations (e.g., orthographic mapping, self-teaching). Basically, phonics instruction – along with phonemic awareness and morphology – helps students to form an internal cognitive memory system that allows them to efficiently remember words.

To help kids develop sight vocabularies in the tens of thousands (which is the real goal), we should provide systematic instruction focused on spelling patterns, relationships between letters and sounds and spellings and pronunciations and meanings. That is where most of our word teaching efforts should be focused.

Are there benefits from rote memorization of some words early on?

There is the obvious benefit of motivation. In my experience, learning a bunch of abstract sounds doesn’t enthrall the average 5- or 6-year-old, while knowledge of real words can be a source of pleasure and pride. Words give a greater sense of accomplishment.

Also, there’s no reason to perseverate on isolated words or word lists for a long period while the students try to master an extensive set of grapheme-phoneme relationships and spelling patterns. Including some high frequency words in a typical phonics curriculum enables students to begin to read texts almost from the beginning and that has both motivational and cognitive benefits (Solity & Vousden, 2009).

Most important, there is considerable evidence showing that students can generalize from memorized words to the decoding of not-yet-known words (Barr, 1972; Brunsdon, Coltheart, & Nickels, 2005; Fletcher-Flinn & Thompson, 2000; Kohnen, Nickels, & Coltheart, 2010; Kohnen, Levlin & von Mentser, 2020; Nickels, Coltheart, & Brunsdon, 2008; Thompson, Fletcher-Flinn, & Cottrell, 1999). As such, it might be best to think of this teaching as part of the phonics curriculum. No one knows exactly what gets stored in memory -- abstract patterns, rules, or even words themselves -- but including words in what we teach seems to help a bit.

Just as abstract spelling patterns and grapheme-phoneme correspondences can be generalized to new words, words themselves can serve as analogies facilitating the reading of new words and the application of decoding skills.

Is it harmful to have students memorize words?

There are folks who make that claim. They say that if you teach students to memorize any words you will disrupt their decoding or encourage guessing.

No research supports those cautions, and some of the sharpest eyes in the room argue against these groundless claims. For example, Castles, Rastle, and Nation (2018) wrote in response to this question:

“In our view, this concern is unwarranted, and the judicious selection of a small number of sight words for children to study in detail has its place in the classroom alongside phonics. As we have discussed, teaching phonics is crucial because it gives children the skills to translate orthography into phonology and thereby to access knowledge about meaning. However, when this is difficult because of spelling-to-sound complexities, there would seem to be a case for teaching children the pronunciations of a small number of such words directly, particularly those that they are likely to see very frequently in the texts they are reading (such as the, come, have, and said). In effect, this ensures that children can relate the visual symbols of writing to spoken language for as many words as possible and as early in their schooling as possible.” (p. 15)

Is there evidence showing that teaching students to memorize sight words improves reading achievement?

I depend upon studies designed to determine if the use of a certain curriculum or instructional approach provides a learning advantage to students; particularly those that consider whether that teaching generalizes to overall reading achievement rather than just gains in the skill taught. That kind of gold standard evidence does not exist with sight word teaching.

However, there are several studies showing that including such sight word teaching in phonics curricula can be effective – and even that such inclusion improves performance (Kohnen, Nickels, Coltheart, & Brunsdon, 2008; McArthur, Castles, Kohnen, Larsen, Jones, Anandakumar, & Banales, 2015; Price-Mohr & Price, 2017; Shapiro & Solity, 2008; Solity & Shapiro, 2008; Torgesen, 1999; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1986; Wright & Ehri, 2007). Adding word teaching to the phonics regimen was beneficial both in the regular classroom and with dyslexic students. The inclusion of such word teaching can speed beginning reading progress along a bit (Browder & Lalli, 1991; Colenbrander, Wang, Arrow, & Castles, 2000).

How do you teach a child to memorize a word?

Teaching this kind of memorization is pretty straightforward, but there are some key steps. For instance, it’s important to isolate the word from other visual distractions. Students when trying to learn a word need to look at it word, not at pictures or other words in a sentence. Make sure students’ attention is on the written word, then say the word and have students repeat it.

It may help to put the word into meaningful context to convey meaning or usage (Miles, McFadden, & Ehri, 2019). I do this orally. When teaching the word “with”, the teacher may say something like, “I play with my brother.” Who do you play with? With.” Students need to link the visual image of the letters “w-i-t-h” to the phonological representation /w/-/i/-/th/, and we want this visual and phonological information linked to the word’s meaning and grammatical function.

Have students analyze the letters and sounds of the word. Don’t focus on a word’s shape, but on its sequence of letters. Have students spell the word. Perhaps ask if they know the sounds of any of those letters, even if the spelling is irregular, and certainly point out any of the letters that have their usual sound. This not only helps students to learn that particular word but to use this knowledge more generally (Murray, McIlwaom, Wang, Murray, & Finley, 2019). Encourage students to visualize the word (“take a picture with your eyes”) and get them to write/spell the word without looking. Some teachers use the “copy-cover-compare” approach successfully (Joseph, Konrad, Cates, Vajcner, Everleigh, & Fishley, 2011).

Finally, a bit of drill and practice is in order. Reading that word again and again over time helps with memorization. This is where things like flashcards, word rings, word ladders, and the like can come in handy.

What about text?  

When first teaching a word, it is important to isolate it. But remember that one of the purposes for introducing words is to enable earlier text reading. Students should see these words in early instructional texts. They need to be able to read these words not just on flashcards, but in texts. The opportunity to confront these words in varied sentence contexts within controlled vocabulary readers or decodable texts should be part of the ongoing experience that follows their introduction.

Which words should we teach that way?

As has been recommended for 100 years, it is sensible to focus on high frequency words since those will be the most useful to the child’s reading. A high frequency word might be taught through memorization if its spelling is irregular or unusual or if the student has not yet learned the phonics skills that would support its decoding. Studies have shown that a relatively small number of words represent a large portion of the words that readers confront in text; for example, the first 100 words account for more than half the words we see in text (Fry, 1980). Knowing such words well should facilitate fluency and allow greater attention to the rest of the words.

Any other instructional advice?

Yes, those estimates of word frequency can be misleading. The first 100 words make up more than 50% of the words in texts, but only if you consider those words along with their common variants. The word “make” is included in those first hundred words, but it’s there because of make, making, and makes. That fact should suggest morphological work in which students transform sight words into various forms. What a great opportunity to explore the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings that inflectional and derivational morphemes present.

How many words should we have students memorize in this way?

Sight word teaching tends to be overdone. Some commercial programs go over the top including way too many words. The National Academy of Education released a report in which the experts recommended that kindergartners master about 18-20 such words (including their names). There is no research on this, but I think that is a reasonable (and smart) recommendation.

As for Grade 1, I’ve long encouraged teachers and parents to make sure students can read the 100 most frequent words in written English (Fry’s first 100 words). That sounds like a lot, but it includes those 18-20 words mastered in kindergarten. Likewise, more than 50 of those 100 words can be read directly and completely through the most common grapheme-phoneme relationships (e.g., it, he, but, not), and most of the others can be partially decoded with those skills. Of course, that means not all those words need to be taught through memorization. For second graders, emphasize the 300 most frequent words (which includes the 100 first-grade words – and, again, many of those can be learned and read through decoding).   

How much time should be devoted to such word memorization?

I’d not put much time into it… only about 3-5 minutes per day. I’ve found reports of 30-45-minute sight word memorization lessons, which I think is nuts. I have also located studies of 1-3-minute instruction – which makes me wonder if my 5 minutes is overkill.

Many teachers push at least some of this work out of the classroom. It’s an easy thing for parents to help with. One of my favorite principals tested all her first graders on the first hundred words. She gave the results to the teachers and parents and told them the kids needed to know them all by the end of year. Most of the kids nailed it by Thanksgiving, mainly due to parental involvement. Word memorization should be a tiny part of the word knowledge instruction that students receive.

Should we monitor student progress with sight vocabulary?

I think so. That’s the only way to know which words the students know and how much progress they are making. But this can be done during the instruction. For instance, while students are practicing reading those words with partners, a teacher can easily and efficiently check several individual students’ progress with 10-20 words. No extra testing time needed.

References

Barr, R.C. (1972). The influence of instructional conditions on word recognition errors. Reading Research Quarterly, 7(3), 509-529.

Browder, D.M., & Lalli, J.S. (1991). Review of research on sight word instruction. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 12, 203-228

Brunsdon, R., Coltheart, M., & Nickels, L. (2005). Treatment of irregular word spelling in developmental surface dysgraphia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 213–251.

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.

Colenbrander, D., Wang, H., Arrow, T., & Castles, A. (2020). Teaching irregular words: What we know, what we don’t know, and where we can go from here. Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 97-104.

Ehri, L.C. (1998). Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is essential for learning to read words in English. In J.L. Metsala & L.C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy, (pp. 3–40). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

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. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356.

Fletcher-Flinn, C. M., & Thompson, G. B. (2000). Learning to read with underdeveloped phonemic awareness but lexicalized phonological recoding: A case study of a 3-year-old. Cognition, 74, 177–208.

Fry, E. (1980). The new instant word list. Reading Teacher, 34(3), 284-289.

Joseph, L.M., Cates, G., Vajcner, T., Eveleigh, E., & Fishley, K.M. (2011). A meta-analytic review of the cover-copy-compare and variations of this self-management procedure. Psychology in the Schools, 49(2), 122-136.

Kohnen, S., Nickels, L., & Coltheart, M. (2010). Skill generalisation in teaching spelling to children with learning difficulties. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties, 15, 115–129.

Kohnen, S., Nickels, L., Coltheart, M., & Brunsdon, R. (2008). Predicting generalization in the training of irregular-word spelling: Treating lexical spelling deficits in a child. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 25, 343–375.

Levlin, M., von Mentser, C.N. (2020). An evaluation of systematized phonics on reading proficiency in Swedish second grade poor readers: Effects on pseudoword and sight word reading skills. Dyslexia, 26, 427-441.

McArthur, G., Castles, A., Kohnen, S., Larsen, L., Jones, K., Anandakumar, T., & Banales, E. (2015). Sight word and phonics training in children with dyslexia. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 48(4), 391-407.

Miles, K.P., McFadden, K.E., & Ehri, L.C. (2019). Associations between language and literacy skills and sight word learning for native and nonnative English-speaking kindergartners. Reading and Writing, 32, 1681-1704.

Murray, B.A., McIlwaom, M.J., Wang, C., Murray, G., & Finley, S. (2019). How do beginners learn to read irregular words as sight words? Journal of Research in Reading, 42(1), 123-136.

Price-Mohr, R.M., & Price, C.B. (2017). Synthetic phonics and decodable instructional reading texts: How far do these support poor readers? Dyslexia, https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1581

Shapiro, L. R., & Solity, J. (2008). Delivering phonological and phonics training within whole class teaching. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 78, 597–620.

Share, D. (2004). Orthographic learning at a glance: On the time course and developmental onset of self-teaching. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 87, 267–298. 

Solity, J., & Shapiro, L. R. (2008). Developing the practice of educational psychologists through theory and research. Educational and Child Psychology, 25, 119–145.

Thompson, G., Fletcher-Flinn, C., & Cottrell, D. (1999). Learning correspondences between letters and phonemes without explicit instruction. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 21–50.

Vellutino, F. R., & Scanlon, D. M. (1986). Experimental evidence for the effects of instructional bias on word identification. Exceptional Children, 53, 145–155.

Wright, D., & Ehri, L.C. (2007). Beginners remember orthography when they learn to read words: The case of doubled letters. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 115-133.

I wonder why you never write about curriculum integration. This year my district is all about including social studies in all of our lessons and my sister (a teacher in another state) is doing something like that with science in the upper grades. Do you have any advice for teachers like us?

Shanahan response:

As a teacher I was a strong advocate of integrating reading and writing instruction at a time when that kind of thing wasn’t common. Later, when I became an academic, I studied reading-writing relationships and that blossomed into an interest in the combination of other curricula as well which eventually led to my work on disciplinary literacy.

In the late 1990s, I wrote about curricular integration with a great deal of angst (Shanahan, 1997). At that time, there were only a handful of studies that had explored the impact of combining reading with writing or any other subject. Even worse, those few efforts were unsuccessful; teaching various subjects together seemed to result in less learning, not more. We had good reasons to think integration could be beneficial, but no real supporting evidence. What a disappointment.

But 1997 was a long time ago.

Since then, there have been dozens of studies exploring issues of curriculum integration. As research has progressed, the newer studies have become more ambitious in curriculum design, more detailed in their results, and more rigorous in their research design. There has been so much of that kind of work we even have several meta-analyses of it.

For example, a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, grades 2-12, reported that having students write about the texts they were reading improved reading comprehension and the learning of information from the texts (Graham & Hebert, 2010). Writing about the texts had a bigger impact on learning than reading or reading and rereading. Various kinds of writing in response to texts were effective. Text summarizations or retellings were most effective with younger students and more extended writings (analysis, critique, synthesis) had a bigger learning payoff for the older ones.

Studies continue to accumulate showing that combining reading and writing can enhance learning, particularly when these combinations are carried out in content areas like history (De La Paz & Felton, 2010; Monte-Sano, 2011; Monte-Sano, De La Paz, & Felton, 2014; Sielaff & Washburn, 2015; Wiley & Voss, 1999).

Another body of studies has examined reading instruction in the context of middle school and high school social studies and science classes. These studies (Swanson, Wanzek, Vaughn, Roberts, & Fall, 2015; Vaughn et al., 2013; Wanzek, Swanson, Roberts, Vaughn, & Kent, 2015) emphasized text reading, connecting text-based learning to prior learning, and applying the knowledge gained from texts to problem-solving activities in the content areas. Such literacy activities enhanced performance on measures of content knowledge, content reading comprehension, and standardized reading comprehension.

A meta-analysis of 16 such studies (Swanson, Wanzek, Vaughn, Roberts, & Fall, 2015) examined the impact of reading interventions delivered with social studies content. Such approaches proved effective with learning disabled students across grade levels – they did best in the upper grades. Studies in this synthesis focused on graphic organizers, mnemonics, reading and answering questions assignments, guided notes, and other related practices, and reported positive results with both social studies content and reading comprehension. A similar meta-analysis (Kaldenberg, Watt, & Therrien, 2015), this one examining reading instruction using science texts, reported similar outcomes with learning disabled students.

Not only were these approaches successful with struggling readers, but they have evidently worked with students from a wide array of demographic backgrounds (economic, racial, ethnic, linguistic).

Recently, this kind of research has taken an important turn. Now there are high-quality studies that have examined the impacts of curricular integration in elementary school, including in the primary grades.

For instance, the use of learning projects that address a combination of social studies and literacy standards led to increased learning of both content and improved ability to read informational text (Duke, Halvorsen, Strachan, Kim, & Konstantopoulos, 2021). That study took place in second-grade classrooms.

Likewise, teaching social studies and science units within the literacy block in grades K-4 was found effective in increasing content knowledge and informational text reading skills (Connor, Dombek, Crowe, Spencer, Tighe, Coffinger, Zargar, Wood, & Petscher, 2017). These effects were greater for social studies and science knowledge than reading, though there were some reading improvements. Similar results were evident with science knowledge – but not with reading comprehension – in a study conducted with fourth-grade science content (Cervetti, Barber, Dorph, Pearson, & Goldschmidt, 2012).

What does all that mean?

• The use of content texts in reading comprehension lessons can improve content knowledge and reading ability.
• Teaching students how to use reading and writing in content classrooms can also have these kinds of dual effects.
• Curriculum integration can have positive outcomes across a wide range of grades and with a wide range of students (including demographics and learning abilities).

I sure feel better about all of this than I did in 1997. However, there are both important insights and cautions to be drawn from these studies.

1.     Integration has led to greater gains in content knowledge than improvements in literacy. This is to be expected as the studies often aligned their knowledge tests with the content taught in their lessons – and reading was often evaluated with more general standardized assessments. I suspect it’s easier to teach a specific set of facts than to improve someone’s reading skills. In any event, given these findings, the successful combination of reading and science or social studies should not encourage schools to reduce the amounts of explicit reading instruction that they provide. Kids still need to develop print awareness, phonemic sensitivity, decoding skills, oral reading fluency, general vocabulary, grammatical skills, as well as general reading comprehension abilities. Those are not likely to benefit from these integration efforts.

2.     Also, it is important to remember that the reading teachers have special responsibilities when it comes to literature. Literature is a content, just like social studies and science. It seems wise to focus some reading units on the reading of informational or expositional texts. It is just as wise to provide a similarly sharp focus on reading literature and understanding how it works.

3.     Even with integration, we should be delivering high quality science and social studies lessons. There is more to these subjects than text reading, though text reading certainly matters. At this stage, integration should create opportunities for double dosing and extending lessons, rather than to making the curriculum more efficient. Such efficiencies may be a reasonable long-range goal, but we don’t know enough for that yet.

4.     Some states/districts/schools limit what can be included in their literacy block. Those rules and regs would prevent teachers from the kind of curriculum integration discussed here. Those limitations should be rethought to allow teachers to teach students to read social studies and science, including the use of informational texts that may not be drawn from the approved reading textbooks.

5.     In many of these studies, the teachers were guided to make accommodations in the text difficulty students were asked to read. This was done by putting the lowest readers in easier texts. This may have been part of the reason why there were greater gains in content than reading. If students are practicing reading comprehension with texts they can already read satisfactorily, progress will be low. I’d encourage teachers not to reduce the text complexity – except possibly for the very low readers (K-1 level) but spend time showing students how to make sense of unknown vocabulary, complicated sentences, subtle cohesive links, and complex text organization. This should include showing students how to read and reread content texts in small chunks, linking those pieces together as you go. (Such lessons could easily replace the kinds of round robin reading so ubiquitous in social studies and science classes).

6.     The research has produced several successful examples of integration. I assure you that in none of these cases did they just slap the subjects together. No, they came up with well-organized schemes for these combinations. For example, a common practice was to focus on culminating reports, projects, electronic presentations, and so on. These outcomes helped to make the student efforts purposeful, provided motivation, and allowed teachers and students to appraise the learning. Also, there were schemes for connecting new concepts to student knowledge and to clarify the meaning of what was read (with teachers and the other students), there were research and information recording systems, and organizational schemes that included whole class, small group, and individual work. Teachers that want to take on the challenge of integrated instruction would be advised to follow these models closely.

7.     Finally, it is crucial that teachers recognize that curriculum integration is more than an alternative way of teaching. Its purpose, ultimately, is to increase the intellectual challenge of our curriculum and to foster a greater depth and appreciation of knowledge and research. In these studies, that was often evident in the curriculum designs, though surprisingly, it was rarely addressed in the evaluations. Integrated instruction should do more than improve reading comprehension (e.g, understanding or remembering facts). With such curricula, students should be reading more critically (such as recognizing the fallibility of sources). And, content outcomes should be more than longer lists of facts the students have managed to memorize but a deeper understanding and appreciation of the nature and value of scientific and historical knowledge.

References and Other Relevant Sources

Cantrell, R., Fusaro, J., & Dougherty, E. (2000). Exploring the effectiveness of journal writing on learning social studies: A comparative study. Reading Psychology, 21(1), 1-11. doi:10.1080/027027100278310

De La Paz, S. (2005). Effects of historical reasoning instruction and writing strategy mastery in culturally and academically diverse middle school classrooms. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97(2), 139-156. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.97.2.139

De La Paz, S., & Felton, M. (2010). Reading and writing from multiple source documents in history: Effects of strategy instruction with low to average high school writers. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 35(3), 174-192. doi:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2010.03.001

De La Paz, S., & Wissinger, D. (2015). Effects of genre and content knowledge on historical thinking with academically diverse high school students. Journal of Experimental Education, 83(1), 110-129.

Dobao, A. (2012). Collaborative writing tasks in the L2 classroom: Comparing group, pair, and individual work. Journal of Second Language Writing, 21(1), 40-58. doi:10.1177/0013124512446221

Fernandez Dobao, A., & Blum, A. (2013). Collaborative writing in pairs and small groups: Learners’ attitudes and perceptions. System, 41(2), 365-378. doi:10.1016/j.system.2013.02.002

Guthrie, J. T. (2003). Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction: Practices of Teaching Reading for Understanding. In C. Snow & A. Sweet (Eds.), Reading for Understanding: Implications of RAND Report for Education. New York: Guilford.

