I am hoping that you can clarify a question that some of us are debating. I've sought out the wisdom of Kelly Cartwright and Katie Pace Miles as well. Can you clarify the difference between language comprehension and listening comprehension? And where does linguistic comprehension fit in here? I'm asking because when we refer to the Simple View of Reading, so many people use listening comprehension (which is inaccurate) but this leads to the question of what are the nuances or subtleties of them all! Thank you!

RELATED: How I Teach Students to Use Context in Vocabulary Learning

Shanahan responds:

Awhile back, I posted a blog that dared mention that the language comprehension in the simple model of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) referred to listening comprehension. It wasn’t the point of the blog. Just a mention in passing.

I was shocked at the blow back I got from some quarters. Many reading authorities (some who I’d never heard of before), were certain that the term did not refer to listening and “they were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”

I went back and found that one of the most vociferous critics had been using the term in the same way in her own publications. They were recent publications too, ruling out the possibility that she’d had a Paulian conversion (though I admit that the thought of her being knocked from her horse was pleasing).  Apparently, if I used listening comprehension as the synonym for linguistic comprehension, then I was an idiot. If she did it, she was a scholar!

Your letter reminded me of that weird exchange. Perhaps my response here will stir up another swarm of bees in the Twitterverse. I hope not, but here we go.

The simple view of reading model proposes that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and linguistic comprehension abilities. If you are lacking either of these collections of skills, then your reading proficiency will be undermined.

There are various reasons why someone might use terms like “linguistic comprehension” or “language comprehension.” One possibility is that those terms include both listening and reading comprehension. The use of those adjectives emphasizes this comprehensiveness. That, however, is clearly not what was intended here, given that the purpose was to describe the abilities that underlie reading comprehension. Comprehensiveness would be circular.

Another possibility was that those adjectives were meant to slow folks down, so they’d think about all the component parts of language that are inherent in listening comprehension.

I believe that to be the best explanation.

As Hoover and Gough (1990) explained explicitly, they meant the term linguistic comprehension as a synonym for “auding” (which was defined in that paper as “listening to language for the purpose of comprehension,” p. 157). 

Here is a quote from the same paper that reveals their desire to emphasize the complexity or multiple components comprising or underlying listening comprehension:

“Comprehension. In the simple view of reading, linguistic comprehension is the ability to take lexical information (i.e., semantic information at the word level) and derive sentence and discourse interpretations. Reading comprehension involves the same ability, but one that relies on graphic-based information arriving through the eye. A measure of linguistic comprehension must assess the ability to understand language (e.g., by assessing the ability to answer questions about the contents of a listened to narrative).”  (Hoover & Gough, 1990, p. 131).

Phil Gough, the father of the simple view, indicates here that linguistic comprehension is determined by one’s ability to listen to a message and answer questions about it… which sounds, to me, exactly like listening comprehension. But what abilities are included in listening comprehension? Well, again, according to Dr. Gough (1975) and his colleagues, vocabulary, and morphological knowledge (that’s the lexical information they are talking about) and an understanding of syntax, structure, and cohesion (those skills needed to formulate the sentence and discourse interpretations that they mention).

This conclusion about the meaning of language/linguistic comprehension and my explanation of why it would be stated in that way is also quite consistent with Bill Tunmer’s later operationalizations of the term in his own empirical research (e.g., Tunmer & Chapman, 2002; Tunmer & Chapman, 2007). He – someone who certainly must have known the meaning of the terms as originally intended – employed measures of listening comprehension in his own studies to represent that linguistic comprehension component.

I’d also add, that though I’ve never discussed this issue explicitly with Phil, I believe my interpretation to be consistent with the aspects of his theory that we did discuss (he used the theory to press me hard on my ideas about the value of writing in reading development).

The fundamental idea of the theory can be stated quite clearly in two linked terms: (1) if you can understand oral messages and can listen to oral narratives with comprehension, then (2) when you translate a text from print to oral language (in other words, you read the text aloud), then you should be able to comprehend that sample of oral language – the one read aloud. If either variable – listening comprehension with all its components and decoding with all of its – is deficient, then reading comprehension breaks down.

This homely explanation of the simple view raises an additional thought for why the more straightforward term “listening comprehension” was not used. It may have to do with silent reading. When someone reads aloud, or more aptly decodes aloud, the potential value of listening is evident. But what about during silent reading? A term like language comprehension covers instances when we hear language in our heads, rather than through our ears. We can read silently, but we can also remember something said earlier or we can carry on imagined conversations in our minds. The term linguistic comprehension includes these silent language phenomena. And, since as teachers we would have no access to those silent language versions, the only possible way to meaningfully operationalize linguistic comprehension would be through tests of listening. 

Th simple view theory has been valuable because of its simplicity and its testability. It is possible to see where the theory holds up and where it breaks down. Research has supported it in many ways; for instance, you won’t find many scholars of reading who don’t believe that decoding and language comprehension are key parts of reading comprehension. Just look at all the alternative models put forth since the simple view; every one of them prominently includes those two components.

There are also important limitations inherent in the model, however:

(1) Researchers have concluded that oral and written language are quite different in many ways (Hildyard & Olson, 1982; Leu, 1982). There are vocabulary terms rarely heard in oral language, for example. Likewise, the syntax of text tends to be much more complicated than that of oral language. That means readers must learn to deal with those differences when learning to read. Listening comprehension may not be enough, especially as one moves up the grades.

(2) Researchers have found that even if one considers decoding and linguistic comprehension, not all the variation in reading comprehension is accounted for (Foorman & Petscher, 2018). These simple view components only explain about 60% of the variance in reading ability. That means there must be other variables – knowledge, reasoning, executive processes, cognitive processing speed, and so on – that are implicated in reading, too. Their exclusion from the simple view is problematic.

(3) The math problem of multiplying decoding with listening comprehension doesn’t quite work in the way the theory suggests (Wang, Sabatini, O'Reilly, & Weeks, 2019), which could both be due to those missing variables or a more complex relationship of those decoding with language comprehension variables. In fact, research reveals that decoding and linguistic comprehension are not as modular or separate as the theory holds (Duke & Cartwright, 2021). That vocabulary knowledge is implicated in decoding development is the kind of thing can really mess up a multiplication problem – and that has important implications for both what and how we teach.

(4) The model implies that reading comprehension instruction may not be needed since a strong listening capacity alone would be expected to do the job. Research, however, finds listening and reading to be imperfectly correlated and shows that listening skills do not necessarily translate to reading automatically (Sticht, Beck, Hauke, Kleiman, & James, 1974). This means that no one should allow the simple view to discourage explicit reading comprehension instruction.

Using the simple view to explain the importance of decoding or language comprehension in schools that are neglecting either makes great sense. It is easy to understand and persuasive.

However, you should hear screeching brakes, squealing tires, and smashing glass like in the latest Marvel movie when someone tries to use the simple view as a map of what to include in a comprehensive reading curriculum. Using it that way would be about as effective as trying to buy your Tay-Tay tickets from Ticketmaster. You know, some are going succeed, many others won’t, and everybody is going to be ticked off.