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

McCulley, L., & Osman, D. (2015). Effects of reading instruction on learning outcomes in social studies: A synthesis of quantitative research. Journal of Social Studies Research, 39(4), 183-195. doi:10.1016/j.jssr.2015.06.002

Monte-Sano, C. (2008). Qualities of historical writing instruction: A comparative case study of two teachers’ practices. American Educational Research Journal, 45(4), 1045-1079.

Monte-Sano, C. (2011). Beyond reading comprehension and summary: Learning to read and write in history by focusing on evidence, perspective, and interpretation. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(2), 212-249.

Monte-Sano, C., De La Paz, S., & Felton, M. (2014). Implementing a disciplinary literacy

curriculum for US History: Learning from expert middle school teachers in diverse classrooms. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 46(4), 540-575.

Reynolds, G., & Perin, D. (2009). A comparison of text structure and self-regulated writing strategies for composing from sources by middle school students. Reading Psychology, 30(3), 265-300.

Sielaff, C., & Washburn, E. (2015). The PEA strategy: One teacher’s approach to integrating writing in the social studies classroom. Social Studies, 106(4), 178-185. doi:10.1080/00377996.2015.1043616

Snow, C., Lawrence, J., & White, C. (2009). Generating knowledge of academic language among urban middle school students. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2(4), 325-344. doi:10.1080/19345740903167042121.

Storch, N. (2005). Collaborative writing: Product, process, and students’ reflections. Journal of Second Language Writing, 14(3), 153-173.

Storch, N., & Wigglesworth, G. (2007). Writing tasks: The effects of collaboration. In M. Garcia Mayo (Ed.), Investigating tasks in formal language learning (pp. 157-177). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Swanson, E., Wanzek, J., Vaughn, S., Roberts, G., & Fall, A. (2015). Improving reading comprehension and social studies knowledge among middle school students with disabilities. Exceptional Children, 81(4), 426-442.

Vaughn, S., Swanson, E., Roberts, G., Wanzek, J., Stillman-Spisak, S., Solis, M., & Simmons, D. (2013). Improving reading comprehension and social studies knowledge in middle school. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(1), 77-93. doi:10.1002/rrq.039

Wanzek, J., Swanson, E., Roberts, G., Vaughn, S., & Kent, S. (2015). Promoting acceleration of comprehension and content through text in high school social studies classes. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 8(2), 169-188. doi:10.1080/19345747.2014.906011123

Wiley, J., & Voss, J. (1999). Constructing arguments from multiple sources: Tasks that promote understanding and not just memory for text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(2), 301-311. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.91.2.301

You say that we should teach students to read with grade level texts. But my professor (I’m working on a master’s degree in reading) says that would be a big mistake since harder texts have been found to lower students’ fluency and comprehension (Amendum, Conradi, & Hiebert, 2017). Your research says one thing and his says something else. How can I sort this out? I kind of think that he is right since my students don’t read as well when I put them in the grade level books.

Shanahan response:

This is an easy question to answer: I’m right and your professor is wrong. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah!

That didn’t convince you? Well, let’s try again.

The correct answer to your question depends on what your purpose is.

Your professor (and the research study he cited) are focused on how well students can read a text. They are correct – students generally don’t read harder texts as well as simpler ones. That means that if your goal is to ensure students read a particular text well – fluently and with high comprehension – then place the students in those easier texts.

However, ensuring a strong reading performance with a particular text is rarely a teacher’s goal. The point of lessons isn’t to demonstrate how well students can already read a text.

No, lessons are supposed to help kids improve their reading ability. That’s a very different thing.

Your professor is confusing reading comprehension and learning to read. Research shows that students read simpler texts better, but it doesn’t show such reading to be particularly powerful in making students into better readers.

In fact, the research shows just the opposite (Shanahan, 2020).

More complex texts provide students with an opportunity to learn – to learn the unknown words, to learn how to untangle the complex syntax, to learn to track the subtle connections across a text, and so on. If students can already read texts reasonably well (95% fluency, 75% reading comprehension), there isn’t much for them to learn from those texts.

The article that you cited recognizes the difference. “If we give students more complex texts without any support, we are unlikely to see the benefits... Specifically, we draw attention to the importance of scaffolds and instructional supports to assist students as they read more challenging texts” (Amendum, Conradi, & Hiebert, 2017, p. 146).

In other words, they are saying that you can’t just dump hard texts into your classroom and expect to see reading gains.

Don’t avoid complex texts – teach students to read them.

How to do that? There are many scaffolds and instructional routines that have a basis in research (there are several blogs, articles, and PowerPoints about that on this site) but let’s take a quick look at one easy to use support that really helps.

There is a surprising amount of research that explores the impact of rereading and usually with positive results. When understanding doesn’t come automatically from a single read, it makes great sense to devote some time to rereading.

What might you expect with a second reading?

• Improved reading fluency with lower reading times, fewer regressions, and a greater depth of comprehension (Xue, Jacobs, & Lüdtke, 2020)
• Comprehension improvement especially for low comprehenders and students with low working memory (Griffin, Wiley, & Thiede, 2008)
• Incorporation of more information into students’ text memory – particularly causally connected information (Millis & King, 2001)
• Improved literary appreciation (Kuijpers & Hakemulder, 2018)
• Improved metacomprehension (Rawson, Dunlosky, & Theide, 2000)
• Improved integration between text and graphics (Mason, Tornatora, & Pluchino, 2015)
• Readers perceive the text as being easier to understand (Margolin & Snyder, 2018)

Having students reread texts or parts of texts can improve student reading performance. But even rereading benefits from instructional guidance.

The study that found greater attention to causal connections (Millis & King, 2001) found this to be true with both good and poor readers, but the impacts were greatest with the better readers. Good readers had a clearer idea of the kinds of information to seek when they reread. Teaching students to look causal connections, including signal words (e.g., because, so, so that, if… then, consequently), would make sense.

Lack of that kind of instruction may be why some studies report no benefits from rereading (Callender, et al., 2009) or that rereading is less effective than other more intentional study approaches (Weinstein, McDermott, & Roediger, 2010).

One interesting study with elementary students found that reading and rereading had no impact on reading comprehension. But reading-retelling-rereading was effective (Koskinen, Gambrell & Kapinus, 1989). Perhaps the retelling step sensitized the students to what they were missing, which made the rereading more purposeful. Another study successfully guided fourth graders to reread specific parts of the text with positive results (Bossert & Schwantes, 1995).

In any event, rereading has the power to transform a difficult read into an easier one and learning to make sense of texts that one can’t already read easily is at the heart of successful reading instruction.

Tell your professor that!

References

Amendum, S.J., Conradi, K., & Hiebert, E. (2017). Does text complexity matter in the elementary grades? A research synthesis of text difficulty and elementary students’ reading fluency and comprehension. Educational Psychology Review, 30, 121-151.

Bossert, T. S., & Schwantes, F. M. (1995). Children's comprehension monitoring: Training children to use rereading to aid comprehension. Reading Research and Instruction, 35(2), 109-121. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19388079509558201

Callender, A. A., & McDaniel, M. A. (2009). The limited benefits of rereading educational texts. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 34(1), 30-41. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2008.07.001

Griffin, T. D., Wiley, J., & Thiede, K. W. (2008). Individual differences, rereading, and self-explanation: Concurrent processing and cue validity as constraints on metacomprehension accuracy. Memory & Cognition, 36(1), 93-103. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/MC.36.1.93

Koskinen, P. S., Gambrell, L. B., & Kapinus, B. A. (1989). The effects of rereading and retelling upon young children's reading comprehension. National Reading Conference Yearbook, 38, 233-239.

Kuijpers, M. M., & Hakemulder, F. (2018). Understanding and appreciating literary texts through rereading. Discourse Processes, 55(7), 619-641. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2017.1390352

Margolin, S. J., & Snyder, N. (2018). It may not be that difficult the second time around: The effects of rereading on the comprehension and metacomprehension of negated text. Journal of Research in Reading, 41(2), 392-402. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12114

Mason, L., Tornatora, M. C., & Pluchino, P. (2015). Integrative processing of verbal and graphical information during re-reading predicts learning from illustrated text: An eye-movement study. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(6), 851-872. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-015-9552-5

Millis, K. K., & King, A. (2001). Rereading strategically: The influences of comprehension ability and a prior reading on the memory for expository text. Reading Psychology, 22(1), 41-65. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02702710151130217

Rawson, K. A., Dunlosky, J., & Theide, K. W. (2000). The rereading effect: Metacomprehension accuracy improves across reading trials. Memory & Cognition, 28(6), 1004–1010. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209348

Shanahan, T. (2020). Limiting children to books they can already read. American Educator, 44(2), 13-17, 39.

Weinstein, Y., McDermott, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2010). A comparison of study strategies for passages: Rereading, answering questions, and generating questions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 16(3), 308-316. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a002099

Xue, S., Jacobs, A. M., & Lüdtke, J. (2020). What is the difference? rereading Shakespeare’s sonnets—An eye tracking study. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 14. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00421

Would you do an article about your thoughts on recent report about Reading Recovery?  

Shanahan response:

The first time I heard of Reading Recovery (RR) was in 1987. The editor of the Journal of Reading Behavior asked me to review Marie Clay’s book, Early Detection of Reading Disabilities. I knew of the book – even had a copy – but was only aware of the innovative assessment that it presented.

I hesitated to take on the task since the book was already in its third edition and had attracted a reasonable number of reviews already. "That's the point," she told me. The instruction proposed in the book had not been reviewed. Nor had the research included in its appendix. I’d be the first independent scholar to take a careful look at those parts. She thought that would be timely since some professors at Ohio State (Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnel) were then trying to bring the program to U.S. schools.

I conducted the review, attending more to the research claims than the instruction, though I noted that the activities were aimed at teaching “directionality of print, locating procedures, spatial layouts of pages, story writing, oral reading, correspondence of spoken and written words, and letter names” and included procedures for “teaching children to read fluently, for helping them to develop self-monitoring and self-correcting strategies during reading.”

Notice anything missing?

I either didn’t recognize any gaps at the time or chalked up any omissions to the fact that the program targeted kids who were still not reading well after a full year of teaching. Clay, I assumed, believed that at that point such kids in New Zealand would be decoding, so would need lots of rereading and sentence writing. In any event, I voiced no complaints about the teaching plan, but deemed the studies so poorly designed that one couldn’t determine the value of the program on their basis. The flaws in Clay’s methodology misleadingly made the program appear more successful than it was.

Despite the insights in my little review, in ensuing years, RR became a very big thing in U.S. education. More and more schools adopted it, more and more big-name reading authorities endorsed it, and more and more data accumulated as to its effectiveness. I wasn’t particularly curious – lack of adequate research doesn’t mean something doesn’t work and I’d been ignored before.

During the mid-1990s, I was approached by one of the Regional Education Labs here in the U.S. Several governors were considering funding RR in their states and wanted to know what the research said. I was selected for this role because of that earlier review, but my negative take made them wonder if I wasn’t too negative about RR. They asked if I would conduct the review with Rebecca Barr who they saw as more of an RR-advocate at that point. Becky and I differed in our views of RR then (not by the end of the process) but we had confidence in each other’s integrity, so we agreed. 

By then, Ohio State had generated a lot of data, and a handful of independent studies had accumulated too. We wrote the report and proceeded to try to publish a version in Reading Research Quarterly. That manuscript went through substantial review and the editors even obtained other prepublication studies for us to consider. That extended report was eventually published, and it even won an award.

We concluded that much of the RR literature was seriously biased. As with the original collection of studies, there were design flaws that systematically magnified the value of RR. Much of the evidence had to be set aside.

However, there were a couple of studies that met acceptable standards (including a particularly well reported independent randomized trial) and those well-done studies concurred as to its effectiveness.

We also examined some studies that supplemented RR in one way or another: one added explicit phonics instruction (Iversen & Tunmer, 1993), and the other included parent involvement (Yukish & Fraas, 1988). In both cases, enrichment improved efficiency. Students accomplished the program goals with much less instruction.

We also reported the first cost analysis of RR. Program charges varied due to local differences in teacher salaries, but overall enrolling a student in RR basically doubled the cost of their education for a school year. If a district budgeted $10,000 per child for a year of schooling, then RR added another $10,000 for each child enrolled, making it a very expensive intervention.

I mentioned those well-done evaluation studies. One was particularly notable, a study conducted in Australia (Center, Wheldall, Freeman, Outhred, & McNaught, 1995). This study quickly became the lens through which I personally came to view RR from then on. It was a randomized control trial with standardized assessment – and with none of the tricks, flaws, and biases evident in so many of the other studies. Yola Center and her colleagues found RR to be effective (including in improving students’ phoneme awareness and phonological recoding). This is also why the What Works Clearinghouse has determined that RR works; by focusing only on those studies that were rigorously designed and implemented.

There is more to looking at these kinds of data than identifying statistically significant differences between groups. In this case, the RR learning advantage was not particularly stark.

A full 35% of the RR kids were not discontinued. Despite 12 weeks (60 lessons) or more of RR, they failed to accomplish sufficient learning. With such a high failure rate, it should be clear that RR was not the magic bullet cure that was being so heavily promoted. According to these data, if your school managed to treat 16 RR students (a number rarely reached), only 10 of those students would be expected to succeed. But it gets worse.

How about the control group? How did they do? Those kids got none of the expensive RR intervention, but 31% of them managed to do well in reading anyway. There are many possible reasons why that might be… maturation, regular classroom instruction, parent efforts… one of the most intriguing explanations is that the RR screening procedures couldn’t distinguish youngsters with a learning problem from those a bit behind because of limited opportunity to learn (once they get some reading instruction – any reading instruction – they caught up). That latter possibility may not have been likely with the original NZ-version of the program since RR came only after a year of reading instruction, but the U.S. version jumped right in at the beginning of Grade 1, even when there was little or no kindergarten reading tuition. 

In any of event, of those 10 RR kids who did well, 5 of them likely would have anyway even without RR given the success of the control group.  

Effect size comparisons with other instructional efforts suggested that RR was comparable, though it was clearly more costly. RR did about the same as many of the other interventions, but this came at some cost. The RR kids needed more instruction to accomplish these outcomes, more individual instruction, and more instruction from the carefully selected “best teachers.”

We examined the available longitudinal evidence and found that the discontinued students did not tend to keep up with their classmates in second grade and that the relative significance of their initial gains diminished yearly. A big part of the promotion of RR had been to emphasize its long-range value – the claim was that RR students were going to be self-sustaining reading improvement machines! They wouldn’t need expensive special education or other kinds of extra instructional supports in coming years. The longitudinal data made us skeptical about RR’s lasting power without continued extra help for these students.

Think of it this way: there are two reasons why young children may struggle with reading – causes inside the head and causes outside the head. The inside the head barriers include low IQ, serious sensory deficits, cognitive processing problems, learning disabilities, etc. While the second set encompasses poverty, racism, absenteeism, neglect, poor instruction, etc.

RR successfully increases what children know about reading. But that doesn’t alter their brains, nor does it enrich environments permanently. Catching up with the other kids is nice even if temporary, but there was nothing in the instruction that would be a long-term game changer for most kids. It shouldn’t be surprising that they begin to fall behind again as soon as the RR support is withdrawn.

That isn’t a unique problem for RR. Few early interventions have long term benefits. But this is a particularly pointed problem for RR given its extraordinary expense and its profligate promises.

Again, life went on and I ended up in charge of reading programs in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). At that time, CPS incentivized schools to adopt RR. I ended that policy immediately and discouraged (but did not ban) individual schools from continuing the program on their own.

My reasoning was this. An average Chicago elementary school at that time enrolled about 850 students, K-8, 85% of whom were likely to be reading below grade level. How could anyone justify spending almost their entire reading improvement budget on successfully raising the reading levels of 4 or 5 first grade students? Especially when that meant ignoring the reading needs of 700 other kids who were also below grade level, and often much further behind than those first graders.

That to me was a serious ethical problem more than a pedagogical one.

What instigated this question was a recent report from colleagues at my alma mater, the University of Delaware (May, Blakeney, Shrestha, Mazal, & Kennedy, 2022). They issued the results of a longitudinal study on RR a few weeks ago.

They found that despite positive outcomes at the end of the grade one, the RR kids had fallen behind comparison kids by fourth grade. Surprising to a lot of people who have relied heavily on that program, and yet consistent with the conclusions we drew 27 years ago.

Essentially, the findings suggest that the kids would have been better served without RR – since the kids so like them outperformed them in the long run. I doubt very much that RR was causing damage. But no matter how one interprets that aspect of the study, it should be clear that RR simply fails to provide long-term learning benefits.

My conclusions:

1.     We owe a debt of gratitude to Marie Clay for making early reading interventions a thing. Despite the problems with RR, prior to her efforts it was uncommon for educators to respond to reading needs in kindergarten and Grade 1.

2.     Reading Recovery, despite some positive research results, neither is effective enough to justify its exceptional cost, nor are its small benefits long term enough.

3.     It should be clear, yet again, that explicit decoding instruction tends to be beneficial for students who haven’t yet developed those skills. RR advocates would have been wise to adjust more based on the results of the Iversen & Tunmer study.

4.     There are no magic beans when it comes to early literacy. The trick is to catch kids up early and then to continue to strive to keep them caught up. Don’t spend all your resources on that first step, because you’ll need them later, too.

5.     No matter how many ill-conceived studies there might be on a topic, it doesn’t justify ignoring the well-designed ones – even if you don’t like their results. Following the science does not mean cherry-picking results that are consistent with your beliefs.

References

Center, Y., Wheldall, K., Freeman, L., Outhred, L., & McNaught, M. (1995). An experimental evaluation of Reading Recovery. Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 240-263.

Clay, M.M. (1979, 1985). The early detection of reading difficulties. Auckland, New Zealand: Heinemann.

Iversen, J.A., & Tunmer, W.E. (1993). Phonological processing skills and the Reading Recovery program. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 112-125.

May, H., Blakeney, A., Shrestha, P., Mazal, M., & Kennedy, N. (2022, April 23). Long-term impacts of Reading Recovery through third and fourth grade: A regression discontinuity study from 2011-12 through 2016-17. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA.

Shanahan, T. (1987). Review of Early Detection of Reading Difficulties. Journal of Reading Behavior, 19(1). 117-119.

Shanahan, T., & Barr, R. (1995). Reading Recovery: Am evaluation of the effects of an early instructional intervention for at-risk learners. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(4), 958-996.

Yukish, J.F., & Fraas, J.W. (1988). Success of Old Order Amish children in a strategy-oriented program for children at risk of failure in reading. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA

I hope you can help me as I have learned, and continue to learn, new things from your blog. Is there any benefit to using dictionaries in middle school? Is there any research you can share that discusses the pros/cons of using a dictionary in middle school? The students are native speakers, but there are some ELLs.

Shanahan replies:

The value of the dictionary depends upon your purpose.

If the idea is to teach word meanings or to facilitate reading comprehension, then provide the definitions directly Wright & Cervetti, 2017). All the looking-things-up and choosing among definitions increases “cognitive load.” That is, the dictionary tasks distract attention from learning the word meanings. It may waste valuable class time, too. Reducing dictionary demands on middle school students can be beneficial – if the goal is to improve comprehension or to focus attention on the word meanings (Yeung, 1999). [Though for counterevidence on this see Peters, Hulstijn, Sercu, & Lutjeharms, 2009 and Wang, 2012 that report studies of dictionary work that clearly enhanced vocabulary learning.]

That’s why many textbooks include definitions of key vocabulary in the margins. Technology is helpful here to, allowing students to click on a word to find its definition. By those means, publishers provide access to definitions without requiring students to wrestle with dictionaries. Those tools help (Reinking & Rickman, 1990).

But, of course, there is more to it than that. Students should be learning to turn to the dictionary during reading when they’re in a spot and it’s worthwhile to make them sufficiently proficient enough to overcome that cognitive load problem.

All students can gain from dictionaries (Hamilton, 2012), but the benefits of dictionary use are most obvious for English Learners because of their limited knowledge of English vocabulary. Studies show that ELs tend to do better when provided with dictionaries and generally report positive (though small effects) from dictionary availability despite all the barriers: cumbersome access, lack of clear definitions, unclear connections to context.

Unfortunately, dictionary use hasn’t generated much research, especially with native language speakers. The research that is there has tended to take a decided anti-dictionary stance. For instance, copying definitions from a dictionary is often the control condition in vocabulary learning studies (National Reading Panel, 2000). Not surprisingly, dictionary copying doesn’t do much towards that purpose – there are many better ways to build vocabulary.

Nevertheless, a serious commitment to a strong vocabulary program will include five elements: explicit instruction in word meanings, context use, dictionary/thesaurus use, morphology, and the development of word consciousness (being aware of when you don’t know word meanings).

In my personal experience – both as student and teacher – dictionary instruction can be pretty bad, with a lot of emphasis on looking up words (e.g., alphabetical order, guide words, parts of dictionary entries) and little energy devoted to making sense of definitions or choosing the relevant ones. Technology has eased the “looking up” burden but the rest of it is still an issue. These days I use electronic dictionaries often, but I still am responsible for the interpretive tasks).

There has been much work on providing child friendly definitions in vocabulary instruction and there is no question that offering easy to understand definitions is sensible (Gardner, 2007). But have you ever seen a reading comprehension lesson focused on how to read dictionary definitions? I haven’t and I’ve been doing this for quite a while.

Kids simply don’t know how to make sense of what they find in dictionaries – the benefits of gaining information from each of the multiple definitions, and the need (sometimes) to look up additional words to make sense of a definition (Mueller & Jacobsen, 2016; Ranalli, 2013; St-Jacques & Barrière, 2005). For instance, if you look up “joy” you will quickly be confronted with the word “emotion,” a harder word, I think, than the one you were trying to figure out. I’d sure love to see some guided reading lessons aimed at dictionary text.

Dictionary instruction can provide a great opportunity to explore the grammatical relations among words (e.g., imagination, imagined, imaginative, imaginatively), too – something my morphological friends surely appreciate

I remember those definition copying exercises I did as a boy. Whatever the teacher’s purpose, I admit I never sought the “relevant” definition. No, my goal was to find the shortest one; less copying that way. I’d have benefited greatly from some lessons in choosing definitions pertinent to the reading context. Never happened and I doubt that it happens much these days either and that’s a shame.

Dictionary lessons of those types will not increase vocabulary – other instruction must tend to that. But those lessons will provide students with the proficiency that they need to solve unknown words during reading and that’s a good thing.

Indeed, I’d teach dictionary.

References

Gardner, D. (2007). Children's immediate understanding of vocabulary: Contexts and dictionary definitions. Reading Psychology, 28(4), 331-373. doi.org/10.1080/02702710701260508

Hamilton, H. (2012). The efficacy of dictionary use while reading for learning new words. American Annals of the Deaf, 157(4), 358-372.  

Mueller, C. M., & Jacobsen, N. D. (2016). A comparison of the effectiveness of EFL students’ use of dictionaries and an online corpus for the enhancement of revision skills. ReCALL: Journal of Eurocall, 28(1), 3-21. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0958344015000142

Peters, E., Hulstijn, J. H., Sercu, L., & Lutjeharms, M. (2009). Learning L2 German vocabulary through reading: The effect of three enhancement techniques compared. Language Learning, 59(1), 113-151.

Ranalli, J. (2013). Online strategy instruction for integrating dictionary skills and language awareness. Language Learning & Technology, 17(2), 75-99.

Reinking, D., & Rickman, S. S. (1990). The effects of computer-mediated texts on the vocabulary learning and comprehension of intermediate-grade readers. Journal of Reading Behavior, 22(4), 395-411.

St-Jacques, C., & Barrière, C. (2005). Search by fuzzy inference in a children's dictionary. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18(3), 193-215. doi.org/10.1080/09588220500173377

Wang, J. (2012). The use of e-dictionary to read e-text by intermediate and advanced learners of Chinese. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 25(5), 475-487. doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2011.631144

Wright, T. S., & Cervetti, G. N. (2017). A systematic review of the research on vocabulary instruction that impacts text comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(2), 203-226. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.163

Yeung, A. S. (1999). Cognitive load and learner expertise: Split-attention and redundancy effects in reading comprehension tasks with vocabulary definitions. Journal of Experimental Education, 67(3), 197–217.

I teach kindergarten. We’ve been arguing over whether we should teach spelling or developmental spelling. Which is best?

Shanahan response:

You’re asking if learning to spell comes more surely from “transmission” (teaching by telling or demonstrating) or from “construction” (learning through discovery or operating on the world). Arguments in educational psychology have raged over this for decades.

I think the dispute – at least with regards to spelling – is misleading. The two approaches are posed as contradictory, that teachers must choose one way or the other.

I don’t see it that way.

Explicit spelling versus invented spelling is a false dichotomy. I encourage both – and did so in my classroom teaching, in my research, and these days even in what I urge on my grandkids.

What does the research say? There is an extensive body of studies showing that explicit spelling instruction results in better spelling and reading and enables better writing. There is also a body of research into invented spelling showing that it results in better phonemic awareness, word reading, and spelling.

Although these approaches may appear to emerge from different philosophical positions, they both confer learning advantages to children. We should not forget that.

It’s easy, of course, to caricaturize proponents of each these approaches. Those who advocate explicit instruction are unreformed behaviorists who champion spelling accuracy at the expense of creativity. Those on the invented spelling side are a bunch of Rousseau-inspired hippies rebelling against society and its rules – including spelling rules.

None of that claptrap has anything to do with the real issues. Everyone wants kids to spell well, and as I pointed out, there is plenty of research supporting both approaches.

What does it mean to “teach” developmental spelling?

Let’s clear one thing up right away. Developmental spelling isn’t something that you teach.

You encourage it, you nurture it, but you don’t teach it, per se.

That’s the whole idea of “invention.” The kids are using what they know about letters, sounds, and words to try to determine reasonable spellings.

I know some on the explicit spelling side dismiss this approach as being akin to the cueing-system guessing that they deplore. But that isn’t the case. One of the major reasons for engaging kids in spelling invention is to induce them to closely think about the phonemic structure of words and the relationship of those phonemes with letters.

That isn’t guessing, it’s analysis – analysis beneficial to kids’ learning.

Not surprisingly, many phonics advocates prefer “speech-to-print phonics.” Part of the reason for this may be that speech-to-print – getting kids to go from sounds to letters – provides a greater opportunity for kids to develop phonemic sensitivity.

If you have any doubts, compare the number of phonemes a nascent writer analyzes when composing a single sentence, and the number included in a good phonemic awareness lesson. That’s also likely the reason that invented spelling is a better predictor than is accurate spelling of growth in reading during the first year of reading instruction (Senechal, 2017).

We encourage developmental spelling because kids may balk at writing in fear of mistakes. A lot more learning happens when students set aside those anxieties. Encouraging students, in this case, means urging them to spell the words in they think they are spelled and not to worry about getting them exactly right. “Just try,” we tell them.

We also need to nurture developmental spelling. There is no learning benefit from laborious corrections. That feels like punishment and kids will avoid attempting to spell if they think their errors will lead to that. Celebrate their efforts rather than reproving them. Bring parents into this equation too – they need to know why you aren’t correcting those misspellings (and that you recognize those spellings as incorrect).

One big benefit of invented spelling is that it provides teachers with a window into their students’ understanding of the spelling system. It is valuable to analyze students’ spelling attempts to try to understand what is going on. That way instruction can be better targeted on students’ needs.

If you are uncertain how to do that, I strongly endorse Richard Gentry’s books on spelling or Charles Temple et al.’s Beginnings of Writing, or Words Their Way. They all have a ton of insight and good teacherly advice.

I know some teachers and parents worry about invented spelling. Their concern is that once kids misspell a word, they will learn the error. That isn’t really how it works. Young children’s spellings are more fluid than that. Their hypotheses about the spelling system are based on what they know, and as they know more – from phonemic awareness and phonics lessons, and from reading words – they adjust their hypotheses.

That’s where formal spelling instruction comes in (Graham, 2000). That teaching adds to what children know about words and becomes part of the grist that they mill. At first, knowing the spelling of a word likely only affects how a child spells that word but over time (memorizing isn’t enough) – as children incorporate that new information into their thinking, their spelling improves more generally. Over time, they incorporate the new information, and their spelling attempts get closer and closer to accuracy.

Of course, kids make plenty of spelling progress just by learning to read (Share, 1999), but with explicit instruction students can make even more rapid progress (Treiman, 2017, p. 273). Good spelling instruction is not the enemy of invented spelling – it’s just another source of information that feeds that invention.

Some facts about early spelling:

• Invented spelling increases student awareness of the speech segments in words (Martins & Silva, 2006)
• Invented spelling, together with alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness, influence reading and spelling development (Oulette & Sénéchal, 2017)
• First-graders who are encouraged to spell as well as they can end up with significantly better reading scores than those that relied on traditional spelling instruction alone (Clarke, 1988)
• Invented spelling and phonemic awareness training lead to the same level of phonemic awareness processing (Ouellette & Sénéchal, 2008; Ouellette et al, 2013), even for students at risk of reading difficulties (Senechal, et al., 2012)
• Explicit phonemic awareness instruction increases the quality of students’ spelling inventions (Ball & Blachman, 1991)
• Giving students appropriate feedback on their invented spelling leads to greater progress (Ouellette, Sénéchal, & Haley, 2013)
• Explicit spelling instruction should do more than get kids to memorize words – it should focus on the analysis of spelling, including considering spelling alternatives (Berninger, et al, 1992)
• Explicit teaching in spelling improves spelling and increases the vocabulary diversity in student writing (Graham, Harris, & Adkins, 2018)
• Adding explicit spelling instruction to developmental approaches improves spelling (Graham, 2000)
• Explicit spelling instruction improves spelling, reading, and writing (Graham & Santangelo, 2014)

 References

Ball, E. W., & Blachman, B. A. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26(1), 49-66. doi:https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.26.1.3

Berninger, V. W., Vaughan, K., Abbott, R. D., Begay, K., Coleman, K. B., Curtin, G., . . . Graham, S. (2002). Teaching spelling and composition alone and together: Implications for the simple view of writing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(2), 291-304. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.94.2.291

Graham, S. (2000). Should the natural learning approach replace spelling instruction? Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(2), 235-247. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.92.2.235

Graham, S., & Santangelo, T. (2014). Does spelling instruction make students better spellers, readers, and writers? A meta-analytic review. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 27(9), 1703-1743. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-014-9517-0

Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Adkins, M. (2018). The impact of supplemental handwriting and spelling instruction with first grade students who do not acquire transcription skills as rapidly as peers: A randomized control trial. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(6), 1273-1294. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9822-0

Martins, M. A., & Silva, C. (2006). The impact of invented spelling on phonemic awareness. Learning and Instruction, 16(1), 41-56. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2005.12.005

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2008). Pathways to literacy: A study of invented spelling and its role in learning to read. Child Development, 79(4), 899–913. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2008.01166.x

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017). Invented spelling in kindergarten as a predictor of reading and spelling in grade 1: A new pathway to literacy, or just the same road, less known? Developmental Psychology, 53(1), 77-88. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000179

Ouellette, G., Sénéchal, M., & Haley, A. (2013). Guiding children's invented spellings: A gateway into literacy learning. Journal of Experimental Education, 81(2), 261-279. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220973.2012.699903

Sénéchal, M. (2017). Testing a nested skills model of the relations among invented spelling, accurate spelling, and word reading, from kindergarten to grade 1. Early Child Development and Care, 187(3-4), 358-370. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2016.1205044

Sénéchal, M., Ouellette, G., Pagan, S., & Lever, R. (2012). The role of invented spelling on learning to read in low-phoneme awareness kindergartners: A randomized-control-trial study. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 25(4), 917-934. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11145-011-9310-2

Treiman, R. (2017). Learning to spell words: Findings, theories, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 21(4), 265-276. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2017.1296449

P.S. Evidence that students will not need later to “unlearn” their early misspellings comes from a rather extensive body of longitudinal developmental evidence on children’s spelling growth over time (references below). This week my granddaughter shared with me her year-long kindergarten journal – which reveals yet again the fluid nature of young children’s spelling attempts as they try to master an understanding of the phonological/orthographic structure of words. For those, for whom such descriptive studies are insufficient, there are also experimental tests of the idea refuting the notion that invented misspellings are learned (Ehri, Gibbs, & Underwood, 1988). The preponderance of evidence suggests it is better to encourage developmental spelling attempts than to try to prevent children from putting to use what they are learning about words. Learning to read and spell words is more than a rote memorization task – nascent readers benefit from analyzing the speech stream and attempting to map letters to those sounds.

References

Bissex, G.L. (1980). GNYS AT WRK: A child learns to read and write. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Clemens, N. H., Oslund, E. L., Simmons, L. E., & Simmons, D. (2014). Assessing spelling in kindergarten: Further comparison of scoring metrics and their relation to reading skills. Journal of School Psychology, 52(1), 49-61.

Ehri, L. C., Gibbs, A. L., & Underwood, T. L. (1988). Influence of errors on learning the spellings of English words. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 13(3), 236-253. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/0361-476X(88)90024-0

Ferreiro, E. (1978). What is written in a written sentence? A developmental answer. Journal of Education, 160, 25-39.

Frost, J. (2001). Phonemic awareness, spontaneous writing, and reading and spelling development from a preventive perspective. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14(5-6), 487-513.

Gentry, J. R. & Ouellette, G. P. (2019) Brain words: How the science of reading informs teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Stenhouse Publishers.

Godin, M., Gagné, A., & Chapleau, N. (2018). Spelling acquisition in French children with developmental language disorder: An analysis of spelling error patterns. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 34(3), 221-233.

Henderson, E. H. and Beers J. W. (1980). (Eds.) Developmental and cognitive aspects of learning to spell: A reflection of word knowledge. Newark, Del.: International Reading Association.

Huxford, L., Terrell, C., & Bradley, L. (1992). 'Invented' spelling and learning to read. In C. M. Sterling, & C. Robson (Eds.), Psychology, spelling and education; psychology, spelling and education (pp. 159-167). Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Kamii, C., & Manning, M. (1999). Before “invented” spelling”: Kindergartners’ awareness that writing is related to sounds of speech. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 14, 16-25.

Lazo, M. G., Pumfrey, P. D., & Peers, I. (1997). Metalinguistic awareness, reading and spelling: Roots and branches of literacy. Journal of Research in Reading, 20(2), 85-104.

McBride-Chang, C. (1998). The development of invented spelling. Early Education and Development, 9(2), 147-160.

Lie, A. (1999). Effects of a training program for stimulating skills in word analysis in first-grade children. Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 234-250.

Ouellette, G., & Sénéchal, M. (2017). See above.

Read, C. (1971). Preschool children's knowledge of English phonology. Harvard Educational Review, 41, 1-34.

Read, C. (1975). Children’s categorizations of speech sounds in English. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English

Read, C. (1986). Children's creative spelling. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Zhang, C., Bingham, G. E., & Quinn, M. F. (2017). The associations among preschool children’s growth in early reading, executive function, and invented spelling skills. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30(8), 1705-1728. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9746-0

Zhang, Y., Nie, H., & Ding, B. (1986). The ability to manipulate speech sounds depends on knowing alphabetic reading. Cognition, 24, 31-44.

My question is regarding comprehension as it relates to solving math word problems. I have observed almost all word problems begin with presenting the data first (We ate five apples…) then asking the question (How many apples…?) I have noticed when I ask the question first, it seems to narrow their working memory on the relevant detail (s) and I am noting marked improvement in 1) understanding what it is they need to do, 2) extracting the relevant details and 3) employing the correct operations. Your thoughts on the order in which questions are posed. Part 2) Are there studies showing how increasing reading ability (Science of reading) impacts math abilities especially in primary students? It seems logical that since testing is generally reading based across subject areas, scores would improve but has this been measured?

Shanahan response:

The relationship between reading and math has long been of interest to scholars. For a long time, the data were pretty confusing.

They found reading ability to be an important precursor to better math performance (hooray, hooray). But they also reported the reverse – better math skills presaged reading improvements. That, of course, makes little sense.

While reading arguably would enable students to do story problems or to read the directions on a math test, why would being nimble with long division increase one’s ability to decode words or comprehend stories?

Research on those issues has gotten more astute – and better and more extensive data sets have been brought to bear on the issue (Bailey, et al., 2020).

One reason math and reading may have looked so interdependent in older studies could be the result of the influence of common underlying abilities or enabling conditions. Being smart, industrious, careful, motivated, and having a good memory could play a role in learning anything, including both math and reading. Likewise, supportive parents, good nutrition, sufficient sleep, and the availability of high-quality teaching might benefit reading and math.

A recent example of this kind of analysis was a study that found that first-grader’s executive functioning was implicated in later improvements in both reading achievement and mathematics (ten Braak, Lenes, Purpura, Schmitt, & Størksen, 2022).

As data sets have improved, more complex and well controlled studies have provided deeper insights into the direct relations between reading and math. These newer studies have offered some valuable insights. For instance,

• Reading and math do co-develop during the elementary school years, but reading ability was found to promote higher math achievement – not the reverse. This study of 355,883 students tracked development in children across the ages 5-12 (Hübner, Merrell, Cramman, Little, Bolden, & Nagengast, 2022). The researchers concluded that “acquiring good reading skills is highly relevant for developing mathematics skills.”
• A study of 46,373 students (ages 5-19) also found that reading comprehension had a significant impact on math learning across the grades (Grimm, 2008). Reading achievement had an impact on conceptual understanding of math and the application of math knowledge (both the kinds of skills involved in story problems), but not on computation. Controlling for differences in earlier math skills, reading performance enabled more rapid improvement in later math learning.
• In a third study, reading comprehension mattered in the mathematics performance of fourth-grade students, but only for the low and average performing students (Chang & Ko, 2012). Reading apparently played little role in the performance of the highest achieving math students (with them math knowledge and other mathematical abilities are most important). According to the authors, “reading ability appears to be a critical foundation for the lower-mathematics performance group.”
• I mentioned earlier that factors like poverty may have a general impact on all kinds of academic achievement. While that may be generally true, research has found poverty to exercise a greater impact on reading achievement than on math (Eamon, 2002). This should not be surprising – we learn more language at home – stimulating home language environments are an important factor in literacy learning; math is more often relegated totally to the school, which means home environment won’t matter as much.
• Another important separation between reading and math is their impact on the learning of other subjects. A study of 12,058 students explored the role that these foundational subjects play in science learning (Zhu, 2022). The analysis showed that both math and reading mattered in this regard, but that reading was much more influential, and that reading should be accorded greater attention in science instruction.

These studies (and dozens more cited by each of these) reveal the importance of reading in math development – particularly in the application of math knowledge in problem solving and for the lowest achieving students.

Here’s a particular pregnant example from the Zhu, 2022 study (p. 3): 

Many researchers have shown that there is a close correspondence between student performance in reading and mathematics (Adelson et al., 2015; Harlaar et al., 2012; Kyttälä & Björn, 2014). Language-related factors, particularly students’ reading ability, can affect their performance on mathematics assessments (Ajello et al., 2018; Isphording et al., 2016; Trakulphadetkrai et al., 2020; Walker et al., 2008). As a result, reading can be used to predict the outcomes of math tests (Beal et al., 2010; Codding et al., 2015; Foster et al., 2019). Reading comprehension can also account for ‘a considerable proportion of the variance in mathematics performance (Ding & Homer, 2020). Some researchers even found that children with dyslexia were ‘5.60 times and 8.54 times more likely than other children to experience deficits in fact fluency and operations, respectively’ (Vukovic et al., 2010). Furthermore, some recent studies analysed this topic in detail. They reported that it was syntax and early written language skills predicted mathematics performance, rather than vocabulary or phonological awareness (Birgisdottir et al., 2020; Chow & Ekholm, 2019). In a word, prior reading skills are important for students to learn mathematics (Erbeli et al., 2021; Grimm, 2008).

So, indeed, reading contributes to math development (even in the primary grades)—and, at least in part, this contribution is channeled through story problems. As with studies of the relationship of math and reading development, there have been valuable recent advances in this area of research, too.

In fact, Lynn Fuchs and her colleagues (2010, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022) have published several studies in the past year or so that go right to the heart of your question. Though there is long history of research on story problems, I think this newer work is admirable both in its clarity and rigor, but also in its careful consideration of knowledge drawn from past research – and it focuses on young readers particularly.