My advice?

First, make sure your use of the simple view makes sense and isn’t misleading you into ignoring important aspects of the reading process that are neither focused on decoding or linguistic in nature.

Second, don’t overcomplicate things. Basically, language/linguistic comprehension simply means for all practical purposes listening comprehension.

Third, don’t miss out on what is being emphasized by those language adjectives either. Listening is not a unitary ability. It is an applied ability that depends upon several language skills including vocabulary, morphology, syntax, cohesion, and discourse structure. No one becomes a good reader without considerable development of all those abilities that are part of listening comprehension.

Fourth, although the model emphasizes the primacy of oral language abilities, I believe research suggests that building those skills both orally and textually is the best way to go. 


READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

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). https://doi-org/10.1002/rrq.411

Foorman, B. R., & Petscher, Y. (2018). Decomposing the variance in reading comprehension to reveal the unique and common effects of language and decoding. Journal of Visualized Experiments: JoVE, (140), 58557. https://doi.org/10.3791/58557

Gough, P. B. (1975). The structure of the language. In D. D. Duane, & M. B. Rawson (Eds.), Reading, perception and language (pp. 15-38). Baltimore, MD: York Press.

Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. RASE: Remedial & Special Education, 7(1), 6-10. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104

Hildyard, A., & Olson, D.R. (1982). On the comprehension and memory of oral vs. written discourse. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Advances in discourse processes: Spoken and written language (vol. 9, pp. 19-33). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing.

Hoover, W. A., & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2(2), 127–160. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00401799

Leu, D. J. (1982). Differences between oral and written discourse and the acquisition of reading proficiency. Journal of Reading Behavior, 14(2), 111-125.

Sticht, T. G., Beck, L. J., Hauke, R. N., Kleiman, G. M., & James, J. H. (1974). Auding and reading: A developmental model. Washington, DC: HumRRO.

Tunmer, W. E., & Chapman, J. W. (2002). The relation of beginning readers' reported word identification strategies to reading achievement, reading-related skills, and academic self-perceptions. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 15(3-4), 341-358. doi:https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1015219229515

Tunmer, W. E., & Chapman, J. W. (2007). Language-related differences between discrepancy-defined and non-discrepancy-defined poor readers: A longitudinal study of dyslexia in New Zealand. Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 13(1), 42-66. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.327

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. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000302

This plague of vagueness is exasperating, and I think it prevents productive dialogue or any kind of substantive progress in the field.

Over the decades, reporters and policymakers have often asked me my opinion of [insert any of those undefined terms]. My usual response has been something along the lines of:

“Tell me what ________ is, and I’ll give you my opinion,” not-so-cleverly shifting the responsibility for definition to my questioner.

If they say, “balanced literacy means providing explicit instruction in key reading skills while trying to provide a motivational and supportive classroom environment”, I say, “I’m all for it.” If they tell me, “it means teaching reading with a minimum of explicit instruction, particularly in foundational skills like spelling and decoding,” then I’m strongly opposed.

That approach keeps me out of the soup, but it really doesn’t solve any important problem. My clarity and consistency aside, teachers are still inundated with invitations to professional development programs, textbooks, and classroom instructional practices that are supposedly aligned with some unspecified definition of today’s hot jargon.

The biggest offender now – if my Twitter feed is representative – is the “science of reading.”

I can’t believe the number of webinars, blogs, textbooks, professional development opportunities, and the like that aim to provide the latest and greatest information from the science of reading (whatever that is?).

My advice to everyone: Grab your wallets and run!

Okay, I admit that isn’t very helpful, but it should save you a lot of money and aggravation.

What would be more helpful?

Consumers of a science of reading should start out with a definition of what would fairly constitute such a science. That way they could always check to see if what was being promoted was what they were seeking.

Back in the late 1990s, federal education law – recognizing how misleadingly the term “research” was being used by textbook companies, consultants, and the like – provided definitions of “scientifically-based reading instruction (SBRR).”

Unfortunately, in one fell swoop, the feds stopped promoting instructional approaches based on research and did away with the legal definition of scientific evidence; moves that coincided, I might point out, with the last round of gains in national reading scores.

I’d suggest that, though that definition no longer has legal standing, it is a good starting point for deciding what should be in your personal definition of “a science of reading.”

What would that look like?

First, the evidence must be derived from a scientific method that is appropriate to the claim being made. If you want to claim that a particular instructional method or approach improves reading achievement, you need to prove that; that such instruction is more beneficial than other approaches.

That can only be accomplished through an educational experiment; that provides a sound comparison between students who are receiving that instruction and those who aren’t.

Other scientific methods can provide valuable information, but they can’t answer a “what works” kind of question.

Descriptive and correlational research methods are appropriate for many other important questions (e.g., Are kids of different races or genders making equal gains? What kinds of library books are students most interested in? Have reading scores risen in the past three years?). Those other research methods, if implemented appropriately, can provide sound answers to such questions.

You might be surprised how many fine scientists are out there telling teachers how and what to teach – even though their research has never tested the effectiveness of what they are recommending.

Evidence from their studies can be usefully provocative – that is, it may suggest worthwhile questions. If, for example, you noticed greater student engagement when kids were allowed to choose what to read, you might wonder, “Would such choice lead to more learning?” Unfortunately, too often, people see or think they see that kind of pattern and jump right to a conclusion, “Student choice must lead to more learning,” without bothering to test that claim through a rigorous experiment. (Sometimes research supports such a claim and sometimes it doesn’t. But it certainly can’t be recommended as being based on science without such a test).

Something we should remember that when science identifies a potentially valuable avenue to better learning that doesn’t mean we know how best to exploit that knowledge.

Basically, all I’m saying is, if you want to claim that something works, you need to try it out and show that it can be beneficial.

Second, a science of reading would require studies that provided a rigorous analysis of the data derived from educational experiments. Such analysis must ensure that the results are due to the instruction and not just to normal variations in performance. It also must ensure that the comparisons being made are sound. Some studies try to compare results with groups that are so different in the beginning that it would be impossible to attribute outcome differences to the instruction.

Third, the studies need to go through peer review or some other kind of independent scientific evaluation to protect against serious flaws in the reasoning or analysis.

Fourth, the studies need to be replicated or generalized. That’s why I depend so heavily on meta-analysis; it combines the results of multiple studies. It is not enough to know that the XYZ reading method had great results in one study, if there are 9 other investigations that showed it to be ineffective. That kind of pattern says to me, this technique can work, but it rarely does. Not something I’d be likely to adopt or to recommend to schools.

Fifth, it helps if there are convergent findings – in other words, other evidence that appears to be consistent with these findings. Like the U.S. Department of Education of two decades ago, I would never place the imprimatur of science upon an instructional approach that had not actually been tried out in classrooms and shown to be effective. But once I have that evidence, I am heartened to know of other supporting information.