Without going into too much detail these studies have found that it is beneficial to teach students to recognize the structure of story problems (are they asking for the combination, comparison, or changes of quantities), and then to translate that structure into a diagram or equation that maps onto the “story.”

The studies have found it efficacious to teach those structures and to include relevant reading comprehension instruction that helps students to make sense of the language of the problems. For instance, they are taught the vocabulary alternatives they might confront in story problems of different types (in all or altogether in combination problems, or more, fewer, than, and -er words for comparison problems). 

These scientists were quick to point out that they did more than teaching students to recognize these key words but guided them to interpret those words embedded in the story problem language. The students were not just searching for comparison words but were guided to read the entire problem to identify the problem type and they spent a lot of time re-analyzing the language to see why they may have ended up with the wrong operations or the wrong numbers. In other words, as mentioned earlier the language challenge in math is more rooted in making sense of the sentence syntax than in isolated vocabulary.

Fuchs and company provide from past research a helpful example of the importance of language and structure in the interpretation of story problems (Hudson, 1983). These two story problems were posed to young children. The second version resulted in a whopping 83% performance improvement, which reveals the difficulty to be more with the language than the computation.

There are 5 birds and 3 worms. How many more birds were there than worms?

There are 5 birds and 3 worms. How many birds won’t get a worm?

The students obviously failed to recognize that these problems required the same mathematical operations. Teaching them to recognize the equivalence of the language in these versions and giving them tools for translating that language into diagrams or equations made a big learning difference.

So, indeed, early reading development plays an important role in later progress in math. Students need to learn how to understand and operate effectively on math language.

Despite recent popular claims that reading comprehension depends solely on decoding ability and knowledge of the social and natural world, this research illustrates the importance of knowing how to interpret language when it comes to comprehension.

Knowledge is important (you can’t get these story problems right without an understanding of computation), but that is not enough for success. To solve these problems, students must develop a rich relevant vocabulary along with the syntactic skills that allows them to make sense of the relations among the words in the problem and of their connection with students’ math knowledge.

Lynn Fuchs and company are improving students’ ability to “do math” by teaching young students to comprehend a particular type of language. More of that should be occurring in primary grade reading and math classes.

References

Bailey, D.H., Oh, Y., Farkas, G., Morgan, P., & Hillemeier, M.M. (2020). Reciprocal effects of reading and mathematics? Beyond the cross-lagged panel model. Developmental Psychology. doi.org:10.1037/ dev0000902.

Chang, C., & Ko, H. (2012). The relationship between mathematics achievement and reading comprehension: TIMSS 2003 and PIRLS 2006 test items as measuring instruments. Bulletin of Educational Psychology, 44(1), 95-116.

Eamon, M. K. (2002). Effects of poverty on mathematics and reading achievement of young adolescents. Journal of Early Adolescence, 22(1), 49-74. doi.org/10.1177/0272431602022001003

Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., Sterba, S. K., Barnes, M. A., Seethaler, P. M., & Changas, P. (2022). Building word-problem solving and working memory capacity: A randomized controlled trial comparing three intervention approaches. Journal of Educational Psychology. doi.org/10.1037/edu0000752

Fuchs, L. S., Gilbert, J. K., Fuchs, D., Seethaler, P. M., & Martin, B. N. (2018). Text comprehension and oral language as predictors of word-problem solving: Insights into word-problem solving as a form of text comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 22(2), 152-166. doi-org:10.1080/10888438. 2017.1398259

Fuchs, L. S., Powell, S. R., Cirino, P. T., Schumacher, R. F., Marrin, S., Hamlett, C. L., . . . Changas, P. C. (2014). Does calculation or word problem instruction provide a stronger route to pre-algebraic knowledge? Journal of Educational Psychology, 106, 990–1006. doi.org/10.1037/ a0036793

Fuchs, L. S., Seethaler, P. M., Sterba, S. K., Craddock, C., Fuchs, D., Compton, D. L., . . . Changas, P. (2021). Closing the word-problem achievement gap in first grade: Schema-based word-problem intervention with embedded language comprehension instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(1), 86-103. doi.org:10.1037/edu0000467

Fuchs, L. S., Zumeta, R. O., Schumacher, R. F., Powell, S. R., Seethaler, P. M., Hamlett, C. L., & Fuchs, D. (2010). The effects of schema broadening instruction on second graders’ word-problem performance and their ability to represent word problems with algebraic equations: A randomized control study. The Elementary School Journal, 110, 446–463. doi.org/10.1086/651191

Grimm, K. J. (2008). Longitudinal associations between reading and mathematics achievement. Developmental Neuropsychology, 33(3), 410-426. doi.org/10.1080/ 87565640801982486

Hübner, N., Merrell, C., Cramman, H., Little, J., Bolden, D., & Nagengast, B. (2022). Reading to learn? The co-development of mathematics and reading during primary school. Child Development.  doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13817

Zhu, Y. (2022). Reading matters more than mathematics in science learning: An analysis of the relationship between student achievement in reading, mathematics, and science. International Journal of Science Education, 44(1), 1-17. doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2021.2007552

What do you think of the jigsaw method for organizing the reading in a science or social studies class? I teach 5^th grade in a suburban school.

Shanahan response:

Jigsaw is a cooperative learning activity developed in the 1970s (Aronson, et al., 1978). Basically, the approach is to divide the curricular topic (e.g., dinosaurs, Morocco, amphibians) into subtopics, to divide these portions among individuals/partners/small groups. Each student/group is to become the “expert” on that subtopic. These newly minted experts then put their knowledge to work, perhaps by contributing to a class project (e.g., designing a diorama) or by bringing their classmates up to date through peer teaching. I’ve observed instances of it that have appeared to be motivational – though I did wonder if what was so pleasing was the reduction of work (jigsaw does away with the need for everyone to study everything).

In any event, research into its effects on learning have produced mixed results, with some studies finding it outperforms business as usual teaching methods (Hattie, 2017) – and others concluding that there were no apparent learning benefits (Crone & Portillo, 2013; Law, 2011; Moreno, 2009; Moskowitz, et al., 1983, 1985; Stanczak, et al., 2022). Unfortunately, most studies were with older students (university level), and it has not done as well with younger students. In other words, limited support for jigsaw’s contribution to academic learning at secondary level, and nothing convincing at the elementary level.

Even if you disregard studies with no effects (or negative effects), there is a serious problem with the evidence. Jigsaw approaches seem to be more effective with the learning of social studies and literature content and less effective with STEM subjects, especially math (Stanczak, et al., 2022).

Why no mention of its effects on learning to read? Because that hasn’t been studied – even with regard to its effects of jigsaw on how well students can read the texts in a particular subject area).

That gap is a provocative one since what is usually being jigsawed is the texts. Students either read different texts or different parts of the same texts.

I’m dubious about literacy payoffs.  

Here’s why:

The teacher assembles a text set with a range of resources, some easy, some hard. Likewise, she divides the class into heterogeneous groups in reading ability. When the reading assignments get divvied up (by teacher assignment, peer choice, or individual choice) the lowest readers tend to end up with the easiest and least meaty texts – an approach that does nothing to help them advance. Unfortunately, that approach makes some sense since students will receive little teacher support and no explicit instruction guiding their reading.

Of course, that means that the strongest readers are likely to gain the greatest amount of knowledge and will have the best chance to take on complex text. The lower readers will gain some knowledge from what the better readers tell them, but that won’t improve their reading ability.

These days our ideas of research have broadened to include not just text sources but videos, audiotapes, photographs, political cartoons and so on. That’s a good thing, but it exacerbates the problem noted: the low readers can watch the videos while the better students try to make sense of the more detailed information in the challenging texts.

The purpose of text sets should be to expose students to a multiplicity of sources rather than to differentiate instruction. All students – especially those struggling with reading – should be guided to read the whole collection of texts – or at least those documents should be rationed out so that amounts of reading and degrees of reading challenge offer legitimate learning opportunities to everyone.

Based on existing research, I can’t recommend jigsaw approaches despite their possible value in social studies.  

My concerns are with the reading side of things. I don’t like methods that reduce the amount of reading, that assign reading rather than offering instructional support for strengthening literacy skills, and that give unequal access to challenge texts.

Maybe, if you build your text sets and assign them in ways that allow the lower performing readers to confront more challenging texts – and if you support these readings with explicit guidance, then jigsaw may make sense… but that’s a lot of maybes.

References

Aronson, E., Blaney, N., Stephan, C., Sikes, J., & Snapp, M. (1978). The jigsaw classroom. Sage.

Crone, T. S., & Portillo, M. C. (2013). Jigsaw variations and attitudes about learning and the self in cognitive psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 40(3), 246–251. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628313487451

Hattie, J. (2017). 256 influences related to achievement. Visible Learning. https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-learning-achievement/

Law, Y.-K. (2011). The effects of cooperative learning on enhancing Hong Kong fifth graders’ achievement goals, autonomous motivation and reading proficiency. Journal of Research in Reading, 34(4), 402–425. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.2010.01445.x

Moreno, R. (2009). Constructing knowledge with an agent-based instructional program: A comparison of cooperative and individual meaning making. Learning and Instruction, 19(5), 433–444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2009.02.018

Moskowitz, J. M., Malvin, J. H., Schaeffer, G. A., & Schaps, E. (1985). Evaluation of jigsaw, a cooperative learning technique. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 10(2), 104–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/0361-476X(85)90011-6

Stanczak, A., Darnon, C., Robert, A., Demolliens, M., Sanrey, C., Bressoux, P., Huguet, P., Buchs, C., Butera, F., & PROFAN Consortium. (2022). Do jigsaw classrooms improve learning outcomes? Five experiments and an internal meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(6), 1461-1476.

Given that comprehension lessons tend to focus on “prior knowledge,” vocabulary, text reading with follow-up questions, comprehension strategies, the lowly sentence gets short shrift in most programs and classrooms.

In any event, while that rant gathered some attention, it came up short.  

Accordingly, I have decided to take a mulligan.

That blog articulated my opinions but neither marshalled the research evidence, nor provided much in the way of helpful instructional guidance. It called for action but was terse on specifics.

This piece should remedy those omissions.

To tell the truth, when I wrote that blog I didn’t bother to search for research on sentence comprehension because, that topic never attracted much attention. There were some old studies indicating that teaching formal grammar had no impact on comprehension or writing. That seemed to settle it for most of us.

When I was working on my doctorate, a prominent reading scholar told me that “Noam Chomsky is dead.” He meant it figuratively as he was trying to dissuade me from squandering my time on something as pointless as sentence comprehension.

No matter my excuses, boy was that a foolish oversight!

Over the past two decades – slowly, gradually – research on syntax and reading comprehension has accumulated. And, over the past couple of years, the numerous publications appearing in high quality psychological, educational, and linguistic journals suggests that being a sentence- comprehension researcher is now a respectable line of work, along with social media consultant or TikTok dancer.

First, the research.

These days we’re all doing some handwringing over supply lines. Nevertheless, there are clearly no supply line problems to report when it comes to sentence-comprehension studies. The desert has become an oasis. 

There is now a slew of rigorous studies revealing that an understanding of syntax is correlated with reading comprehension (Rand, 2002). That simply means that students who know more about how sentences are constructed do better on reading comprehension measures.

Even more persuasive is that many such studies examined that relationship AFTER controlling for differences in decoding ability, vocabulary knowledge, memory, and/or other relevant reading skills (Bowey, 1986; Bowey & Patel, 1988; Brimo, Apel, & Fountain, 2017; Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018; Cain, 2007; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006; Cutting & Scarborough, 2006; Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Gaux & Gombert, 1999; Farnia & Geva, 2013; Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022; Gottardo, Mirza, Koh, Ferreira, & Javier, 2018; Hagtvet, 2003; Mackay, Lynch, Duncan, & Deacon, 2021; Mokhtri & Thompson, 2006; Nation & Snowling, 2000; Nippold, 2017; Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2019; Poulsen, Nielsen, & Vang Chrisensen, 2022; Scarborough, 1990; Scott, 2015; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007; Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2021; Tong & McBride, 2015).

In other words, if all students did equally well on decoding, vocabulary, and memory tests, we’d still see variations in reading comprehension ability because of syntax difference. The kids who understand syntax comprehend better than the ones who don’t.

That list of studies is impressive, but not comprehensive. I didn’t search carefully for these studies – combing through reference lists, using a variety of search terms and strategies, considering books and doctoral dissertations, and so on.

It is fair to point out that some such studies didn’t find significant relationships between syntax and comprehension (e.g., Cain & Oakhill, 2006), though the data are sufficiently one-sided enough to conclude that any honest meta-analysis would conclude that knowledge of syntax is an essential reading skill.

That collection of studies cited above found sentence knowledge to be important to comprehension as early as 30-months old and throughout the school grades, K-12. They found that syntax mattered with regular classroom kids and those with dyslexia. They reported this pattern in English, French, Dutch, and Cantonese. They found syntax to matter with native English speakers and with English Language Learners. Syntax played a significant role in comprehension both in studies that measured those simultaneously, and in longitudinal studies which considered the role of the relationship in learning and development.

The amount of comprehension variance explained by syntax varied quite a bit from study to study (~5% to 30%). Researchers attributed some of those differences to the nature of the syntax measures, suggesting that the ability to make sense of complex sentences is more crucial than the ability to evaluate grammatical accuracy (e.g., Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018). Researchers paid less attention to variations in reading comprehension measurement.

The texts included in Comprehension tests can vary a great deal in sentence complexity, and in whether the questions they ask tap into this complexity (Shanahan & Kamil, 1984).

This concern is important since syntax is a particularly important factor determining text complexity or comprehensibility (Graisser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; Stenner & Swartz, 2012). Texts with more complicated sentence structures will be a special challenge for kids who lag in sentence comprehension ability. However, at least for fifth-graders the ability to make sense of sentences with simple structures was more closely related to reading comprehension than doing so with more difficult sentences; though this may have been due to the specific demands of the particular comprehension measure used in the study (Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2021).

Another relevant collection of studies is those focused on oral reading fluency or text reading fluency. Such research has long shown that oral sentence reading requires skills beyond those required to read word lists – even when the words in the lists and sentences are identical (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003). That study found sentence reading to be more predictive of reading comprehension than was word list reading. Students with specific reading comprehension deficits read word lists as well as comparison students but perform more poorly than controls on text reading fluency (Cutting, Matterek, Cole, Levine, & Mahone, 2009). Research also has reported that syntax and text prosody are related to each other and to reading comprehension (Veenendaal, Groen, & Vehoeven, 2015).

If that provocative but incomplete review of the research isn’t enough to convince you that sentence comprehension is a thing, then you likely can’t be convinced. Your lifetime membership in the Flat Earth Society is safe and secure for the time being.

For those of you who are more open minded, let’s turn to what we know about teaching sentence comprehension.

I’d love to present an equally impressive array of studies showing that if you teach sentences your state test scores will reach levels just this side of Nirvana. Unfortunately, I can’t do that.

A thoughtful review (MacKay, Lynch, Duncan, & Deacon, 2021; Stoddard, Valcante, Sindelar, O’Shea, & Algozzine, 1993) recently concluded that this research is so severely limited and insufficient that it would be unwise yet to proceed pedagogically. The reasoning of these researchers is admirable and consistent with what I usually espouse – don’t try to apply basic research to classroom practice. Wait for the instructional studies!

MacKay and company rightly point out that some interventions aimed at improving sentence comprehension haven’t worked (e.g., Balthazar & Scott, 2018), and that interventions aimed at sentence comprehension have been hopelessly confounded (e.g., Morris, et al., 2012; Proctor, Silverman, Harring, Jones, & Hartranft, 2000; Reynolds, 2021). Although these studies reported significant reading comprehension improvement, they didn’t focus on syntactic work alone but also taught morphology, vocabulary, or text structure; perhaps the gains were due to one or another of them.

The same point could be made about paraphrasing studies (Stevens, Vaughn, House, & Stillman-Spisak, 2020). Although such teaching must include some attention to translating sentences into one’s own words – for the most part, these studies have emphasized paragraph paraphrases which would likely include skills that go beyond sentence interpretation. Though this approach has been successful at improving reading comprehension, it would be inappropriate to conclude from this alone that sentence instruction is a good idea.

Despite these problems, in this case, I’m going to suggest the appropriateness of cautiously proceeding with sentence comprehension teaching.

First, I believe studies that show a close connection between text reading fluency and reading comprehension to be persuasive. (I cited a few such studies but could include many more; see Breznitz, 2005 for a more rigorous treatment of these issues). MacKay and her colleagues didn’t credit this dimension of the work, but if you do then the many studies showing that oral reading guidance and chunking instruction can improve reading comprehension need to be considered (NICHD, 2000; Stevens, 1981). They suggest that teaching students how to read sentences aloud with proper prosody is effective, and I believe those practices to be examples of effective sentence instruction.

Also, I know researchers differ in the weight they accord to sentence manipulation instruction. I tend to be persuaded that sentence combining and reduction improves reading comprehension (Neville & Searls, 1985; O’Hare, 1973; Wilkinson & Patty, 1993), and that provides another body of supportive instructional data – though I admit the quality of some of these studies is dubious, it is also fair to point out that the results were just as good in the best designed and implemented studies.

Finally, I identified a couple of studies that were beyond the purview of the MacKay review. One of these studies taught 9- and 10-year-olds to read fables and to identify complex sentences, constituent clauses, and subordinate conjunctions in those texts, and then to revise the fables to make them more readable. This results in significant gains in both oral and written language.

I also recently discovered a doctoral dissertation that evaluated the impact of an intriguing sentence comprehension intervention that improved reading achievement for high school students – grades 9 and 11 (Rozen, 2005). That study had teachers guiding students to analyze difficult texts sentence-by-sentence, discussing main ideas, author’s purpose, inferences, and styles of passage as expressed or revealed in those sentences. They also taught students to break down difficult sentences, simplifying them, and determining the primary function of the various phrases (e.g., who does what to whom?).

The comparison groups received all the business-as-usual reading instruction – including vocabulary, strategies, and practice reading of the texts. The 15-minutes per day of sentence work was accomplished by reducing the time accorded to the other skills. The classes were taught by the same teacher and control and experimental students read the same texts.

My advice to teachers?

1.     Teach oral reading fluency either with grade level classroom texts, including the texts for social studies and science. In the upper grades focus specifically on prosody issues. If the students are not reading the sentences properly – attending to punctuation and pausing in the appropriate places in terms of meaning, then the sentences will make no sense. (Although I know of no research on the practice, but I wouldn’t hesitate with older students to focus this fluency work on the reading of specific complicated sentences drawn from appropriate texts).

2.     I think it also makes sense to engage students in sentence combining and reduction – combining simple sentences to make complex ones and breaking more complicated sentences down into their constituent parts. For examples of this kind of work, along with a wealth of other practical syntax teaching approaches, I recommend downloading the document, “Syntactic Awareness: Teaching Sentence Structure” by Joan Sedita. I found it by typing ‘Syntactic Awareness” into the search box at the Mass Literacy Website (https://www.doe.mass.edu/massliteracy/)

3.     Lots of times teachers tell me they aren’t too sure whether a sentence may seem complex to the students. A good readable source that can provide guidance for identifying sentences that may be barriers to comprehension can be found for free online; an article by Cheryl M. Scott and Catherine Balthazar provides great advice regarding sentence length, subordination, relative clauses, passive voice, and other syntactic issues. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4373700/) However, remember that even more basic sentences may pose challenges for elementary students. However, no matter how complex a sentence may be, it is only worth breaking down if it poses some impediment to comprehension. Scott and Balthazar's guidance may help you to notice whether a sentence poses a particular kind of problem (like a passive sentence seemingly confusing actor and acted upon), but an exercise aimed at comprehending such a structure, should start with a question to determine whether or not students could understand it. If understood, move on. If not understood, it would be a great basis for a lesson.

4.     I think that idea of replacing some typical “guided reading” with the kind of reading intervention described earlier – guiding students to read each sentence, to paraphrase what they mean, and to break the sentences down when they have trouble paraphrasing. That strikes me as a very intelligent and supportive way to teach these skills – going faster when the kids are having no problem with a sentence and digging in to solve the problem when they do. 

5.     Although I’ve emphasized sentences heavily here, it is important to remember that individual words play an important role in sentence interpretation and syntactic understanding (Adlof & Catts, 2015; Goodwin, Petscher, & Reynolds, 2022). Meaning will often turn on coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, so) or subordinating conjunctions (e.g., because, when, if). Likewise, verb tenses (e.g., swim and swam) reveal when actions took place or are taking place or will take place in time. Sentence work requires some attention to word meanings and morphology.

6.     There have been several successful reading interventions that included sentence work. Those studies aren’t sufficient to determine the effectiveness of the sentence comprehension part of the instruction. Nevertheless, we can take some direction from such studies – including sentence work while still teaching vocabulary, morphology, text structure, and so on. These days vocabulary instruction seems to be getting a lot of play, though the contribution of syntax to reading comprehension is similar in magnitude (Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007). Perhaps 15 minutes per day on sentence comprehension would be a good use of reading instruction time.

References

Adlof, S. M., & Catts, H. W. (2015). Morphosyntax in poor comprehenders. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 28(7), 1051-1070.

Balthazar, C. H., & Scott, C. M. (2007). Syntax-morphology. In A. G. Kamhi, J. J. Masterson & K. Apel (Eds.), Clinical decision making in developmental language disorders; clinical decision making in developmental language disorders (pp. 143-163). Baltimore, MD: Paul H Brookes.

Bowey, J. A. (1986). Syntactic awareness and verbal performance from preschool to fifth grade. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 15(4), 285-308.

Bowey, J. A., & Patel, R. K. (1988). Metalinguistic ability and early reading achievement. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9(4), 367-383.

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

Brimo, D., Apel, K., & Fountain, T. (2017). Examining the contributions of syntactic awareness and syntactic knowledge to reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 40(1), 57-74.

Brimo, D., Lund, E., & Sapp, A. (2018). Syntax and reading comprehension: A meta?analysis of different spoken?syntax assessments. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 53(3), 431-445.

Cain, K. (2007). Syntactic awareness and reading ability: Is there any evidence for a special relationship? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 679-694.

Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. (2006). Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76(4), 683-696.

Catts, H. W., Adlof, S. M., & Weismer, S. E. (2006). Language deficits in poor comprehenders: A case for the simple view of reading. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49(2), 278-293.

Cutting, L. E., Materek, A., Cole, C. A. S., Levine, T. M., & Mahone, E. M. (2009). Effects of fluency, oral language, and executive function on reading comprehension performance. Annals of Dyslexia, 59(1), 34-54.

Cutting, L. E., & Scarborough, H. S. (2006). Prediction of reading comprehension: Relative contributions of word recognition, language proficiency, and other cognitive skills can depend on how comprehension is measured. Scientific Studies of Reading, 10(3), 277-299.

Deacon, S. H., & Kieffer, M. (2018). Understanding how syntactic awareness contributes to reading comprehension: Evidence from mediation and longitudinal models. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(1), 72-86.

Farnia, F., & Geva, E. (2013). Growth and predictors of change in English language learners’ reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 36(4), 389-421.

Gaux, C., & Gombert, J. (1999). La conscience syntaxique chez les préadolescents: Question de méthodes. L'Année Psychologique, 99(1), 45-74.

Goodwin, A. P., Petscher, Y., & Reynolds, D. (2021). Unraveling adolescent language & reading comprehension: The monster’s data. Scientific Studies of Reading.

Gottardo, A., Mirza, A., Koh, P. W., Ferreira, A., & Javier, C. (2018). Unpacking listening comprehension: The role of vocabulary, morphological awareness, and syntactic knowledge in reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(8), 1741-1764.

Graesser, A.C., McNamara, D.S., & Kulikowich, J.M. (2011). Coh-Metrix providing multilevel analyses of text characteristics. Educational Researcher, 40(5), 223–234.

Hagtvet, B. E. (2003). Listening comprehension and reading comprehension in poor decoders: Evidence for the importance of syntactic and semantic skills as well as phonological skills. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 16(6), 505-539.

Hirschman, M. (2000). Language repair via metalinguistic means. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 35(2), 251-268.

Jenkins, J. R., Fuchs, L. S., van den Broek, P., Espin, C., & Deno, S. L. (2003). Sources of individual differences in reading comprehension and reading fluency. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(4), 719-729.

Lauterbach, S. L., & Bender, W. N. (1995). Cognitive strategy instruction for reading comprehension: A success for high school freshmen. High School Journal, 79(1), 58-64.

MacKay, E., Lynch, E., Sorenson Duncan, T., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Informing the science of reading: Students’ awareness of sentence?level information is important for reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly.

Mokhtari, K., & Thompson, H. B. (2006). How problems of reading fluency and comprehension are related to difficulties in syntactic awareness skills among fifth-graders. Reading Research and Instruction, 46(1), 73-94.

Morris, R.D., Lovett, M.W., Wolf, M., Sevcik, R.A., Steinbach, K.A., Frijters, J.C., & Shapiro, M.B. (2012). Multiple component remediation for developmental reading disabilities: IQ, socioeconomic status, and race as factors in remedial outcome. Journal of Learning Disabilities,

45(2), 99–127.

Nation, K., & Snowling, M. J. (2000). Factors influencing syntactic awareness skills in normal readers and poor comprehenders. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21(2), 229-241.

Neville, D. D., & Searls, E. F. (1991). A meta-analytic review of the effect of sentence-combining on reading comprehension. Reading Research and Instruction, 31(1), 63-76.

Nippold, M.A. (2017). Reading comprehension deficits in adolescents: Addressing underlying language abilities. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 48(2), 125-131

Nomvete, P., & Easterbrooks, S. R. (2020). Phrase-reading mediates between words and syntax in struggling adolescent readers. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 41(3), 162-175.

Poulsen, M., Nielsen, J. L., & Vang Christensen, R. (2022). Remembering sentences is not all about memory: Convergent and discriminant validity of syntactic knowledge and its relationship with reading comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 49(2), 349-365.

Proctor, C. P., Silverman, R. D., Harring, J. R., Jones, R. L., & Hartranft, A. M. (2020). Teaching bilingual learners: Effects of a language?based reading intervention on academic language and reading comprehension in grades 4 and 5. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1), 95-122.

RAND Reading Study Group (2002). Reading for understanding, toward an R&D Program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.

Rozen, S.D. (2005). Sentence disambiguation using syntactic awareness as a reading comprehension strategy for high school students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.

Scarborough, H. S. (1990). Index of productive syntax. Applied Psycholinguistics, 11(1), 1-22.

Scott, C. M., & Balthazar, C. H. (2010). The grammar of information: Challenges for older students with language impairments. Topics in Language Disorders, 30(4), 288-307.

Scott, C.M., & Balthazar, C. (2013). The role of complex sentence knowledge in children with reading and writing difficulties. Perspectives on Literacy and Language, 39(3), 18-30.

Shanahan, T., & Kamil, M. L. (1984). The relationship of the concurrent and construct validities of cloze. In J. A. Niles, & L. A. Harris (Eds.), Changing perspectives on re­search in read­ing/language processing and instruction. (Thirty-third Yearbook of the National Reading Con­fer­ence, pp. 252–256). Rochester, NY: National Read­ing Conference.

Shiotsu, T., & Weir, C. J. (2007). The relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary breadth in the prediction of reading comprehension test performance. Language Testing, 24(1), 99-128.

Sorenson Duncan, T., Mimeau, C., Crowell, N., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Not all sentences are created equal: Evaluating the relation between children’s understanding of basic and difficult sentences and their reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(2), 268-278.

Stevens, E. A., Vaughn, S., House, L., & Stillman-Spisak, S. (2020). The effects of a paraphrasing and text structure intervention on the main idea generation and reading comprehension of students with reading disabilities in grades 4 and 5. Scientific Studies of Reading, 24(5), 365-379.

Stevens, K. (1981). Chunking material as an aid to reading comprehension. Journal of Reading, 25, 126-129.

Stoddard, K., Valcante, G., Sindelar, P., O'Shea, L., & al, e. (1993). Increasing reading rate and comprehension: The effects of repeated readings, sentence segmentation, and intonation training. Reading Research and Instruction, 32(4), 53-65

Tong, X., & McBride, C. (2015). A reciprocal relationship between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. Learning and Individual Differences, 57, 33-44.

Veenendaal, N. J., Groen, M. A., & Verhoeven, L. (2015). What oral text reading fluency can reveal about reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading, 38(3), 213-225.

Wilkinson, P.A., & Patty, D. (1993). The effects of sentence combining on the reading comprehension of fourth-grade students. Research in the Teaching of English, 27(1), 104–125.

At my school, the district inservice has made a big deal out of Scarborough’s rope. Nevertheless, when it comes to daily instruction, we (the primary grade teachers) have been told that decoding is the most important thing and that we are to emphasize that. They’ve sent us to LETRS training, purchased instructional programs on phonics, and require testing students’ “nonsense word fluency” frequently. At what grade levels is it appropriate to teach the “language comprehension” portions of the rope?

Shanahan responds:

In 1915, near where I’m writing this, a passenger ship, the SS Eastland sank, drowning 844 passengers – many of them children. It was the greatest disaster in Chicago history and the greatest loss of life of any single shipwreck on the Great Lakes…. But I’ll get back to that in a moment.

I agree with your district that young readers – if they are going to be young readers – need to learn to decode and phonics and phonemic awareness instruction is essential during the primary grades to ensure that students develop proficient decoding ability.

But it seems to me that in your school district’s prodigious and well-meaning efforts to ensure that happens, they are ignoring Scarborough’s rope, Gough & Tunmer’s simple view, Duke & Cartwright’s active view model, the report of the National Reading Panel, $100 million worth of research from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and a slew of other more recent research studies.

They’ve left the “bop out of the bop-sh-bop-sh-bop.” Or, more accurately, they’ve left the science out of the “science of reading.”

Most people would chalk this overreach up to “reading wars.” That could be what’s happening; maybe there’s a “true believer” in your district who thinks that only decoding matters – and is willing to make that happen no matter the costs.

However, I’ve been hearing about this “decoding first” or “decoding only” action often lately – from parents, state department of education officials, and teachers. Reading instruction over my career has tended to follow a pendulum. As interest swings one way or the other, instructional practice gets twisted out of shape.

I remember back in the 1970s and 80s. The federal government invested heavily in research on reading comprehension. That produced a lot of terrific studies, and for a while it dominated the reading journals – both the research journals and those aimed at practitioners.

In 1980, it was nearly impossible to find a contemporary high-quality article on phonics teaching. The comprehension researchers weren’t anti-phonics, they just sucked all the oxygen out of the room. A beginning teacher at that time would have thought the only thing she was supposed to teach was comprehension strategies.  

Not surprisingly, publishing companies followed that lead. It wasn’t that they wouldn’t publish information on how to read words or how to teach students to do so. They were just following the market, publishing the shiny new stuff that everyone was interested in right then – rather than trying to make sure that all the important aspects of teaching reading were addressed sufficiently.

That’s what’s going on now. The press and media are emphasizing decoding because of serious gaps in the practices of many schools, so parents are asking questions about it and curriculum directors are making darn sure that they have a good story to tell. Since no one appears particularly concerned about prosody or vocabulary or whether kids are reading enough science text, all hands-on deck are about addressing the decoding gap.

We certainly have work to do to make sure that phonics is taught, that teachers have supportive, high-quality instructional materials aimed at that, and investing in professional development on decoding is wise, too.

But that’s the easy part.

The trick to doing that successfully, however, is to do it without tipping the boat over.

Ah, the SS Eastland, let’s get back to that. The ship that day was loaded with families going out for a excursion on the lake, a Sunday entertainment. Unfortunately, once boarded the ship listed heavily to starboard (it was leaning uncomfortably to the right). The passengers responded as might be expected… they moved quickly to the other side of the boat – which tipped it over.

It sounds like your district is trying to address a real problem. But under pressure and anxiety, they are shifting all the ballast to one side of the boat. Ignoring or delaying language comprehension instruction is not the smart way to correct the decoding problem. In fact, it might eventually sink the boat.

Is there really any reason to believe that teaching phonics first or that only teaching phonics for a year or two is a good idea? If you have phonics stuff to sell, it probably seems like it is. But if you have any interest in the science of reading (that is, you want to base your actions on data rather than sales talks and unintentional media hyperbole), then it’s clear those scorched earth approaches are bad pedagogy.

If you don’t think that I’m right about this, look at this evidence:

1.     Jeanne Chall, the Harvard professor most known for her analysis of the research on phonics instruction (Reading: The Great Debate, 1967), promoted the role of phonics more vocally and more articulately than any scientist of her generation. Nevertheless, the phonics instruction that she promoted through her own work never delivered phonics in a vacuum. Her research revealed that students, to become readers, needed to progress in multiple skills area simultaneously.

2.     In 1990, Marilyn Jager Adams published the landmark, “Beginning to Read,” her magnificent summary of the research on the early acquisition of reading ability. Not surprisingly, this work – like Chall’s – has been a major pillar of movement to teach phonics explicitly and thoroughly from the beginning. However, this incisive review of research explicitly rejects the idea of either “phonics first” or “meaning first” approaches. It describes such approaches as “misguided” and “simplistic,” and documents the lack of empirical supporting either of those approaches.

3.     Hollis Scarborough’s rope, which you mention, treats word recognition and language comprehension equivalently. However, you could read that visual metaphor for reading development two different ways. You could read it left-to-right, which would suggest that both sets of skills develop simultaneously and interactively from the beginning. Or you also might read it from top to bottom, suggesting that language comprehension comes later in the process, built upon a foundation of phonemic awareness, phonics, and sight vocabulary. Recently, Hollis clarified the intended meaning in a Q&A available on YouTube. She said that the publisher of the original graphic left out one important item. There was to be an arrow at the bottom labeled time, and it was to point left-to-right. Her understanding of the research is in accord with those of Chall and Adams – decoding needs to be taught early in the developmental process, along with those comprehension abilities.

4.     The National Reading Panel report (2000) is oft cited as the major support for phonics instruction. We found (I was a member of the panel) that explicit, systematic phonics instruction helped students to become better readers – based on a meta-analysis of 38 studies. But most of those studies provided the phonics instruction embedded in or accompanied by a more comprehensive reading program (the same was true of all the other components of reading that NRP examined). If you have any doubts, Linnea Ehri, the scientist who led the alphabetics part of the effort, has focused her research not only on how kids learn to recognize words (ever hear of “orthographic mapping”?), but also on more comprehensive approaches to decoding like Reading Rescue.

5.     The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that once instruction had successfully raised kids to average levels of decoding ability – levels that should have resulted in successful reading – more than half the students still struggled. Decoding was essential, but insufficient for success. That’s why Reid Lyon, Jack Fletcher, Barbara Foorman, Joe Torgesen, and so many others endorsed more comprehensive approaches to meeting children’s reading needs (Fletcher & Lyon, 1998). They were quite explicit that the teaching of these components takes places simultaneously, not consecutively or sequentially. It would be cruel to put all the emphasis on one part of the process, while allowing kids to languish with the other parts (sort of like providing calcium by taking away the protein).

6.     Perhaps you think that what I’m saying may be true for some kids, but not for kids with dyslexia. You’d be wrong there too if you examined the rigorous and well-grounded research of folks like Sharon Vaughn or Maureen Lovett. They must not have gotten the memo that kids only need decoding supports early on; look at the interventions they’ve developed for students with dyslexia.

7.     Not long ago, on a listserv where I lurk, someone argued that it was okay to teach phonics to kids who already could decode satisfactorily (“it couldn’t hurt”). Research shows that engaging those kids in comprehension and language activities instead of teaching them again what they already know, generates greater learning progress (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004). Nothing wrong with supporting phonics instruction but being so cavalier about the education of other people’s children is insensitive and offensive. (Yes, unfortunately, I’ve witnessed that same kind of insensitivity and gracelessness from those excusing their own disregard for the decoding needs of kids.)

8.     The value or possibility of teaching foundational skills and language skills simultaneously is not just for reading either. Karen Harris and Steve Graham shared some of their recent work with me that shows that first-graders do quite well with a more comprehensive approach from the beginning (Harris, Kim, Yim, Camping, Graham, et al., in review).

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. The scientists who know the most about this are big proponents of teaching phonics, but they don’t buy in to the idea that its phonics first or phonics only. Those ideas comes from folks who are trying to push a pendulum, make a sale, or – perhaps, like your district – who want to respond to community pressure without taking the trouble to examine the science of reading.

How to proceed? The way I handle it is by apportioning time to parts of the literacy curriculum. I follow the research and advocate teaching phonics for about 30 minutes a day (just like in most of the studies summarized by the National Reading Panel). Comparable amounts of time should be devoted to the other important components that reading comprehension, writing, and the ability to read text fluently. Doing it that way, kids get what research says is an effective dose of phonics instruction, and they don’t miss out on all the other things that they need if they are to become good readers.

In Chicago, when I was the director of reading, we began every workshop with an overview of all the skills needed to read. It was explained repeatedly that today’s PD was on ______ but not because that was the most important or the only component of reading. It was important, it mattered, and it was the topic of the day, but it had to fit together with the other pieces (that also were essential and that mattered every bit as much). Worked for our kids.

Please share this article with your administrators. Perhaps we can persuade them to do less tail covering and more to meet the literacy learning needs of our diverse children.

Let’s not sink the boat in our zeal to make it look like we are doing a great job with phonics.

References

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Chall, J. S. (1967). Learning to read: The great debate. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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.

Fletcher, J. M., & Lyon, G. R. (1998). Reading: A research-based approach. In W. M. Evers (Eds.), What’s gone wrong in America’s classrooms (pp. 50-77). Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press. 

Harris, K. R., Kim, Y., Yim, S., Camping, A., Graham, S., & Fulton, M. L. (Under review). Yes, they can: Developing transcription skills and oral language in tandem with SRSD instruction on close reading of science text to write informative essays at Grades 1 and 2. 

National Reading Panel (U.S.) & National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read : an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Teacher question:

I am surprised that you are such a staunch advocate of phonics. English is a very complex language and teaching young children the sounds and letters won’t change that. Most letters and spelling patterns in English are not regular (not only the Dolch words, but lots of other words, too). It is just discouraging having to spend so much time teaching skills that can’t possibly work. I’ve taught for a long time, and I feel so sorry for these children given what I am required to teach now. I am so discouraged that I want to retire. This makes no sense. You could help teachers if you would just speak out against this silliness.

Shanahan response:

Take a breath.

Your observations aren’t crazy, but your conclusion is way off. Maybe I can help with that.

I recognize the complexities of English – that’s what you are right about. But there is also a great deal of systematicity or regularity to the language as well. So much regularity, in fact, that phonics can be quite useful – if you (and your students) grasp how phonics works or its raison d’être.

That’s why so many studies have found that teaching phonics boosts reading ability, which is why I promote it.

Many observers, like you, recognize that even in the best of situations readers trying to sound out words are going to make a lot of mistakes. There are many irregularities, exceptions, and conditionalities in the English spelling system, and a good deal of its regularity is not due to phonology.

For instance, think of a spelling pattern like ea (in words like beat, great, and bread). How is a student supposed to know which sound to use when he/she comes across a pattern like that? Of course, they’ll err sometimes, trying out the wrong sounds, making the wrong choices.

That isn’t a problem though.

The point of phonics isn’t to provide readers with exactly correct pronunciations of words, but only close approximations (Cunningham, 1975-1976). Its aim is to get readers to look at all the letters in a word (Venezky, no date)– not the word’s shape or first letter or the pictures on the page. Phonics instruction should tip students off to some of the more frequent and useful orthographic patterns, but it never attempts to impart them all. An ambitious phonics program usually introduces no more than 60-70 patterns over 2-3 years, not a 10^th of all the patterns linguists have identified.

The patterns that are taught are ones that are consistent enough to be useful and that come up frequently enough that they can provide reading support.

Additionally, introducing frequent and somewhat consistent patterns awakens an awareness of the existence of such patterns. Humans have amazing pattern recognition capabilities (that’s why some can learn to read simply by memorizing a bunch of words), but more kids will become sensitive to patterns if instruction tips them off that they are there.

You may have noticed that proficient readers don’t usually sound out words, and every first-grade teacher has observed students who struggle to remember words early in the year, but who later master new words without effort. Again, the point of phonics isn’t to enable overt sounding out, though that is unavoidable early on. No, the point is to reshape memory so that students remember words easily.