I don’t talk much about the brain research in reading. Not because I’m unaware of its potential importance, but because of its insufficiency. Any pattern revealed in neurological investigations that suggests an instructional possibility still must be evaluated in the classroom. Sometimes a basic idea is sound, but it is more challenging or complicated to implement than you realize.  

In any event, descriptive and correlational studies, theories, neurological investigations, and studies of other kinds of learning may bolster your trust in the instructional studies that you have.

We have many studies showing the effectiveness of decoding instruction. Those are studies that have compared the results of a strong phonics emphasis versus a no phonics or a weak phonics approach. My trust in those results goes up when I see the mRI studies showing how the brain connects the visual recognition of letters and words with the part of the brain that carries out phonological processing. That neurological evidence on its own, wouldn’t be enough to scientifically endorse phonics as an effective instructional approach, but it sure provides convergent proof that should strengthen my resolve to offer such instruction. (The same, in this case, could be said about digital simulation studies of reading as well.)

Where does this leave us?

If I were invited to a science of reading seminar, and wondered if it would be worthwhile, I’d ask the sponsors if the presenters will either

1. Limit their endorsement of instructional approaches to those that have been evaluated through rigorous and well analyzed classroom experiments that have been published in peer reviewed outlets, and replicated; or
2. Distinguish which of their instructional recommendations have such evidence and which do not?

If I had no choice but to attend, those would be the kinds of questions I’d be asking the presenters if their presentations didn’t make the foundations of their claims clear.

If we are serious about improving reading achievement for all children, we are only likely to get there if we hold ourselves to the highest standards of professional practice. Having a sound definition for what constitutes a “science of reading” is more than a game of semantics.  Employing instructional approaches that have repeatedly benefited learners in rigorously implemented and analyzed studies is likely to be the most productive way to progress.

These days I’m seeing schools mandating instructional practices that have no direct research evidence in the name of the science of reading. Those practices don’t become part of the science of reading because someone wrote them down, or because they were recommended by a researcher, or because they address a particular aspect of reading development.

I’m interested in whether personal grief trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) effect reading comprehension or learning to read. Over the years, I have had students who have lost parents or siblings, and some who are witnesses to (or victims of violence). What does research say about these students’ reading ability and what should we be doing to make sure they learn to read as well as possible?

Shanahan response:

You’re not the only one who has wondered about this.

Researchers, educators, researchers, and lawyers have all taken a swing at it – conducting correlational studies, crafting potentially valuable instructional responses, and filing lawsuits.

My overall sense of the best thinking on this?

The research indicates that traumatic events can have an impact on children’s (and adults’) ability to learn, including their ability to learn reading. For instance, a study (Duplechain, Reigner, & Packard, 2008) surveyed students (grade 2-5) and correlated the results to three years of reading scores. “Results suggested that violence exposure had an adverse effect on reading scores,” and the greater the amount of such exposure, the lower the achievement. Those results are provocative but other studies contradict the results, reporting no such link with reading achievement (Attar, Guerra & Tolan, 1994) or for academic achievement generally (Overstreet & Braun, 1999; Rosenthal & Wilson, 2003).

Trauma is a problem because it can affect memory, cognition, attention, and abilities to organize and process information. It can also disrupt schooling and increase absences. However, the variations in the types and degrees of trauma and in the resilience of those who experience trauma are so great as to make outcomes unpredictable. In other words, even severe trauma won’t necessarily hamper someone’s learning. There is so much individual variation both in the traumatic events and in students that one cannot be sure whose learning will be disrupted.  

The difficulty of understanding this complex problem is compounded by the severe limits on the amount of research. Think about it: how many children will lose a parent each year and what are the chances that a researcher will identify enough to conduct a powerful study? Even in situations where many children appear to experience the same tragedy, like a school shooting, there will likely be great differences in the impact of the event. One child might have observed the occurrence while another observed it and seemed to be an intended target; one child may be a close friend of a victim, and another might not know him/her at all. Research can sort out such differences, but it does this by examining the variation in large samples of subjects – and, again, that is unlikely.

Further complicating things are individual differences. Two siblings may lose a parent and respond in completely different ways. Some of this difference has to do with age but some kids are just more resilient than others.

Basically, it seems clear that trauma can sometimes interfere with learning – and the greater the trauma and the longer it goes on, the greater the risk. But it’s certainly not a slam dunk. Sadly, far too many kids live through traumatic events, and yet some can withstand heroically those stresses.

The educators and psychologists most expert in this have tended to emphasize more general educational supports than anything specific about the teaching of reading. That is, they promote “trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive teaching”. Things like welcoming school environments, positive discipline, bereavement counseling, mental health supports, facilitation of the expression of feelings, and the fostering of a sense of safety and personal control.

As far as I can tell, there isn’t any research showing the effectiveness of any of these when it comes to reading achievement, but they all seem appropriate, and they make sense to me. If my kids or grandkids experienced trauma, I’d appreciate it if their teachers tried to provide such positive environments, but I know of no convincing evidence showing that this will necessarily facilitate academic learning. It is more a hope than a proven fact.

Lawyers have gone so far as to sue a school district (Peter P. v. Compton Unified School District, 2015), demanding that it provide such educational supports to students exposed to violence and loss, family disruptions, incarceration, the foster system, racism, and discrimination. Their legal argument was that students who have experienced such trauma should be considered to have disabilities. I don’t believe that case ended up with a final verdict, as the school district agreed to provide such supports without a court order.

Peter, the boy named in the case, was no stranger to trauma. He had been exposed to violence on more than 20 occasions. Other students in the case had similar experiences. It should not be surprising that a judge might find it plausible – even with the contradictory evidence noted – that Peter and his peers may have been affected by so much trauma and that it would be perfectly reasonable for schools to try to minimize the problem. As the severity of cases increases, the chances of a negative outcome would seem to rise.

Where does that leave us?

Let me point out one of my favorite studies of all time (Robinson, 1946); memory tells me this was her doctoral dissertation. Helen Robinson identified a sample of struggling readers and then tested the hell out of these kids. She didn’t do the testing herself, but hired the services of a social worker, a psychiatrist, a pediatrician, a neurologist, three ophthalmologists, a speech and language specialist, an otolaryngologist, an endocrinologist, a reading specialist, a psychologist, and a reading technician (I don’t remember what that one is). Man, did they look thoroughly at those children, considering pretty much everything they knew of at the time. Of course, there weren’t MRI scans or genetic screenings in those days, but the results were interesting.

First, kids were amazingly resilient. Few problems identified by these various experts were consistently related to low reading ability. Vision problems, endocrinal imbalances, disruptive illnesses, environmental stressors, and so on, all thought at the time to be potential sources of disability were again and again found not to be related to the severity of the children’s reading problems.

Second, the children who struggled the most with reading tended not to suffer from a particular problem but from a confluence of difficulties. Your father might be abusive, but you could still learn to read. You might have trouble seeing the blackboard, but you still could learn to read. You could be receiving less than stellar instruction, and yep, you could still make progress.

But, as the number of these anomalies and challenges increased, students’ resilience was undermined. The kids with the most severe cases of reading disability, suffered from the greatest numbers of difficulties. You might be able to overcome some social or emotional challenge (like trauma), but your success in accomplishing that would be less likely if you also needed glasses and were getting inappropriate instruction at your school.  

I suspect trauma likely works the same way.

There might be some kids who go off the rails specifically because of PTSD, but there are many more for whom PTSD is just ODTAA… “one darned thing after another” that undermines learning.

The kid who has a genetic predisposition to struggle with reading (learning disabilities tend to have genetic roots), whose parents haven’t done much to support language and literacy progress prior to school entry, who is enrolled in a class where the teacher doesn’t do a very good job teaching reading, and who then experiences trauma may very well be crushed academically by the horrific experience. Another child suffering the same trauma may continue to succeed in school, with barely any interruption.

Confirming this idea is a study that suggests that children with learning disabilities tend to be especially sensitive to trauma (Marks, Norton, Mesite, Fox, & Christodoulou, 2022). That means Robinson is right – kids already suffering from limited learning due to disability (and I presume to poverty, racism, and neglect) are the ones likely to be most unsettled academically by grief, abuse, violence, and so on.

What all this means is:

1.     Trauma can be disruptive of learning for at least some children.

2.     Educators should assume that kids who experience trauma may benefit from trauma-sensitive schooling. Making sure these students feel safe and included can be beneficial in keeping them in school regularly.

3.     Being sensitive does not mean teachers should back down from teaching reading to these children – remember trauma does not necessarily interfere with learning but reducing instruction in the name of sympathy certainly will. In fact, keeping kids academically engaged has been found to help keep these students connected to their environment in positive ways (Mullins & Panlilio, 2021).

4.     There is no special reading curriculum or way of teaching reading that will facilitate that has been proposed or proven to provide special benefits to these kids. Sound responses to the trauma problem tend to be more general kinds of things that make kids feel protected, valued, safe, in control, and supported.

What matters in the teaching of reading is the amount of reading instruction, the content of reading instruction, and the quality of reading instruction. Making sure that every child – including those who suffer trauma – receive enough teaching, focused on essential reading skills and abilities, and with sufficient quality to encourage maximum learning is the right prescription. All kids benefit from that, but it is especially important for kids who have challenges of various kinds. Reading instruction itself should not be one of the challenges that kids with PTSD or other disorders must surmount to succeed. Reding teachers need to be part of the solution rather than the problem.

References

De Bellis, M. D., Hooper, S. R., Spratt, E. G., & Woolley, D. P. (2009). Neuropsychological findings in childhood neglect and their relationships to pediatric PTSD. Journal of International Neuropsychological Society, 15(6), 868-878.

Duplechain, R., Reigner, R., & Packard, A. (2008). Striking differences: The impact of moderate and high trauma on reading achievement. Reading Psychology, 29, 117-136. DOI: 10.1080/02702710801963845

Goodman, R. D., Miller, M. D., West-Olatunji, C. A. (2012). Traumatic stress, socioeconomic status, and academic achievement among primary school students. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 4(3), 252-259. doi:10.1037/a0024912

Marks, R. A., Norton, R. T., Mesite, L, Fox, A. B., & Christodoulou, J. A. (2022). Risk and resilience correlates of reading among adolescents with language-based learning disabilities during COVID-19. Reading and Writing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10361-8

McGrew, S. L. (2019). Examining the impact of trauma on reading performance among elementary students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Mississippi State University.

Mullins, C. A., & Panlilio C.C. (2021). Exploring the mediating effect of academic engagement on math and reading achievement for students who have experienced maltreatment. Child Abuse & Neglect, 117. doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2021.105048

Opiola, K. K., Alston, D. M., & Copeland-Kamp, B. (2020). The effectiveness of training and supervising urban elementary school teachers in child–teacher relationship training: A trauma-informed approach. Professional School Counseling, 23(1), 11. doi.org:https://doi.org/10.1177/2156759X19899181

Peter P. v. Compton Unified School District. (2015). Retrieved from http://media.wix.com/ugd/29cec4_4d7cb86b540e4b0e8b5671ce4c8e7137.pdf

Read, S., Papakosta-Harvey, V., & Bower, S. (2000). Using workshops on loss for adults with learning disabilities. Groupwork: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Working with Groups, 12(2), 6-26.

Robinson, H. M. (1946). Why pupils fail in reading. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Our school district is all abuzz about “Sold a Story,” a documentary about reading instruction, and the response it is getting from some reading experts. We’ve been surprised that you haven’t written about this. We’re sure you have an opinion. Would you be willing to share it?

Shanahan responds:

I admire Emily Hanford and her work. I’ve been interviewed several times by her over the years. She always has treated me respectfully. She asks probing questions and relies on relevant research for the most part. In my experience, her quotes are accurate and fitting.

That doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with all her views or even how she frames some of her arguments. Nevertheless, in my opinion, she usually gets things right, and I’m sympathetic with most of her conclusions since I believe they’re more in tune with what research reveals about reading instruction than the positions of her supposedly expert critics.

The major thrust of her work (not just the documentaries you note, but also earlier productions) has been that readers must translate print (orthography) into pronunciation (phonology) and that explicit teaching of phonics helps kids learn to do this. She also emphasizes that many schools are not providing such instruction and that many teachers aren’t prepared to teach it. Finally, she’s revealed that the currently most popular commercial reading programs ignore or minimize phonics instruction, and teach approaches to word reading that science has rejected (like 3-cueing, in which students are taught to read words by looking at the pictures or guessing from context).

Those positions are sound; well supported by lots of high-quality research. My disagreements with Ms. Hanford’s work are more around the edges. I think she puts too much emphasis on the motivations of those who’ve advanced theories that don’t stand the test of evidence. Also, her reports tend to imply greater consequences of the problems identified than is prudent (something I might write about soon).

The counterarguments to Ms. Hanford’s reporting strike me as more troubling. I think they do more to confuse the issues than to enlighten. They often seem to have no purpose beyond attempting to discourage the teaching phonics (a peculiar slant given that such instruction has long been required by all 50 U.S. states).

I have neither the space nor patience to reply to all of the criticism, but here are my thoughts on some of the more prominent ones.

1.     Challenges to the source rather than the content.

Since the early Greek philosophers, ad hominem arguments – as opposed to ad verbum ones – have been characterized as illogical, fallacious, and just bad form. Any student enrolled in Philosophy 101 learns that sound reasoning eschews attacks on the person rather than the person’s claims.

Accordingly, I reject the ad hominem judgments of some of my colleagues.

The idea that reporters can’t report on education unless they’ve taught school or possess a PhD in education strikes me as loony. It is akin to the idea that Woodward and Bernstein couldn’t cover Watergate since they’d never been elected President.

The accuracy of Ms. Hanford’s reports is legitimately open to challenge, but rejections of accurate reporting because the source isn’t a professional educator is fallacious.

I’m flabbergasted that those who reject Ms. Hanford’s reporting because she is a reporter aren’t similarly up in arms about commercial reading programs created by folks with little or no expertise or knowledge of reading instruction. The latter would seem to be more problematic since the likelihood of it harming children would be so much higher.