Finally, phonics should sensitize students to alternative sound-symbol relations and spelling patterns. That way when misreading a word like bread as “breed,” the student has available some other pronunciation choices for that ea.

Proficient decoders must be flexible, sensitive to orthographic patterns, comfortable with approximate results, and self-correcting. This has long been understood by researchers (e.g., Gibson & Levin, 1975). Critics of phonics expect too much of it and, consequently, reject it as being too primitive to overcome the limits and meet the expectations that they themselves have supposed.

Likewise, some educators and phonics promoters make the same mistake. They confuse phonics – a relatively simple and effective way for getting reading started – with phonetics, the complex science of speech sounds. This may result in curriculum and instruction that is overly consistent – ignoring, nay denying, irregularities in the system. That approach may deter some children from accomplishing the real purposes of phonics.

Though the need to deal with these complexities in a flexible manner has long been recognized, it has generated very little research – until the past few years. Recently, there has been a great deal of correlational investigation into the importance of cognitive flexibility in decoding. Enough convincing, high-quality work to conclude flexibility to be an essential property of proficient decoding ability. Kids who lack that kind of flexibility are at a disadvantage.

I wish I could say that the instructional research offers a discrete and specific instructional prescription for transforming all kids into flexible decoders. We’re not there yet. But several appear promising – at least under some conditions, and none appear to be either sufficient in and of themselves nor mutually exclusive of the others (Colenbrander, Wang, Arrow, & Castles, 2020).

How can we develop proficient decoding ability without engendering a too-rigid response from our students? How can we teach the systematic nature of the spelling system while fostering the cognitive flexibility needed to take full advantage of it? Certainly, a program of explicit phonics instruction is central to that goal, but some additional supports may help with the flexibility part of that.

Here are some practical ideas:

1. Teach Sight Words.

Have kids memorize high frequency words, particularly those that are spelled irregularly. I know some critics claim such memorization is harmful, but Colenbrander and company rightfully challenge those claims. Their well-researched conclusions: “Instruction of a small set of frequent, functionally useful irregular words, in addition to instruction in regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences, has been shown to be effective for typical readers and children with reading difficulties. There is no evidence that teaching irregular sight words alongside regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences is harmful for children or results in ‘unlearning’ of existing grapheme-phoneme correspondences. There is also some evidence that sight word instruction can result in generalization to words that are similarly spelled” (Colenbrander, et al., 2020, p. 98). Building a stock of irregularly spelled words in memory may help students to recognize some of the complications of the spelling system. (Don’t go crazy with this. Five minutes a day is probably more than enough time to ensure that all first graders know the 100 most frequent words and that second graders know the 300 most frequent words).

2. Teach Mispronunciation Correction.

Several recent studies have focused on guiding students to correct mispronunciations in reading. Oral reading creates opportunities for such correction, but the lessons in these studies have been more explicit and specific, focusing only on irregular words. Basically, students are taught how to correct their mistakes. “If what is first produced does not sound like something already known from listening, a child has to change one or more of the sound associations (most probably a vowel) and try again” (Venezky, 1999). Approaches that have been tried include having students correct puppets’ reading errors, guided analysis of the mispronounced words to connect their spellings with their pronunciations (my favorite), and strategic steps in which students question themselves as to whether a word is correct or not and what other words sound like that.

3. Cognitive Flexibility Tasks.

Cartwright and colleagues have found that engaging students in word reading tasks that require sorting based on multiple criteria improves cognitive flexibility and reading fluency. For instance, students must sort four words into a 2X2 matrix, grouping the words simultaneously based on their initial consonant and semantic category. Thus, fish and face would be grouped together in the same row since they both begin with f but would go in different columns since face goes with tooth and fish with toad in terms of meaning. I can’t really figure out why this has worked so well or so consistently, but what the heck, it apparently helps.

4. Word Sorts.

Don Bear and colleagues have long proposed word categorizing activities that both emphasize consistency and generalization as well as the exceptions (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2020). As they put it, “compare words that ‘do’ with words that ‘don’t’.” Thus, when kids are studying: she, he, we, and me, it makes sense to include exceptions to the pattern if there are any, in this case: the. Or, sometimes it is less about the exceptions or what they call “oddballs,” and more about introducing alternatives pronunciations bow, cow, how, now, pow, sow, vow, wow, chow versus bow, crow, flow, low, mow, row, sow, tow, show. That kind of lesson complicates things in a useful way for young readers.

5. Morphology Instruction.

One of the complicating factors in English orthography is that its regularity is based on more than phonology. Our spelling system represent sounds, but also meanings. The words themselves, of course, convey meaning, but the spelling does too. Think of how we usually indicate plurality. In oral language we add a sibilant sound at the end of a noun (/s/ or /z/). But we don’t do that in our spelling system. English spelling doesn’t attempt to represent the two different sounds, but instead to preserve the consistency of the plural meaning across words like cats and dogs. Many supposedly irregular words represent that consistency of meaning. Research shows that supplementing phonics instruction with explicit teaching of those kinds of semantic patterns can be beneficial (Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010). Here I like best structured word inquiry.

6. Be Careful not to Overdo Decodable Text.

The purpose of decodable text is to provide practice in the application of phonics skills. To provide such practice, decodable texts tend to present a heavy dose of words with regular spelling patterns; a greater concentration is common in regular texts. We don’t want to mislead students into thinking that reading is quite that consistent and that sounding out words guarantees accuracy. I’m not recommending foregoing any potential practice benefits that may be derived from decodables (though research has not found them to improve learning), but I do suggest not limiting student reading to these texts. Those who claim it is harmful for children to try to read any texts that may include words tha may not yet be able to fully decode should provide evidence either that this is a problem or that a steady diet of decodables helps students to learn to read. Until then, let’s hedge our bets and cast the reading net a bit wider from the start – not necessarily to make the reading any harder (we are talking young children), but to expose them to more of the complicating features of how phonics works. Irregularly spelled words, if repeated frequently, are easy enough to learn. Structured word inquiry is great for this.

I know you think phonics can’t help students given the complexity of English. Research on learning says that is a baseless concern. However, research also indicates that phonics works best for readers when they recognize the need for flexible responses to words – recognizing the complexity and conditionality of spelling, monitoring their reading for errors, and considering alternative pronunciations.

I think it would be wise for you to embrace phonics instruction, but complicate a bit, so your students don’t miss the point. I think you’ll see that it really can help and I hope you can make some combination of these instructional approaches to flexibility work for your students as well.

References

Bowers, P. N., Kirby, J. R., & Deacon, S. H. (2010). The effects of morphological instruction on literacy skills: A systematic review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 80(2), 229-251. doi.org/10.3102/0034654309359353

Cartwright, K. B., Marshall, T. R., Huemer, C. M., & Payne, J. B. (2019). Executive function in the classroom: Cognitive flexibility supports reading fluency for typical readers and teachers-dentified low-achieving readers. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 88, 49-52.

Colenbrander, D., Kohnen, S., Beyersmann, E., Robidoux, S., Wegener, S., Arrow, T., Nation, K., & Castles, A. (2022). Teaching children to read irregular words: A comparison of three instructional methods. Scientific Studies of Reading, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2022.2077653

Colenbrander, D., Wang, H. C., Arrow, T., & Castles, A. (2020). Teaching irregular words: What we know, what we don’t know, and where we can go from here. Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 37(2), 97–104. https://doi. org/10.1017/edp.2020.11 

Cunningham, P. M. (1975-1976). Investigating a synthesized theory of mediated word identification. Reading Research Quarterly, 11(2), 127-143. doi.org/10.2307/747546

Dyson, H., Best, W., Solity, J., & Hulme, C. (2017). Training mispronunciation correction and word meanings improves children’s ability to learn to read words. Scientific Studies of Reading, 21(5), 392–407.

Edwards, A., Steacy, L. M., Seigelman, N., Rigobon, V. M., Kearns, V. M., Rueckl, J. R., & Compton, D. L. (2022). Unpacking the unique relationship between set for variability and word reading development: Examining word-and child-level predictors of performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(6), 1242–1256.

Kearns, D. M., Rogers, H. J., Koriakin, T., & Al Ghanem, R. (2016). Semantic and phonological ability to adjust recoding: A unique correlate of word reading skill? Scientific Studies of Reading, 20(6), 455–470.

Rueda, M. R., Rothbart, M. K., McCandliss, B. D., Saccomanno, L., & Posner, M. I. (2005).Training, maturation, and genetic influences on the development of executive attention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102(41), 14931–14936. doi:10.1073/pnas.0506897102

Shaul, S., & Schwartz, M. (2014). The role of executive functions in school readiness among preschool-age children. Reading and Writing, 27(4), 749–768. doi:10.1007/s11145-013-9470-3

Steacy, L. M., Edwards, A. A., Rigobon, V. M., Gutierrez, N., & Marencin, N. C. (2022). Set for variability as a predictor of word reading: Potential implications for early identification and treatment of dyslexia. Reading Research Quarterly. doi:10.1002/rrq.475

Steacy, L. M., Rigobon, V. M., Edwards, A. A., Abes, D. R., Marencin, N. C., Smith, K., Elliott, J. D., Wade-Woolley, L., & Compton, D. L. (2022). Modeling complex word reading: Examining influences at the level of the word and child on mono- and polymorphemic word reading. Scientific Studies of Reading. DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2022.20771

Steacy, L. M., Wade-Woolley, L., Rueckl, J. G., Pugh, K. R., Elliott, J. D., & Compton, D. L. (2019). The role of set for variability in irregular word reading: Word and child predictors in typically developing readers and students at-risk for reading disabilities. Scientific Studies of Reading, 23(6), 523–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2019.1620749 

Thorell, L. B., Lindqvist, S., Bergman, S., Bohlin, G., & Klingberg, T. (2009). Training and transfer effects of executive functions in preschool children. Developmental Science, 12(1), 106–976. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00745.x

Vadasy, P. F., & Sanders, E. A. (2021). Introducing phonics to learners who struggle: Content and embedded cognitive elements. Reading and Writing, 34, 2059-2080.

Vadasy, P. F., Sanders. E. A., & Cartwright, K. B. (2022). Cognitive flexibility in beginning decoding and encoding. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR). DOI: 10.1080/10824669.2022.2098132

Venezky, R. L. (1999). The American way of spelling. New York: Guilford Pres

Venezky, R. L. (no date). The structure of English orthography: Letters, sounds, spellings, and meanings. Children of the Code, https://childrenofthecode.org/interviews/venezky.htm

I understand your claims that teaching students with grade level texts instead of instructional level texts increases children’s opportunities to learn. However, what about children’s emotional needs, self-esteem, motivation, and self-starting skills when text is challenging. Children who struggle with sight words or sounding out words who are given a hard piece of text will shut down and refuse to try or will act out in the classroom. I always thought that the purpose of avoiding frustration level texts was to avoid frustrating children who were trying to learn to read. What am I missing?

RELATED: Teaching Students to Use Context

Shanahan response:

You’re not alone in your concerns for the motivational or affective aspects of teaching children to read with complex text. I’ll provide an explanation of what they have figured out about these relationships in a moment. First, let me address a misconception that you appear to have.

The idea of having students reading grade level text or difficult text or even frustration level text has not been proposed for beginning readers. The state standards that require students to learn to read grade level texts do so for Grades 2 and up – not kindergarten or first grade. Likewise, all the research that has been done revealing the benefits of teaching students at grade level rather than instructional level were done in Grades 2 and up. There is no evidence that such an approach would be beneficial with younger readers, and there are some serious concerns about its potential value (Hiebert, 1999).

A major factor in text difficulty for young children is the decodability of the text. Students at that point are learning to recognize and use letters and spelling patterns to connect printed words to oral language. Teaching with more difficult texts from the start would mean working with texts that will have less accessible spelling patterns and less repetition of words that helps fix those patterns in memory. Teaching beginners with complex text would be counterproductive.

However, the research suggests that by grade 2, most students are likely to have those most basic decoding skills under their belts and that more challenging texts can be beneficial for learning. Perhaps young children would “shut down” if asked to read more difficult texts, but let’s not find out. There appears to be no potential learning benefit to such an approach, so let’s not go that way.

Given that from Grade 2 on, it is sensible to confront children with texts supposedly at their “frustration levels,” we should be concerned about the motivational implications of that approach.

Researchers have long hypothesized that more difficult text placements would increase reading avoidance and reduce the amount of student reading. The claim has been that overly demanding instruction leads to misbehavior and inattention, and, consequently, to lowered learning and reading avoidance.

Students placed in more challenging texts do exhibit more behavior problems (Gambrell, Wilson, & Gantt, 1981; Gickling & Armstrong, 1978; Jorgenson, Klein, & Kumar, 1977; Treptow, Burns, & McComas, 2007). However, only one of these studies considered alternative explanations for this correlation. Gambrell and company observed that lower achieving students were more likely to be placed in what for them were challenging texts and to misbehave. However, these behavior problems were evident whether these students were taught from frustration or instructional level texts. The correlation was more due to who is placed in challenging text rather than the text placement itself. 

Other evidence on this issue is somewhat mixed, but my overall take is that the research has not found clearly found text challenge to be a motivational problem. If it is, it has not yet been proven.

Studies on these issues have varied much in rigor and applicability. In one study, there were only 3 students and there were only 8 in another. Also, their findings were not based on reading alone, but on other tasks too (like workbook activities). Most importantly, I think, how they operationalized the instructional level differed. For example, in one of these studies, the frustration level students had to perform at lower than 80% accuracy in fluency – far below more traditional criteria and not especially convincing.

In a study of the impact of text placement on attitude towards reading (Roberts, 1976), 125 second- and third graders from 6 schools were examined. Fifty-seven percent of these students had been placed in frustration level texts for instruction. Despite this, student attitudes towards reading were as positive for these students as for those who were “appropriately placed.”

Perhaps this should not be surprising given the levels of books that students evidently prefer reading independently. Studies have repeatedly report that students, even the best readers, tend to prefer texts at their frustration levels – presumably because of the appeal of the content and sophistication of the harder texts (Donovan, Smorkin, & Lomax, 2000; Fresch, 1995; Halladay, 2009).

Most of the research on this issue has been conducted with older students. How applicable these data are to the elementary grades is unknown, however I think at least some of the insights this research has generated should be considered.

Researchers have examined how interest and affect may be influenced by text placement during student reading (Fulmer & Tulis, 2013; Tullis & Fullmer, 2013). In these studies, it was theorized that, “demanding tasks can hinder students’ motivation resulting in higher negative affect … and lower interest and enjoyment” (Fulmer & Tulis, 2013, p. 13). To test this hypothesis sixth- and seventh graders read texts at and above their reading levels, and interest and affect were measured immediately before and after each reading. There were variations with the different passages but generally it was found that the better readers started out with greater interest in reading, but as they read the at-level text their interest declined. The opposite was true when they were asked to read more challenging texts. Student persistence more than text difficulty impacted engagement.  

Yet, from these data, it seems unlikely student affect or motivation would vary consistently due to text levels which is consistent with modern motivation theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991; Deci & Ryan, 1985).

Ninth graders in Germany were less motivated when required to read more difficult books in their literature classes (Locher, Becker, & Pfost, 2019). But the picture is more complicated than that. According to the students, at least part of this negative affect was due to grading procedures, competition for grades, and whether the texts were classical literature or contemporary literature. Likewise, there was no relationship between text difficulty and motivation when students were selecting texts for their own recreational reading, implicating student self-determination as well. In other words, the relationship between text level and affect was very complicated – and it is difficult to determine what is causing what.

Several studies with older students have found a greater amount of mind wandering during the reading of complex texts (Feng, D'Mello, & Graesser, 2013; Forrin, Risko, & Smilek, 2019; Mills, Graesser, Risko, & D'Mello, 2017; Mills, D’Mello, & Kopp, 2015), though there are also studies that have not been able to find that. In the ones that have, students appear to better able to control their attention when reading easier texts. This relationship disappears when students find the texts to be interesting (Fulmer, D’Mello, Strauss, & Graesser, 2015; Soemer, Idsardi, Minnaert, & Schiefele, 2019). One question this raises for me, is whether we should avoid asking students to read texts they find challenging so their minds won’t wander, or if our instruction should focus on helping them to develop attentional control?

Other approaches to text difficulty and reader engagement have resulted in contradictory findings. Some studies report lower engagement in reading tasks (Guthrie, Klauda, & Ho, 2013), more reports of anxiety, anger, and boredom on the part of the students (Acee, et al., 2010); Efklides, 2002; Efklides & Petkaki, 2005; Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, & Perry, 2002), and less interest (Durik & Matarazzo). While others have found more reading engagement, deeper cognitive processing, and greater learning (Bjork & Bjork, 2011; Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; Linn, Chang, Chiu, Zhang, & McElhaney, 2011; McNamara & Kintsch, 1996).

Whatever the relationship may be between being asked to read difficult text and affect, motivation, attitude, or behavior, it is not straightforward. There are many student, text, and task variables that play a role in all of this, and none of them consistently impacts motivation or engagement.

However, that doesn’t mean that we should ignore the possibility that in each situation, with a given text, and a given child, text difficulty may exert some small impact upon motivation. That suggests the need for instructional adjustments.

(1)   Explain to students what you’re up to when you intentionally place them in texts they cannot already easily read. They need to know what the goals are and how they can recognize if they are improving in their ability to handle these texts. Give the students some sense of self determination.

(2)   Students may balk at working with difficult texts in fear of failing. They need to develop trust and confidence in you that you won’t let that happen. I very much like the idea of using the instructional level as an outcome rather than a starting point. What I mean by that is that if on Monday you begin working with a text that students read at a frustration level, that by Friday they should be able to read it with the levels of fluency and comprehension fit instructional level criteria.

(3)   Remember that the teacher’s job is to teach students how to read these texts successfully. Teaching with difficult text requires more than just having kids practice reading with some follow up questions. They need guidance in recognizing and making use of explicit vocabulary definitions that may exist in text, how to use context and morphology to determine the meanings of undefined words, how to break down sentences to enable comprehension, how to track cohesive ties through a text, and how to make sense of text structure, data presentation devices, and literary devices.

(4)   Studies have shown that self-determination and interest can offset any anxiety raised by challenging text demands. Consider allowing for some student role in selecting text; perhaps present two or three challenging text alternatives that the group can choose among or consider topical interests when deciding what complex texts to present.

(5)   Vary your routine. Not every instructional text must be equally hard. You might labor through one or two demanding shorter texts, followed by the reading of a relatively easier and longer one that will require less student persistence and teacher scaffolding.

(6)   Divide a text up and take on parts of it rather than trying to digest it all in one bite.

(7)   Smile, be encouraging. It couldn’t hurt.  

READ MORE ARTICLE HERE: Shanahan On Literacy's Blogs

References

Acee, T. W., Kim, H., Kim, H., Kim, J., Chu, H.-N. R., Kim, M., et al. (2010). Academic boredom in under- and over-challenging situations. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 35, 17–27

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). New York: Worth Publishers.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1991). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper-Perennial.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum Press.

Diemand-Yauman, C., Oppenheimer, D. M., & Vaughan, E. B. (2011). Fortune favors the bold (and italicised): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition, 118, 111–115.

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, 309-333.

Durik, A. M., & Matarazzo, K. L. (2009). Revved up or turned off? How domain knowledge changes the relationship between perceived task complexity and task interest. Learning & Individual Differences, 19, 155–159.

Efklides, A. (2002). Feelings and judgments as subjective evaluations of cognitive processing: How reliable are they? Psychology: The Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society, 9, 163–184.

Efklides, A., & Petkaki, C. (2005). Effects of mood on students’ metacognitive experiences. Learning and Instruction, 15, 415–431.

Feng, S., D'Mello, S., & Graesser, A. C. (2013). Mind wandering while reading easy and difficult texts. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 20, 586–592.

Forrin, N. D., Risko, E. F., & Smilek, D. (2019). On the relation between reading difficulty and mind-wandering: a section-length account. Psychological Research, 83, 485–497

Fresch, M.J. (1995). Self-selection of early literacy learning. Reading Teacher, 49, 220-227.

Fulmer, S.M., D’Mello, S.K., Strain, A., & Graesser, A.C. Interest-based text preference moderates the effect of text difficulty on engagement and learning. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 41, 98-110.