As for myself, I try to avoid ad hominem judgments altogether, though I certainly recognize the appeal (many of those critics have little expertise in these issues – for example, many in their research and teaching are focused on high school education and aren’t particularly conversant in issues of beginning reading instruction). Nevertheless, the issue shouldn’t be who the sources are, but whether the reports are accurate.

2.     Reading requires more than phonics.

Most critics have dismissed Ms. Hanford’s reporting because of its intensive focus on phonics instruction and decoding. Their criticisms are either that she doesn’t provide a definition of reading (so she must not understand what reading entails) or that she is neglecting potentially valuable instruction in other skills and abilities.

I understand why one would want to ensure that children receive comprehensive reading instruction – I’ve argued for comprehensiveness for decades. Teaching children all the skills that research has identified as beneficial to learning seems like the most-likely-to-be-successful approach one could take.

However, journalism is different than teaching. What’s requisite for a curriculum, state standards, core reading programs, teacher education, or daily classroom instruction has little to do with what one must include in a journalistic report.

The same can be said about research studies. If I conduct a study on the teaching of reading comprehension, editors don’t berate me with complaints that my study failed to consider the best way to teach children to deal with the schwa sound.

Imagine that a medical reporter discovers that doctors and nurses at the local hospital are not following sound sanitary protocols. She documents the problem, interviews medical personnel and patients, examines local health records and research studies that have addressed the implications of such lapses.

Would you really be convinced that the reporter must be wrong because there is more to medicine than hand washing and instrument sterilization?

Perhaps the hospital administrator’s response would be something like: “Ms. Hanford doesn’t understand all the necessary components that go into sound health care. You might have noticed that she didn’t define sound health care in her documentaries, nor did she even mention the importance of tasty foods in the commissary or the proper procurement practices when it comes to essential materials that must be kept on hand (an important part of health care to which I have personally devoted my career).”

We’d all laugh the dude out the room because we still want the doctors to wash their hands.

My point is simply this: reporting, unlike reading instruction, doesn’t have to address everything to be sound and of value.

The reportorial identification of negligence or corruption should never be interpreted as being more than just that. If a reporter finds out that a public official is embezzling, that neither means that all public officials are crooks nor that the one so identified is the only fly in the ointment.

My sense is that neither Hanford nor the many reporters following up on her stories in their own locales are having any trouble finding schools that omit or minimize phonics, or teachers who claim they weren’t prepared to teach it.

This should not be terribly surprising to anyone in the field given that Education Week surveys have revealed some commercial reading programs that minimize phonics instruction or that omit it altogether are widely used in U.S. classrooms. Likewise, academic studies have demonstrated important gaps in coverage of phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary/morphology, oral reading fluency, and reading comprehension in teacher education programs.

Even if your local school district is already doing a crackerjack job with phonics, that doesn’t mean that the other 67,000 U.S. schools are on point with decoding. Such reporting may increase the scrutiny your teaching is subjected to, but if you’re really addressing phonics then that shouldn’t be a problem.

Hanford’s reports do not provide a comprehensive examination of all aspects of a reading program. I don’t think we should expect them to do so, and I don’t accept that her identification of this problem prevents anyone from teaching other essential aspects of reading.  

 “We were going to improve our reading comprehension instruction, but that damn Emily Hanford won’t allow us to do that!” Yeah, that’s the problem.

Comprehensiveness of coverage is a responsibility of educational standards writers, curriculum designers, professors, boards of education, school administrators, and teachers. Not journalists. They are vigilant in trying to identify our shortcomings – they are not required to find all of them.

A fascinating aside: Many critics have written things like, “of course, phonics is essential” or “everyone agrees that phonics is an important part of reading instruction.” Those admissions usually precede admonitions that this reporting goes too far in advocating for phonics.

To me that raises a question: If everyone knows that phonics is so important, how could an especially popular commercial reading program omit it for nearly 20 years without any remark from these vigilant reading educators? They blame reporters for not being comprehensive in their conceptions of reading instruction, but then let themselves off the hook for being even more woefully inattentive.

3.     There are many ways to teach reading.

While many of the critics have been willing to concede the value of explicit decoding instruction, others seem to defend its neglect. Their claim is that this reporting is off base since there are “many ways to teach reading.” In other words, in their opinion, teaching 3-cueing is as effective as teaching phonics – and either choice is equally supportable.

Those arguments may appear to deserve 4-stars for affability and reasonability. But only if you’re willing to ignore the research.

Studies show that explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction consistently provide a learning advantage. There are no such studies supporting 3-cueing.

Studies show the activation of visual and phonological centers in the brain when word reading… they don’t reveal similar activation in that would suggest 3-cueing.

Readers do sometimes guess words (e.g., damaged pages, reader distraction, lack of decoding ability), but this is more evident with poor readers than good ones.

Usually, we strive to teach students to emulate proficiency. I want my kids to try to golf like Tiger Woods, not some old duffer who can’t get onto the green.

Three-cueing is the only instance I can think of that asks students to parrot low success performance, rather than proficiency. 

There are many ways to teach reading. It is sophistry, however, to pretend that these ways are all equal. Phonics provides a clear advantage.

To those who claim that we need different ways of teaching decoding (e.g., pictures, context) since all children are different, show me the research.  

Until such research is available, I’m willing to follow this claim to its logical conclusion. Let’s say that I’m willing to entertain the idea that all children learn differently. If that is the case, then why aren’t these critics up in arms about programs that omit or minimize phonics given that research has found such omissions to be especially harmful to our most vulnerable children? Their position seems to be not just inconsistent, but hard hearted and downright mean.

Enough.

Emily Hanford’s investigative reporting has been useful; a welcome relief from the wishful but misleading reporting that has often plagued this topic. (Patti Ghezzi, the astute former educational reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, recently provide an exceptionally candid account of why her past reporting went so wrong -- included in Maureen Downey's column).

For many schools these reports have led and will lead to a serious rethinking of how best to meet young children’s reading needs. Perhaps, some of these long overdue appraisals will be led by wise schoolmen and women who will wonder, “Gee, if we so missed the boat on phonics, how are we doing with other aspects of reading? Maybe we could do better.”

One can hope.

READ MORE ARTICLES HERE: Shanahan On Literacy's Blogs

I admitted that my endorsement of that journalism was not without limits. I had concerns and said I may write about them in the future. The future has arrived.

I expressed two concerns, one substantive and one more stylistic. Let’s get the less important one out of the way first. Style.

In “Sold a Story” there a heavy focus on the financial gains of the creators of the curricula that were critiqued. I admit to being as titillated as the next guy about such juicy details, but I also am aware of its shortcoming of that approach. While I don’t know those authors well, I don’t doubt their seriousness of purpose or staunch beliefs. I agree with Ms. Hanford’s critiques of those programs and have no doubt the authors gladly accepted generous financial rewards.