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

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

Gickling, E. E., & Armstrong, D. L. (1978). Levels of instructional difficulty as related to on-task behavior, task completion, and comprehension. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 11, 559-566.

Guthrie, J. T., Klauda, S. L., & Ho, A. N. (2013). Modeling the relationships among reading instruction, motivation, engagement, and achievement for adolescents. Reading Research Quarterly, 48, 9–26

Halladay, J. L. (2009). Difficult texts and the students who chose them: The role of text difficulty in second graders’ text choices and independent reading experiences. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University.

Hiebert, E.H. (1999). Text matters in learning to read. The Reading Teacher, 52, 552-566.

Jorgenson, G. W., Klein, N., & Kumar, V. K. (1977). Achievement and behavioral correlates of matched levels of student ability and materials difficulty. Journal of Educational Research, 71, 100-103.

Linn, M. C., Chang, H., Chiu, J., Zhang, Z., & McElhaney, K. (2011). Can desirable difficulties overcome deceptive clarity in scientific visualizations? In A. Benjamin (Ed.), Successful remembering and successful forgetting: a Festschrift in honor of Robert A. Bjork (pp. 235–258). New York: Psychology Press.

Locher, F.M., Becker, S., & Pfost, M. (2019). The relation between students’ intrinsic reading motivation and book reading in recreational and school contexts. AERA Open, 5(2), 1-14. doi: 10.1177/ 2332858419852041

McNamara, D. S., & Kintsch,W. (1996). Learning from texts: Effects of prior knowledge and text coherence. Discourse Processes, 22, 247–288.

Mills, C., D'Mello, S. K., & Kopp, K. (2015). The influence of consequence value and text difficulty on affect, attention, and learning while reading instructional texts. Learning and Instruction, 40, 9-20.

Mills, C., Graesser, A., Risko, E., D'Mello, S. K. (2017). Cognitive coupling during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146, 872-833.

Pekrun, R., & Schutz, P. A. (2007). Where do we go from here? Implications and future directions for inquiry on emotions in education. In P. A. Schutz & R. Pekrun (Eds.), Emotion in education (pp. 313–331). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

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

Soemer, A., Idsardi, H. M., Minnaert, A., & Schiefele, Ul. (2019). Mind wandering and reading comprehension in secondary school children. Learning and Individual Differences, 75.

Treptow, M. A., Burns, M. K., & McComas, J. J. (2007). Reading at the frustration, instructional, and independent levels: The effects on students’ reading comprehension and time on task. School Psychology Review, 36, 159-166.

Tullis, M., & Fulmer, S. M. (2013). Students’ motivational and emotional experiences and their relationship to persistence during academic challenge in mathematics and reading. Learning and Individual Differences, 27, 35-46.

One confusion is already well recognized, but merits some mention here. The other befuddlement usually goes without remark, and yet it, too, has unfortunate consequences for young readers.

Let’s dispatch the first problem forthwith. This one I’ll refer to as the three-cueing problem. Research found that when students err in reading a word, they often try to use various kinds of information to resolve the difficulty. Essentially, when something goes wrong, readers try to make things work one way or another. They don’t try to read the word as much as to get it right anyway possible. They turn to context – trying to guess the word by the meaning of the other words, the pictures, the syntax. Whatever it takes.

That fooled some authorities into encouraging the teaching of those solve-it-at-all-cost strategies, instead of teaching them to read. A bad idea, since poor readers are more likely to turn to semantics, pictures, and syntax to guess words, while better readers rely on the letters and sounds. Why teach kids to read like poor readers?

Context does have a role in the decoding process, but as an evaluation check rather than a word reading tool. Meaning (or the lack of it) reveals the success of decoding. If decoding worked, the reader keeps rolling. In cases of failure, the reader must look at the word again to decide among the decoding alternatives (“maybe this is a schwa sound and not a long vowel?”). Even when the meaning has said, “try again,” the next try depends upon letters and sounds not, context.

Okay, no context in decoding.

RELATED: Won’t Student Motivation Be Damaged If We Teach with Complex Text?

What about in meaning?

Everyone seems to agree that context can be quite helpful for determining the meaning of words and phrases. And yet…

I spent a lot of time this week reading research on context and meaning. For the most part, I was disappointed.

My take? The research community has been spinning its wheels. Most of their questions have been decidedly academic (in this context, academic means useless for any practical purpose).

Older research usefully revealed that poor readers were not efficient or proficient in deriving meaning from context (McKeown, 1985). Studies also showed that students gain a lot of word meanings just by reading and using context (Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987).

The practical outcomes from such studies have largely been limited to the development of context-taxonomies with little practical value in real reading. Research continues to emphasize various types of context clues (e.g., definitions, antonyms, synonyms, comparison and contrast, examples, lists, cause and effect, inferences).

I use context a lot in my reading, and never try to identify or classify the types of contexts that is available. I can’t imagine that categorizing context clues would improve my reading.

Nevertheless, these schemes have attracted and continue to attract research. Their results – despite all logic – may even persuade some of their pedagogical value.

Fortunately, cooler heads have prevailed on this one, even if those cooler heads are too often ignored. A research synthesis (Kuhn & Stahl (1998) determined persuasively that students benefited from context instruction. However, it found that it wasn’t the category training that helped, only the actual practice in figuring out word meanings from context.  

Maybe curriculum designers could employ those frameworks to generate a diverse set of practice items. The students could then engage in practicing making sense of context but would need have no explicit truck with the categories themselves.

I have more basic issue with this research. I think it focuses on the wrong learning outcomes. The researchers emphasize how well the students learn the word meanings, testing their later knowledge of those definitions. That seems wrongheaded to me.

The real purpose of using context is to comprehend the text, not to learn word meanings. Context use also improves efficiency and reduces the burden of having to look up so many words. If we teach context use effectively, then reading comprehension, and perhaps, reading rate, should improve. Students may also end up knowing more words than they would without such teaching, but that would be a secondary outcome, not the primary one.

Context instruction should be aimed at facilitating reading, rather than as a delivery system for explicit vocabulary teaching.

When I confront an unknown word in text, I first determine whether it matters. imagine I come to the following sentence:

There are many serious diseases of the stomach and duodenum, including gastritis, gastroenteritis, gastroparesis, non-ulcer dyspepsia, peptic ulcers, and gastric cancer.

 I don’t recognize all those diseases. But I’m not in medical school and given my reading purposes, ignorance of gastroparesis won’t diminish my understanding. In this case, it’s enough that I recognize that these are diseases, so I keep reading.

When do we teach that kind of vocabulary conscience – both the importance of recognizing when we don’t know the meaning of a word and the need to make reasonable judgements about how to address our ignorance most appropriately?

I set out to understand a text – not to memorize the author’s words.

The only context studies I could find with a focus on comprehension were older studies that focused on fill in the blanks in cloze exercises. Cloze may be an index of comprehension, but it is one overly aligned with context training. Context use should improve the ability to answer questions about a text or to write a summary of it.

Most context instruction emphasizes whether kids can arrive at the right definition of a word from sentence or paragraph context. For example,

John was so hungry that he didn’t leave a particle of the muffin on the plate. Define particle:

 Such exercises are common, and they do offer some context practice. I’d challenge such work in terms of its “over consistency.” Such exercises never include any words that can’t successfully be figured out from context. Not exactly how it really works in a reading situation.

As I looked around the room desperately, the teacher started handing out the papers. Define desperately:

 I think it would be a good idea to mix in items like that one in context exercises. Kids need to recognize when context could help and when it is not likely to.

I suspect that such consistency just teaches students that such training has little to do with reading and that it can safely be ignored.  Rarely are the sentences in authentic texts written to, so obviously, reveal the meaning of a word.

Teaching word meanings has a deserved place in the curriculum. Teaching context is something different from that. In the earlier example that I gave, the one with the word particle, I would prefer it if the student were trying to interpret the sentence rather than the word. Crumb might be a good synonym for particle in this case, but so would the word anything. Admittedly, anything is a lousy definition for particle, but such a response would show that the student had been able to interpret the author’s meaning – even when they could not articulate a definition for particle.

While it is apparent that we could improve context instruction by dropping the categories, adding some items in which context fails to help, and by focusing on comprehension rather than vocabulary instruction, there is something even more basic that could and should be done.

Reading lessons usually begin with pre-reading vocabulary introduction. Teachers spend a lot of time familiarizing students with words that will come up in the text they are about to read. This is supportive of comprehension – kids are more likely to understand text when they already know all the words they’ll need. That might be a good idea if teachers plan to continue on with their students into later life, anticipating any words they may need just in time to read each text. I’d rather try to make students more independent than that – you know, teach a man to fish…

There should be less pre-teaching of vocabulary. Let’s end the pre-reading introduction of any words that can reasonably be determined from context. The words should become targets of the post-reading questioning. If students can’t answer such questions, then go back and help them figure those words out. Over time, they should improve in those abilities.

That means context instruction should be a daily experience for kids – not a semi-annual worksheet.

Context is not the best avenue to decoding, but it can play an important role in comprehension – if we teach it as avenue to that rather than to vocabulary learning. Focus such instruction on sense making, not word learning.

READ MORE ARTICLE HERE: Shanahan On Literacy's Blogs

References

Baldwin, R.S., & Schatz, E.K. (1985). Context clues are ineffective with low frequency words in naturally occurring prose. National Reading Conference Yearbook, 34, 132-135.

Baumann, J.F., Edwards, E.C., Boland, E.M., Olejnik, S., & Kame'enui, E.J. (2003). Vocabulary tricks: Effects of instruction in morphology and context on fifth-grade students' ability to derive and infer word meanings. American Educational Research Journal, 40(2), 447-494. doi-org:10.3102/00028312040002447

Baumann, J.F., Font, G., Edwards, E.C., & Boland, E. (2005). Strategies for teaching middle-grade students to use word-part and context clues to expand reading vocabulary. In E. H. Hiebert, & M. L. Kamil (Eds.), Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing research to practice (pp. 179-205). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Blachowicz, C.L.Z., Fisher, P.J.L., Ogle, D., & Watts-Taffe, S. (2006). Vocabulary: Questions from the classroom. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(4), 524-539. doi-org:10.1598/ RRQ.41.4.5

Dessenberger, S., Wang, K., Jordan, E., & Sommers, M. (2022). Lexical inferencing as a generation effect for foreign language vocabulary learning. Memory & Cognition.  doi.org:10.3758/s13421-022-01348-5

Duffelmeyer, F. A. (1984). The effect of context on ascertaining word meaning. Reading Research and Instruction, 24(1), 103-107.

Fukkink, R.G., & de Glopper, K. (1998). Effects of instruction in deriving word meaning from context: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 68(4), 450-469. doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.00162

Fukkink, R.G. (2005). Deriving word meaning from written context: A process analysis. Learning and Instruction, 15, 23-43.

Hafner, L.E. (1965). A one-month experiment in teaching context aids in fifth grade. Journal of Educational Research, 58(10), 472-474.

Kuhn, M.R., & Stahl, S. A. (1998. Teaching children to learn word meanings from context: A synthesis and some questions. Journal of Literacy Research, 30(1), 119-138.

Nagy, W.E., Anderson, R.C., & Herman, P.A. (1987). Learning word meanings from context during normal reading. American Educational Research Journal, 24(2), 237-270.

Schatz, E. K., & Baldwin, R. S. (1986). Context clues are unreliable predictors of word meanings. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 439-453.

One of my colleagues told us that we should not be teaching guided reading lessons or comprehension skills or strategies. We’re using a core reading program that includes those kinds of things. He says that the science of reading proves that we would get higher reading achievement by teaching more social studies and science (he’s our science teacher) and dropping the comprehension instruction that we are providing. He’s really vocal about this. Can you help us shut him up?

RELATED: Shared Reading in the Structured Literacy Era

Shanahan response:

Your colleague is partly right. Knowledge about the world is a valuable commodity in reading comprehension. Education should both nurture curiosity and provide the means to fulfilling it – increasing what kids know about science and social studies (and literature and the arts, too.

He goes wrong, however, when he suggests that doing that should take the place of reading instruction. Such instruction can provide your students with a lifetime ability to increase their knowledge independently. Research does not support the idea of simply increasing knowledge about the world results in some automatic improvements in reading ability. There are types of reading comprehension instruction that can provide those kinds of results. Basically, your colleague is very unscientifically going beyond the empirical evidence and overstating his case.

Comprehension instruction is complicated and multivariate – there isn’t a single type of skill or approach that is likely to be sufficient. I can’t possibly, in the space available here, provide a complete map to what can be included profitably in a reading program.

Research shows that explicit vocabulary and morphology teaching make a difference. We should commit some of the comprehension real estate to increasing what children know about word meanings and how words express those meanings.

Likewise, instruction in how to recognize and use the organizational structure of texts has been well researched, with lots of positive outcomes. Including that is a no brainer.

Strategy instruction – that is, teaching students to execute certain actions before, during, and after reading that can increase their understanding and recall – works too, though admittedly that can be overdone. Such teaching is beneficial, but the regimens of instruction that have been evaluated have tended to be brief and focused on a narrow range of behaviors. But they work.

Not long ago I devoted a blog to the idea of teaching students to read sentences because of the need to makes sense of syntax or sentence grammar. While the general teaching of formal grammar hasn’t been found to hold water when it comes to building comprehension, teaching students to make sense of sentences certainly has.

And, what about literature? I haven’t gotten into that but hope to soon. Too often those who are promoting knowledge leave that out of the equation, as if nothing of value is gained from commerce with fictional stories and novels, poetry, and drama.

Yeah, all those things deserve instructional time, attention not likely to be provided in social studies or your colleague’s science classes.

Let me give one more example of what we need to teach in reading comprehension. Its inclusion is advocated by many of the top researchers in the field – and they have the data to prove it. I haven’t written here about this topic before, but it is one that is well worth exploring: cohesion.  

Authors try to convey a coherent message through their writing. They do that with several linguistic devices and communications conventions. Readers then try to convert this information into a mental representation of that message. Readers don’t put the text itself into their memory (we’re not computers). No, we translate what we read, and that translation requires recognition and use of those devices the author put into the text.

For example, here is a brief passage used in a study of cohesion instruction (Baumann, 1986):

Michael got the chicken pox. Then Tom did too.

Michael said, “Wasn’t that a terrible sickness?”

            “It sure was,” Tom said. “Were you as sick as I was?”

To comprehend this text the reader has to make a number of connections. It is necessary to recognize that “did too” refers to “got the chicken pox,” and that “sickness” and “It” stand for chicken pox, and that “you” is Michael, and “I” was Tom. Readers who fail to make those connections aren’t going to understand what this text is about.

Prior knowledge – the knowledge the reader started with – can help a bit; it is likely helpful to know when you start out that chicken pox is a form of sickness, though this text is simple enough I suspect someone could make the right connections in this case strictly based alone on the linguistic information the author has provided. That might be harder to do if the text was much longer and the distance between the links were greater or if there were more possible choices.

Not surprisingly, younger readers are more likely than older readers to have difficulty with those seemingly straightforward pronoun references – like you for Michael. Or, that older readers who can make those kinds of links might struggle to make causal connections in a science text such as in the following example (Best, Rowe, Ozuru, & McNamara, 2005):

            “Plants lack a nervous system. They cannot make quick responses to stimuli.”

One would hope that a reader, if asked “why can’t plants make a quick response to stimuli?” would answer, “Because they don’t have a nervous system” even though the text didn’t explicitly say this, but only implied this connection by arraying these sentences in this fashion.

Of course, nobody’s perfect. An author may provide a text that allows readers to easily recapture the intended coherence, while others may seemingly be more cavalier – perhaps they expected their readers to have knowledge that they didn’t.

One might assume that all readers would be best served by the authors who produce texts with the highest degree of coherence. That would appear to provide the best support for readers. Let’s face it, if the author is explicit about connections within a text, then more of us should be able to recognize and use those connections.

It turns out, according to research, that some readers earn more from relatively low coherence texts (e.g., McNamara, 2010; Ozuru, Dempsey, & McNamara, 2009). The more knowledgeable and better readers usually learn more when they are forced, by the text, to engage in more mental processing – generating more inferences and the like. Such readers may give high coherence texts a more superficial once over since it is so easy for them to understand, that they end up with lower comprehension and learning. Alternately, when reading more coherent texts the poorer and less knowledgeable readers tend to do better with comprehension. When reading less explicitly coherent texts, these readers may fail to make the necessary connections or fill the gaps that such texts require, so comprehension suffers. 

What that points out is that readers need to learn to negotiate a range of texts – texts that differ in coherence, and, consequently, in their challenge level. Increasing one’s knowledge can help with that – at least, if the knowledge and the subject of the text match – but research has found that it is possible to teach students to negotiate the cohesive ties and connections that the author’s build into their texts. It is this kind of negotiation that needs to be taught in our reading comprehension lessons.

One of the problems with the research on this topic is that it goes under a variety of titles. Some researchers focus on cohesion and cohesive ties – the linguistic repetitions and links themselves, while others categorize it as a kind of inferencing, the mental action that cohesive elements require. Still others might emphasize specific types of cohesion (e.g., referential, causal, temporal, anaphora, cataphora), or relegate this kind of thing to a superordinate category like Executive Function. I might recommend cohesion training, while a colleague may tout inferencing instruction – when we mean the same thing.

In any event, linguists have done a fine job of identifying and categorizing the many forms of cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), psychologists have developed innovative techniques for measuring the degree of unity or cohesiveness in texts (e.g., Graesser, McNamara, Cai, Conley, Li, & Pennebaker, 2014; Sheehan, 2013), and there are scads of studies showing the correlation of ability to interpret cohesion ties and reading comprehension (e.g., Duran, McCarthy, Graesser, & McNamara, 2007; Gasparinatou & Grigoriadou, 2013; Hall, et al., 2015; MacLean & Chapman, 1989; Schmitz, et al., 2017). Such studies have found these relations with a variety of text types (including science texts) and with students across a wide range of ages and abilities.

Most importantly, there are a number of studies showing that it is possible to raise reading comprehension by explicitly teaching such skills (e.g., Bauman, 1986; Best, Rowe, Ozuru, & McNamara, 2005). Elleman, 2017; Gallini, Spires, Terry, & Gleaton, 1993; Garcia-Madruga, et al., 2013). This kind of teaching has been effective with a wide range of ages and abilities – but has been especially powerful with low performing readers.

This kind of instruction should explain this aspect of language, providing many examples. Then teachers should provide direct instruction in how to deal with these kinds of connections through a text. This could include both modeling (showing students how to connect the ideas across sentences, paragraphs, and longer expanses of text), and guided reading (having students try to make these connections with explanations). This might be followed by exercises that give students more practice. These might take the form of worksheets, with the students trying to find the references for particular words or phrases or fill-in-the-blank pages. Or, another possibility, is to have students read a text and answer wh-questions about the passages.
Teachers should also raise these kinds of questions during regular group or class shared or guided reading activities. These kinds of activities should take place with a variety of texts.

Along with those earlier mentioned areas of comprehension instruction, this kind of work can have a positive impact on students’ reading ability.

Tell that to your colleague – but then also make sure that your kids are learning plenty of content, both in his science classes and in your reading lessons. Every reading assignment is an opportunity to expose children to information about their world. With a little diligent attention and effort, that information can become knowledge available to support future reading. The lessons in vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, and text structure should increase students’ ability to gain that information in future reading.

READ MORE ARTICLE HERE: Shanahan On Literacy's Blogs

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. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/747961

Best, R. M. , Rowe, M. , Ozuru, Y. & McNamara, D. S. (2005). Deep-Level Comprehension of Science Texts. Topics in Language Disorders, 25 (1), 65-83.

Cox, B. E., Shanahan, T., & Sulzby, E. (1990). Good and poor elementary readers' use of cohesion in writing. Reading Research Quarterly, 25(1), 47-65. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/747987

Duran, N. D., McCarthy, P. M., Graesser, A. C., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Using temporal cohesion to predict temporal coherence in narrative and expository texts. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 212-223. doi:https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193150

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. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu00 00180

Gallini, J. K., Spires, H. A., Terry, S., & Gleaton, J. (1993). The influence o macro and micro-level cognitive strategies training on text learning. Journal of Research & Development in Education, 26(3), 164-178.

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. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.44

Gasparinatou, A., & Grigoriadou, M. (2013). Exploring the effect of background knowledge and text cohesion on learning from texts in computer science. Educational Psychology, 33(6), 645-670. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.790309

Graesser, A. C., McNamara, D. S., Cai, Z., Conley, M., Li, H., & Pennebaker, J. (2014). Coh-metrix measures text characteristics at multiple levels of language and discourse. Elementary School Journal, 115(2), 210-229. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/678293

Halliday, M. A., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Routledge.

Hall, S. S., Kowalski, R., Paterson, K. B., Basran, J., Filik, R., & Maltby, J. (2015). Local text cohesion, reading ability and individual science aspirations: Key factors influencing comprehension in science classes. British Educational Research Journal, 41(1), 122-142. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3134

MacLean, M., & Chapman, L. J. (1989). The processing of cohesion in fiction and non-fiction by good and poor readers. Journal of Research in Reading, 12(1), 13-28. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.1989.tb00300.x

McNamara, D. S. (2010). Strategies to read and learn: Overcoming learning by consumption. Medical Education, 44(4), 340-346. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03550.x

McNamara, D. S., Crossley, S. A., & McCarthy, P. M. (2010). Linguistic features of writing quality. Written Communication, 27(1), 57-86. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088309351547

Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Prior knowledge, reading skill, and text cohesion in the comprehension of science texts. Learning and Instruction, 19(3), 228-242. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2008.04.003

Schmitz, A., Gräsel, C., & Rothstein, B. (2017). Students’ genre expectations and the effects of text cohesion on reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30(5), 1115-1135. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-016-9714-0

Sheehan, K. M. (2013). Measuring cohesion: An approach that accounts for differences in the degree of integration challenge presented by different types of sentences. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 32(4), 28-37. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/emip.12017

Can you provide clarification on how to promote shared reading in the structured literacy era and how that differs from shared reading in the balanced literacy era. I would think a teacher could certainly initially read the text aloud to students to model fluency and expression, but then must ensure students can get the words off the page and reread by decoding the words, rather than parroting the teacher or memorizing the shared reading text that may be a rhyme/song that is catchy.

Shanahan response:

There are many reasons to read to children. Most of them are pretty sensible.

Some are more problematic.

One that should be avoided is what you describe – reading a text aloud so kids can mimic the teacher. That’s not a particularly effective way of teaching reading so I’d leave that out of my lesson plans.

Teach kids how to read the words themselves rather than subjecting them to this weird listen-remember-pretend-to-read sequence.

I would love to have the proverbial nickel for every time a parent has asked if their kids should be able to read anything that their teacher has not already read to them.

Children need to learn how to read more independently than that. Even a semester or two of such empty practice is woefully inefficient and will often be unsuccessful.

Sadly, a variation on this failed practice often appears in the upper grades, too. Many teachers read texts aloud (or play recordings of a text) so student reading won’t “interfere” with their comprehension. The kids are exposed to some literature and practice answering questions, without all that messy reading getting in the way. That students need to learn literature through reading—rather than going around it—seems not to have occurred to these teachers.

I’d rule out such practices.

Despite how strenuously some educators recommend reading to kids, there is still no research showing that it leads to higher reading achievement. That’s why my friend, Chris Lonigan refers to it as the “chicken soup of reading.” You know, it couldn’t hurt.

Children who experience a lot of book sharing at home do better in school than those who don’t, but those kids are also raised by parents with the greatest amounts of education, are more advantaged economically, and are most likely to receive direct reading instruction at home, too (Silinskas, Lerkkanen, Tolvanen, Niemi, Poikkeus, & Nurmi, 2012; Silinskas, Sénéchal, Torppa, & Lerkkanen, 2020). It may not be the shared reading that provides the learning payoff.

That doesn’t mean there is no value to reading to kids, but it shouldn’t be the panacea turned to whenever there is a reading problem, nor should it be the devil blamed for all those problems (“How can we teach this child to read, his parents don’t read to him?”)

RELATED: Comprehension Instruction That Really Helps – Teaching Cohesion

What makes sense with shared reading?

1.     Reading to primary grade kids can be part of an effective effort for increasing vocabulary knowledge. Reading to the students exposes them to academic vocabulary that may go beyond what they are likely to hear in daily conversation or in the media. Supplementing this exposure with direct instruction and supportive teacher-student interactions increases the chances of this vocabulary sticking. Dialogic reading in which the reader asks questions about the text and gets kids talking about the ideas is effective (Barone, Chambuleyron, Vonnak, & Assirelli, 2019; Pillinger & Wood, 2014; Whitehurst, 2002) as are techniques like “Text Talk” in which you focus attention on selected words from the texts (Beck & McKeown, 2001). In Text Talk the teacher reads the story, explains a word when it appears, then after reading reintroduces the word recontextualized in the story, has the students say the word, explains meaning more generally and provides other examples, has the children provide their own examples, and they repeat the word again. These words then are reviewed throughout the school year.

This kind of thing makes sense given what research has to say about the impact of shared reading. The National Early Literacy Panel (2008) reviewed 19 published studies that evaluated its effects on the learning of preschoolers. The preschoolers who were read to saw gains in their vocabulary knowledge and more recent studies have found this as well (Towson, Akemoglu, Watkins, & Zeng, 2021). Other studies have found the same thing with kindergartners and first graders (Neuman & Kaefer, 2018).

For the most part studies have found that reading aloud to kids increases their vocabulary, which is a good thing, and it works even better with supplemental teaching (Requa, Chen, Irey, & Cunningham, 2021). We hope that knowledge transfers to reading and is sufficient to make kids better readers, but that hope is not yet buttressed with empirical evidence.

2.     There is a small amount of evidence indicating that reading to children can increase their understanding of how print works (e.g., where to begin reading on a page, directionality, what to do at the end of a line). Experience tells me that such skills are easily developed in preschool, kindergarten, and at the beginning of grade 1, and that most kids can develop those skills through observation.

The National Early Literacy Panel (2008) found four studies in which students who were read to showed greater understanding of print concepts.

With parents, facilitating such observation takes little more than seating the child so he/she can see the print and drawing attention to print by pointing at words and tracking. With my own daughters, when they’d put their young hands on the print I would stop reading when I couldn’t see the words. That fascinated them because it revealed that I wasn’t reading the pictures but was focused on the rows of letters.

Newer research has focused on how children’s attention can be effectively focused on print during shared reading (Piasta, Justice, McGinty, & Kaderavek, 2012).

For teachers, when working with kids who haven’t yet figured out those print basics, big books and projections of books are quite useful. In those cases, the teacher does the same thing I described for parents… drawing attention to how one moves through a text, what happens at the end of a page, and so on. Again, kids don’t usually need much of this kind of guidance.

3.     You mention “modeling” for fluency work.

There’s a bit of evidence on this, but not enough to insist on that as a potent feature of fluency teaching. Such instruction seems to work equally well with modeling and without it (Young, Bowers, & MacKinnon, 1996).

I think modeling has a place, but it is of limited value in terms of fostering learning and, therefore, its use shouldn’t take up much real estate.

I often visit classrooms in which teachers devote inordinate amounts of time to reading aloud to kids under the guise of “modeling.” At least that’s how it is labeled in the lesson plans. As if listening to the reading of a proficient adult transfers to fluent student reading.  

The benefits of modeling appear to be more specific and immediate. When I teach fluency, I ask kids to try reading the text first try first. If they do a reasonably good job of it – even if I think they need some word work or to read the text again, I probably won’t do any modeling at all. However, in cases where the reading doesn’t sound right – you know, especially choppy, word-by word or with odd pauses that disrupt the prosody – I will step in and demonstrate how to read that phrase or sentence.

That surprises some teachers, but human memory is limited. Reading an entire paragraph or page doesn’t provide much prosody guidance because no one – even adults – can remember all that information long enough to apply it when it is their turn to do the reading. Keep modeling focused and specific. Techniques like “reading-while-listening” can work too; in those the teacher and students read the text chorally.

One more thing about fluency. Studies of kids in grades 1-3 have found that parents reading to their children has no impact on the kids’ reading achievement, but children reading to their parents does (Sénéchal & Young, 2008); that’s why it is so important to shift from reading to kids to getting them to do the reading.

4.     Another possible use of shared reading is in the teaching of comprehension strategies to children who have yet to learn to read or as the initial way on introducing these comprehension-producing actions at any age. Teacher read alouds can be a good way of allowing kids to develop listening comprehension strategies that can later be applied to their reading (e.g., Roberts, 2013; Williams, Hall, Lauer, Stafford, DeSisto, & deCani, 2005). Success with listening strategies may not transfer directly to reading, but the ability to implement these during listening should be more easily taught on the reading side of the house. Essentially, the listening efforts are to provide a leg up on the later reading efforts.

In this kind of teaching, the teacher does the reading for the students – but remember, this replacement is brief, just until the kids can either do the reading themselves or once they have accomplished some proficiency with the strategy. Then the kids need to take over the reading duties themselves.

5.     Most of the evidence on reading to kids focuses on vocabulary learning. But recent research has shown that kids can gain other information from being read to, and these benefits have been found in Kindergarten and Grade 1 (Gibbs, & Reed, 2021; Neuman & Kaefer, 2018; Neuman, Samudra, & Danielson, 2021) – though I suspect they would be just as true for adults or for watching content rich videos. If you want young children to know more about science, social studies, literature, or the arts, reading texts to them about those topics can be helpful.

This kind of thing would not be expected to have much impact on reading ability itself, except for how well students might be able to read about the specific topics the shared reading focused on.

Reading some texts to the kids in the contexts of content classes makes some sense. However, as kids progress through the grades – certainly by grade two – reading instruction should be focused on making sure the students are able to learn about those topics independently, through their own reading.

6.     Finally, reading books aloud to kids can be a great way to establish a warm tone or positive environment in a classroom. Personally, I’d do some of that kind of reading everyday with young kids (to age 8 or grade 3). Such reading may or may not directly support the curriculum and the vocabulary or informational learning from it may go unmonitored.

However, given that this kind of “pure joy” book sharing has no specific instructional goals, it should not be considered part of reading instruction. Don’t reduce the amount of reading instruction to accommodate this activity, though, again, I’d find a place for it.

Reading to children is not a particularly effective way of teaching reading. However, there are several ways that shared reading can be used as a mechanism to accomplish some specific goals in the primary grades. It can both be an extracurricular activity aimed at warming up a classroom or it may be a tool aimed at teaching or familiarizing students with some very specific aspects of reading ability. What it should not be is the way students learn to read a particular text, nor should it replace instruction in which students would usually be expected to do the reading.  

READ MORE ARTICLE HERE: Shanahan On Literacy's Blogs

References

Barone, C., Chambuleyron, E., Vonnak, R., & Assirelli, G. (2019). Home-based shared book reading interventions and children’s language skills: A meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials. Educational Research and Evaluation, 25(5-6), 270-298. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13803611.2020.1814820

Beck, I. L., McKeown, M. G. (2001). Text Talk: Capturing the benefits of read-aloud experiences for young children. Reading Teacher, 55(1), 10-20.

Gibbs, A. S., & Reed, D. K. (2021). Shared reading and science vocabulary for kindergarten students. Early Childhood Education Journal. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-021-01288-w

Kurasawa, E. (1962). Reading instruction in Japan. Reading Teacher, 16(1), 13-17.

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

Neuman, S. B., & Kaefer, T. (2018). Developing low-income children’s vocabulary and content knowledge through a shared book reading program. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 52, 15-24. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2017.12.001

Neuman, S. B., Samudra, P., & Danielson, K. (2021). Effectiveness of scaling up a vocabulary intervention for low-income children, pre-K through first grade. Elementary School Journal, 121(3), 385-409. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/712492

Piasta, S. B., Justice, L. M., McGinty, A. S., & Kaderavek, J. N. (2012). Increasing young children’s contact with print during shared reading: Longitudinal effects on literacy achievement. Child Development, 83(3), 810-820. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01754.x

Pillinger, C., & Wood, C. (2014). Pilot study evaluating the impact of dialogic reading and shared reading at transition to primary school: Early literacy skills and parental attitudes. Literacy, 48(3), 155-163. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12018

Requa, M. K., Chen, Y. I., Irey, R., & Cunningham, A. E. (2021). Teaching parents of at-risk preschoolers to employ elaborated and non-elaborated vocabulary instruction during shared storybook reading. Journal of Research in Childhood Education. 

doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/02568543.2021.1931579

Roberts, K. L. (2013). Comprehension strategy instruction during parent–child shared reading: An intervention study. Literacy Research and Instruction, 52(2), 106-129. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/19388071.2012.754521

Sénéchal, M., & Young, L. (2008). The effect of family literacy interventions on children’s acquisition of reading from kindergarten to grade 3: A meta-analytic review. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 880-907. doi:https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308320319

Silinskas, G., Lerkkanen, M., Tolvanen, A., Niemi, P., Poikkeus, A., & Nurmi, J. (2012). The frequency of parents’ reading-related activities at home and children’s reading skills during kindergarten and grade 1. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 33(6), 302-310. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2012.07.004

Silinskas, G., Sénéchal, M., Torppa, M., & Lerkkanen, M. (2020). Home literacy activities and children’s reading skills, independent reading, and interest in literacy activities from kindergarten to grade 2. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 15. doi:https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01508

Towson, J. A., Akemoglu, Y., Watkins, L., & Zeng, S. (2021). Shared interactive book reading interventions for young children with disabilities: A systematic review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 30(6), 2700-2715.

Whitehurst, R. G. (2002). Dialogic reading: An effective way to read aloud with young children. Reading Rockets: https://www.readingrockets.org/article/dialogic-reading-effective-way-read-aloud-young-children

Williams, J. P., Hall, K. M., Lauer, K. D., Stafford, K. B., DeSisto, L. A., & deCani, J. S. (2005). Expository text comprehension in the primary grade classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97(4), 538-550. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.97.4.538

Young, A. R., Bowers, P. G., & MacKinnon, G. E. (1996). Effects of prosodic modeling and repeated reading on poor readers' fluency and comprehension. Applied Psycholinguistics, 17(1), 59-84. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716400009462

Every year, I consult Charity Navigator (U.S.) and Charity Intelligence (Canada) to identify the top-rated literacy charities (4-star in U.S., and 5-star in Canada). You can be sure that the charities listed here:

• Are international, national, or multi-regional in scope,
• Focus entirely or mainly on charitable action devoted to providing books and literacy instruction to populations in need,
• Provide books and literacy services directly to children,
• Are transparent in their reporting, and
• Spend all or most of the money they collect on their missions rather than on overhead.

That means that if you donate to these organizations, good literacy things happen for lots of kids.

I’m recommending these charities today, but these listings remain easy to find on my site for the coming year: https://shanahanonliteracy.com/charities

In case you’re wondering, I have no connection to any of these organizations.

I also encourage you to consider supporting one of the many worthwhile local literacy charities in your communities. There are so many of these I cannot possibly vet them all, but there are men and women throughout the world striving to meet the reading needs of children and they, too, could use your help.

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

RELATED: Shared Reading in the Structured Literacy Era

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 choices and ownership. Studies show that children are much more likely to read books that they choose. During the past year, Book Trust has served more than 40,000 children in 20 states – and they have distributed more than 9 million books over the past two decades.

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 56 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.

Curious Learning.  Curious Learning works with partners to curate, localize, and distribute free open-source apps that empowers everyone to have the opportunity to learn to read. They work to empower users with the resources and tools to activate learning and engagement, from the individual child that wants to learn to read, the parent who wants more for their children, to the teacher striving to help many, the non-government agency working with the community, and the governmental or aid organizations working on large scale deployments. This effort expands the distribution of apps by referring users to the next best app at the right moment to facilitate their path to literacy. Currently, they are working with UNESCO in 20 African countries to reach 100 million children. 

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 about 7,000,000 books over the past 23 years (about a half million each year now)!

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 28 million children and they have distributed more than 34 million 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. More than 2 million families have used the United Through Literacy app. 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

First Book Canada. Over the past 13 years, First Book Canada has distributed more than 7 millions of high-quality age-appropriate books to kids in need who would not have access to books otherwise. Their programs focus on getting books into the hands of children growing up in poverty. The program reaches hundreds of thousands of children each year.

READ MORE ARTICLE HERE: Shanahan On Literacy's Blogs

I’m writing to you about high school progress monitoring for reading comprehension. Our school has learning goals for Reading Comprehension. Every two weeks, students read an on-grade level passage and answer 5 multiple-choice questions that assess literal comprehension and main idea. Our data are not matching well with other data that we have (such as course passing rates and state assessments). What might be a more effective progress monitoring process, that go beyond the literal level, and that would provide information the teachers could use to improve instruction.

RELATED: Shared Reading in the Structured Literacy Era

Shanahan response:

I’m not surprised that approach is not working. There is so much wrong with it.

First, why test students so often? Does anyone really believe (or is there any evidence supporting the idea) that student reading ability is so sensitive to teaching that their reading performance would be measurably changed in any 10-day period. Performance on measures like reading comprehension don’t change that quickly, especially with older students.

I don’t think it would be possible to evaluate reading comprehension more than 2 or 3 times over an entire school year in the hopes of seeing any changes in ability. It is unlikely that students would experience meaningful measurable changes in comprehension ability in shorter time spans. The changes from test-to-test that you might see would likely be meaningless noise – that is test unreliability or student disgust. Acting on such differences (changing placement or curriculum, for instance) would, in most cases, be more disruptive than helpful.

Second, I get why we seek brief, efficient assessments (e.g., a single passage with 5 multiple-choice questions). Let’s not sacrifice a lot of instructional time for testing. We have such dipsticks for monitoring the learning of foundational skills (e.g., decoding, alphabet knowledge) with younger students and it would be great to have something comparable for the older ones too.

Unfortunately, reading comprehension is more complicated than that. To estimate reliably the reading comprehension of older students takes a lot more time, a lot more questions, and a lot more text. That’s why typical standardized tests of reading comprehension usually ask 30-40 questions about multiple texts – and texts longer than the ones that your district is using.

How many questions does a student have to answer correctly to decide he/she is doing well? Remember, guessing is possible with multiple-choice questions, so with only 5, I’d expect kids to, by chance, get 1 or 2 correct, even if they don’t bother to read the passages at all. There is simply no room in that scenario to either decide that the student is doing better or worse than previously or to differentiate across students. If a student got 2 items correct last testing, and this week he gets 3, does that mean he showed progress?

Third, reading comprehension question types are not useful for determining instructional needs. Studies repeatedly find no meaningful differences in comprehension across categories like literal, inferential, or main idea categories. If a text passage is easy for students, they usually can answer any kind of question one might ask about it; and, if a passage is hard (in readability and/or content), students will struggle to answer any of the question types.

That means there is no reason to either limit the questions to literal ones or to shift to a different questioning regime. In fact, doing so might focus teacher attention on trying to improve performance with certain types of questions, rather than on decoding, fluency, vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, text structure, writing, and other abilities that really matter.

Fourth, the measurement of readability or text difficulty is not as specific or reliable as you might think. Look at Lexile levels, one of the better of these tools: texts that Lexiles designate as grade level for high school freshmen are also grade level for students in grades 5-8 and 10-12. This kind of overlap is common with readability estimates, and suggests that passages judged to be 1200L will differ in the difficulties that they actually pose for students. Kids might be more familiar with the vocabulary or content of one text or another which can lead to dramatic outcome differences from assessment to assessment.
That’s why the standardized comprehension tests not only pay attention to readability ratings but evaluate combinations of specific passages to make sure that those combinations are going to provide sufficiently accurate and reliable results.

I would suggest that you test students twice a year (at the beginning of each semester) with a more substantial validated reading test. To monitor more closely how students are performing with what is being taught.

For example, one valuable area of growth in reading comprehension is vocabulary. Keep track of what words are being taught in the remedial program and monitor student retention of these words.

Or, If you are teaching students how to break down sentences to make sense of them, then identify such sentences in the texts students are reading to see how well they can apply what is being taught. The same kind of monitoring is possible with cohesion and text structure.

My point is that since you cannot provide the kind of meaningful close monitoring of general reading comprehension that you would like, instead monitor how well students are doing with the skills and abilities that you are teaching – that should provide you with some useful index of progress.

READ MORE ARTICLE HERE: Shanahan On Literacy's Blogs