But I don’t believe they “did it for the money” per se. I’ve offered this same defense against the same charges that were leveled against certain reading publishers during the early 2000s. Critics charged the only reason anyone would endorse phonics programs was to get rich. Hanford even went to the trouble of digging up such a quote from Lucy Calkins herself in 2002— a pitiful example of “what goes around, comes around.”

In those days, I – and other National Reading Panel members – were accused of summarizing the research as we did “just for the money.” That we were neither paid for the work nor allowed to have any financial conflicts, while the critics were reaping financial gains from their criticism, was an irony missed by many.

Some will try to distinguish the events by concluding, the phonics authors are right, and the 3-cueing guys are wrong. I believe that to be the case, but it changes nothing. I think in both cases the authors have had strong reasons for publishing what they did, and in both cases, they have had strong reasons for continuing to do so: money is not just a direct benefit, it is an indication that your work has wide appeal to educators and that it must be fulfilling some instructional need. As I’ve noted before, many things work in reading – they just don’t work equally well. Cognitive psychologists have explained how human beings fool themselves, looking at the positive evidence and rationalizing the data we don’t want to accept.

My point: Emily Hanford did the profession (and, most importantly, the students) a service by identifying how the most popular reading programs were out of alignment with the best knowledge that we have about teaching and learning reading. That’s really all that matters. That authors and publishers are allowed to publish what they want and to profit from that publication is a side issue that muddies rather than clarifies.

My bigger concern with Ms. Hanford’s most recent reporting (episode 1 of “Sold a Story”) has to do with the implied connection between the big problem (unnecessarily low national literacy rates) and her solution (add explicit decoding instruction to the agenda and eschew unproven approaches like 3-cueing).

The deep dive into the ugly NAEP scores was both informative (Hanford’s documentary-making skills were on fine display), but they also left me with the implication that we are only succeeding with 65% of fourth grade readers due to the ubiquity of 3-cueing and the dearth of phonics. That seems to be saying that if we addressed those curricular gaffs, all our kids would be successful readers.

That promises too much.

I know this same criticism can be aptly leveled at other reporters, politicians, and academics as well. Perhaps even me. We foreground our claims with pornographic NAEP literacy statistics without ever divulging that our nostrums are about improvement or mitigation only.

Do I believe it would be productive to have well-prepared teachers delivering explicit phonics lessons in grades PreK-2 using well-designed programs for about 30 minutes per day?

Yes.

I believe it because of the many instructional research experiments that have been conducted over a long period of time that have shown such instruction to provide learning benefits to children.

I believe it because of the descriptive and correlational research evidence from neurological and cognitive psychological studies that suggest the potential benefits of instruction that guides students to connect letters and spelling patterns to phonology.

I believe it because of what has happened to fourth grade NAEP scores in the past when there have been increases (and decreases) in explicit phonics instruction. When we have had major emphases on phonics, scores have risen, and they have fallen or remained stagnant when attention to decoding lapsed.

Given that, what’s the problem?

The problem is that those changes are likely to only produce marginal improvement. Here I’m using the term “marginal gains” the way I think economists do: to refer to small incremental improvements that when added together with other similar improvements could result in significant improvement.

Why do I suspect the gains will be real, but relatively limited?

One reason the gains are likely to be marginal is due to those positive research findings I noted. The effect sizes in those studies average out to about .40 and when you control for other variables that attenuates to about .20.

Many elementary reading tests are calibrated to produce a 1-standard deviation difference between grade levels. That means that the average first-grade and average second grade reading scores often differ by 1-standard deviation. If each year’s phonics instruction managed to accomplish the amount of benefit suggested by those effect sizes (about 20% of a standard deviation or about 2 months added gain over a school year), our kids would be doing about 1 semester better in reading by 4^th grade. That’s an amount of gain that I dearly desire, but an amount of gain that still would leave large numbers and percentages of kids far behind.

Of course, obtaining gains in a small study in which the researcher can carefully monitor the delivery of instruction is much easier than doing so in a large urban school district or a widely dispersed rural one. Usually, attempts to implement research-proven interventions on a large scale, witness diminished results. It is unlikely that those estimated gains would be accomplished statewide or nationwide year after year.

Another reason for my skepticism has to do with the findings reported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. They funded an extensive body of research on reading development and instruction which was strongly supportive of phonics. But it also reported that more than 50% of those struggling readers whose decoding ability was boosted to average levels continued to struggle with reading because of other limitations. More recent studies (such as those done by Rick Wagner and his colleagues) have identified plenty of kids with adequate decoding abilities who, nevertheless, struggle with reading comprehension. No reason to believe phonics or more phonics would help those students.

Still another reason for concern is that past efforts that have significantly improved fourth grade reading achievement on the NAEP (most notably from 1991-2006), but they have done so only marginally. Large enough gains to be both statistically and educationally significant, but still with large numbers and percentages of kids who don’t read well enough.

An example might help. Much has been made of the recent reading gains in Mississippi and these have been ascribed to the wide implementation of a phonics curriculum. My own analysis of these scores is that phonics contributed incrementally or marginally to Mississippi’s surprisingly high (for their economic level) reading scores. Reading didn’t only improve in Mississippi after implementing its phonics reforms, however. Incremental gains had been building over a 17-year-period. Phonics was only one in a long series of incremental improvements that when added together made for noticeably significant results.

Setting aside that observation for a moment, let’s attribute the entire 16-point NAEP gain that Mississippi has experienced during this century to the universal implementation of high-quality phonics instruction. After those very real improvements, we see that 35% of Mississippi kids are still struggling with reading. They’ve managed, despite their high poverty levels, to reach the national averages. That’s wonderful. But even with those remarkable gains a very large percentage of Mississippi kids are struggling with reading.  

Another concern about the NAEP evidence: Even during those eras when phonics instruction and 4^th grade reading performance rose together, they have not managed to have a big influence on NAEP 8^th grade or 11^th grade scores. One would think that 4 or 5 years after accomplishing those phonics gains, better readers would continue to display their early learning gains in middle and high school. That has not been the case.

The take aways?

By all means, please address those educational defects that Emily Hanford has Paul Revered for us. Primary grade kids should have high quality phonics instruction and that should provide precious gains in early reading achievement. More kids will succeed in learning to read, and the level of average performance should go up as well.

However, if what you seek is the solution to the low literacy attainment problem that “Sold a Story” started with, then you had better be prepared to do a better job with those other needs that research has also identified.

Our kids need high quality instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, text reading fluency, spelling, reading comprehension (both in terms of comprehension strategies and written language skills – vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, text/discourse structure), and writing. Indeed, our kids need to learn to read challenging literature and informational texts from the different disciplines in sophisticated ways, and they need to get used to using text for building extensive stores of knowledge about their social and natural worlds.

That prescription is for a PreK-12 response, not a primary grade one. Our goal shouldn’t be better fourth grade readers, but more literate 12^th grade readers. Having more 4^th graders reaching proficiency levels only matters if we’re willing to build quality on quality to make sure they maintain and advance those early successes.

It is okay for our reach to exceed our grasp. But we’ll do best if everyone fully understands both what it is that we are reaching for and what it will really take to accomplish it.

(And to those of Hanford's critics who are now chortling, "See, that's what we were saying," I would say -- "No, what you were doing was fanning the flames of a reading war instead of embracing every initiative that has a reasonable chance of contributing to the accomplishment of universal literacy.")

Today I thought I’d put some meat on the bone; adding some details that might help readers to grasp the implications of a scientific or research-based approach to reading.

What does it mean when someone says an approach to reading instruction “works”?

The term “it works” has gnawed at me for more than fifty years! I remember as a teacher how certain activities or approaches grabbed me. They just seemed right. Then I’d try them out in my classroom and judge some to work, and others not so much.

But why?

What was it that led me to believe some of them “worked” and some didn’t?

It puzzled me even then.  

Teachers, administrators, and researchers seem to have different notions of “what works.”

Teachers, I think, depend heavily on student response. If an activity engages the kids, we see it as hopeful. We give credence to whether an activity elicits groans or a buzz of activity.  

When I do a classroom demonstration and students say they liked the activity and want to do more, most likely I’ve won that teacher over.

Teachers recognize that learning requires engagement, so when an activity pulls kids in, they’re convinced that it’s a good idea.

That satisfaction is sometimes denigrated because of its potential vapidity. Let’s face it. Bozo the Clown engages kids, too, but with how much learning?

What those complaints fail to recognize is that the teacher already has bought into the the pedagogical value of the activity. They assume it is effective. Student engagement is like gaining a third Michelin star.

What about administrators?

Their needs are different. To them, “it works,” is more about adult acceptance. If a program is adopted, the materials shipments arrive as promised, and neither teachers nor parents complain, it works!

And, to researchers?

To them, it means there has been an experimental study that compared that approach with some other and found it to be superior in terms of fostering learning.

If a method does no better than “business as usual” classroom practice, then it doesn’t work (which, confusingly, isn’t entirely correct, since the difference isn’t that everybody in one group learned and nobody in the other did).

I’ve worn all those hats – teacher, administrator, researcher – and I prefer the last one. The reason? Because it’s the only one that explicitly bases the judgment on student learning.

RELATED: What's the Role of Amount of Reading Instruction?

Will we accomplish higher achievement if we follow research and make our teaching consistent with the science?

That’s the basic idea, but even that doesn’t appear to be well understood.

I think we tend to get misled by medical science, particularly pharmacology.

New drugs are studied so thoroughly it’s possible for scientists to say that a particular nostrum will provide benefit 94% of the time and that 28% of patients will probably suffer some unfortunate side effect.

When I tell you that the research shows that a particular kind of instruction works (i.e., it led to more learning), I can’t tell you how likely it is that you will be able to make it work, too.

Our education studies reveal whether someone has managed to make an approach successful.

Our evidence indicates possibility, not certainty.

When we encourage you to teach like it was done in the studies, we are saying, “if they made it work, you may be able to make it work, too.”

That’s why I’m such a fan of multiple studies.

The more times other people have made an approach work under varied circumstances, the more likely you’ll be able to find a way to make it work as well.

If you show me one such study, it seems possible I could match their success. Show me 38, and it seems even more likely that I could pull it off.

That nuance highlights an important point: Our instructional methods don’t have automatic effects. We, as teachers, make these methods work.

Lackadaisical implementation of instruction is never likely to have good results. The teacher who thinks passive implementation of a science-based program is what works is in for a sad awakening.

I assure you that in the studies, everyone worked hard to make sure there were learning payoffs for the kids. That’s part of what made it work better than the business-as-usual approach.

That point is too often muffled by our rhetoric around science-based reading. But teacher buy-in, teacher effort, and teacher desire to see a program work for the kids are all ingredients in success.

I don’t get it, I’m hearing that some approach (e.g., 3-cueing) is harmful, and, yet I know of research-based programs that teach it. Does that make any sense?

You’re right about 3-cueing being part of some successful programs. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Instructional programs usually include multiple components. Studies of them tell if the program has been effective, but they usually say little about the various components that are integral to the program.  

Without a direct test of the individual components, there are three possibilities: (1) a component may be an active ingredient, one of the reasons for the success; or (2) it’s a neutral ingredient -- drop it and kids would do as well; or (3) it’s hurtful, the instruction would be even more effective without it.

Logically, 3-cueing makes no sense. It emphasizes behaviors good readers eschew.

That said, I know of no research that has evaluated 3-cueing specifically.

Claims that it’s harmful (beyond being a likely time waster) are, for the time being, overstatements. These claims rely on logic, not data.

The problem that you identify is a common one – people will tell you that multisensory instruction, a sole focus on decodable texts, advanced phonemic awareness, more social studies lessons, word walls, sound walls, and so on are all certain roads to improved achievement. Each is part of at least one successful program or another. But none have been evaluated directly. The truth is, we really don’t know if they have any value at all.

They might provide benefits, but that isn’t the same thing as knowing that they have done so before.  

Our district has adopted new programs and instructional routines based on science. But our kids aren’t doing any better than before. Does that make any sense?

No, that makes no sense at all. The purpose of any kind of educational reform – including science-based reform – is to increase learning. The whole point is higher average reading scores or a reduction in the numbers of struggling students.

Whoever’s in charge should take this lack of success seriously and should be asking – and finding answers – to the following questions?

• Were these changes really based on the science and what does that mean?

Administrators often make choices based on minimal information. It is better to vet these things before adopting them, but in a case like this one, it is never too late to find out if the reform scheme was really consistent with the science.

• How has the amount of reading instruction to students changed?

Some approaches work better than others because they have a bigger footprint. They provide a greater amount of teaching than business-as-usual approaches. Adopting such programs without making the schedule changes to facilitate their implantation will likely undermine potential success. Are kids getting more instruction, less instruction, or about the same as before?

• How is the amount of reading instruction apportioned among phonemic awareness, phonics, text reading fluency, reading comprehension strategies, written language ability, and writing?

Often the adoption of new programs or reform efforts aimed at a particular piece of the puzzle lead to greater attention to certain abilities, but to diminished attention to other key parts of literacy. Make sure that you aren’t trading more phonics for less fluency work, or more vocabulary for less comprehension. You want to make sure that all components of reading are receiving adequate attention – not going overboard with some and neglecting others.

• To what extent are teachers using the programs?

Compliance matters in program implementation. The adage that “teachers can do whatever they want when the door is closed” highlights one of the biggest roadblocks to making such efforts work. You need to make sure you have sufficient buy in for the men and women who do the daily teaching. You bought a new program or set new instructional policies. Are they being used or followed?

• How well prepared are the teachers to provide the required instruction?

Program adoption requires a lot more than issuing a policy proclamation. Research shows that program implementation supported by substantial professional development is much more successful than just buying a program. You need to make sure that you’ve built the capacity for success and not just expected magic to happen.

READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

National Research Council. (2002). Scientific research in education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Shanahan, T. (2020). What constitutes a science of reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S235-S247.

Stanovich, P. J. , & Stanovich, K. E. (2003). Using research and reason in education. Washington, DC: National Institute of Literacy.

It wasn’t the list of variables that was so provocative, but how Carroll defined each.  

He operationalized all those in terms of instructional time.

For instance, aptitude – then usually a score on an IQ test – was, for Carroll, a matter of the how much time was needed to learn something. A young Einstein may be able to master a K-12 physics curriculum in 42 minutes, while it might take Tim Shanahan 42 years!

Opportunity referred to the amount of instructional time schools provided. If teachers devoted 100 hours to physics instruction, Einstein would have it made given his aptitude, while I might be better advised to become a reading teacher.

Even if schools allotted 42 years to physics, I still might not make it. What are the chances I’d sit still for all those laws of motion, electrons, and quarks? Perseverance, the time students are willing to be taught, figures in learning as well.

Even quality is a matter of time in this scheme. If the quality of teaching is low, then kids will need relatively more teaching to be successful.

No one has come up with ingenious ways to measure those time-based variables. However, the point it made about instructional time was invaluable.  

In the 1970-1980s, researchers following Carroll’s lead explored time and its relationship to academic achievement, including in reading (e.g., Fisher, Berliner, Filby, Marliabe, Cahen, & Dishaw, 1981).

They learned a lot about instructional time. As a result, educational scientists now have a different conception of instructional time and how it should be considered in research studies.

In my opinion, reading educators don’t think enough about time and its importance.

Studies have, again and again, demonstrated the power of amount of instruction in determining student learning (Gay, Sonnenschein, Sun, & Baker, 2021; Sonnenschein, Stapleton, & Benson, 2010; Walberg, Fraser, & Welch, 1986).

RELATED: “It Works” and Other Myths of the Science of Reading Era

Here are 7 key ideas about instructional time that every reading educator should know.

1.     There’s a difference between allotted time and academic learning time.

When scholars first looked at the amount of teaching, they were surprised to discover that there was not much connection.

That’s when they started distinguishing allotted time from what academic learning time (ALT). ALT refers to the amount of time students are engaged in academic tasks likely to lead to learning (Fisher, et al., 1981).

Observational studies reported big differences in ALT (Smith, Lee, & Newman, 2001). Sometimes as much as 100%!

Ms. Jones may provide 90 minutes a day of ALT, while Ms. Smith’s kids only get 45.

Year after year, the Jones’ kids test out higher than the Smith kids, and Ms. Smith concludes, “Yep, the principal always gives me the lowest kids.”

Scheduling 90 or 120 minutes of literacy instruction doesn’t mean kids get that much actual teaching.

Some teachers struggle with classroom management, or they may be pushed into grouping schemes they can’t handle. Big mistake.

Those kinds of things are time robbers. They prevent allotted time from being translated into ALT.

This can play out a couple of different ways. The obvious one has to do with unruliness, misbehavior, noisiness. Those problems threaten the learning of everyone.

But mismanagement is not always an issue of poor discipline. Some kids lose out to inattention, daydreaming, and obeying but not engaging… the kids who sit politely and quietly but who fail to engage with the lesson. The page turners who don’t read.

            Allocated time is not the important issue, ALT is!

2.     Time is a value, not a variable.

When researchers began looking at instructional time, they treated it as a variable. It was routinely included in lists of factors that influence learning (e.g., ability, motivation, quantity of instruction, quality of instruction, classroom climate, home environment, peer group, mass media exposure).

However, that isn’t the way scientists have learned to deal with time.

An example here may help.

We know that iron rusts when the metal molecules bond with the moisture in air. But scientists used to think that it was time that caused rust.  

Modern scientists blanch at the thought of that now. For them, time can never be a causative factor, only a measure of such factors. With rust, oxidation (that bonding of molecules) is the cause and the time the iron is exposed to humidity, is a measure of the amount of oxidation exposure.

In education, time itself shouldn’t be the issue. No, it’s the kind of teaching, the kind of educational environment, or the kind of curriculum that are influencing learning. Time is a valuable way to estimate how much exposure kids are getting to those kinds of teaching and kinds curriculum.

Unfortunately, we tend to say things like, “phonics works,” or “research supports comprehension strategies.”

What we should be saying is, “kids benefited from 30 minutes of daily phonics instruction for a school year,” or “we had measurable comprehension improvement from 8 weeks of strategy teaching.”

Time should be seen as dosage. Too often we’re satisfied that teachers are teaching writing or teaching phonics. But we should be asking, “Are they teaching enough of those things?”

3.     Think components, not overall time.

Principals often proudly tell me that their teachers are required to teach reading/ language arts for 2 hours per day. That’s not nothing, but it’s not enough.

I think the lack of specific attention to time is why many teachers neglect certain aspects of reading, while overdoing others.  

I’ve visited kindergarten classes with no phonemic awareness instruction, and third grade classes without writing (since their goal is higher reading scores). I have vivid memories of a second-grade class with an overwhelming 90 minutes per day of phonics and spelling. I’m often asked if having the kids read a paragraph for fluency practice is enough (no, I don’t think so).

None of that makes any sense.

In Chicago, we overcame that problem by portioning the literacy instruction time among word learning, text reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. That meant kids got a lot of attention to all the key components of reading development.

Making sure that enough time is accorded to each of those curricular components that research has identified as making a difference in reading achievement is not micromanaging.

What we found was that when teachers knew they were required to spend considerable time on fluency instruction or vocabulary, they got very interested in how best to teach those things. It’s easy enough to hide your weaknesses in a 90–120-minute block if no one is paying attention to how those minutes are being divided up. But when you find out you have 30 minutes of fluency instruction to provide, how to accomplish that becomes a much more important question to a teacher.

4.     Aim at learning goals not instructional activities.

Some time-based instructional schemes prescribe specific daily activities: student reading time, small group instruction time, writing, teacher read alouds, ABC Reading Program), etc.

Those schemes help teachers to fill their days.

But filling up a day’s schedule and curating a powerful set of learning experiences are not the same thing.

Organize your instructional time around what you are trying to accomplish, rather than on certain activities. If you have set aside time to teach kids to bring their prior knowledge to bear on the text that they are reading, then your minutes of reading comprehension this week should be focused on that. The texts and activities that you choose should be aimed at accomplishing that goal.

Focus on increasing kids’ vocabulary knowledge, not on teacher read alouds. You may decide to structure a teacher read aloud in a way that will help address that vocabulary knowledge goal, but there are other effective approaches to that too. When it comes to time, keep eyes on the learning prize, not the activity that might be used to address it.

5.     Rate and time are not the same thing.

Time has to do with the numbers of minutes or hours that we devote to a subject. Rate is more bound up in what happens within that time allotment.

For instance, research suggests that the number of interactions that take place between students and teachers (like how many questions they get to answer) makes a difference in learning (Allen, Gregory, Mikami, Lun, Hamre, & Pianta, 2013; Folmer-Annevelink, Doolaard, Mascareño, & Bosker, 2010). Often the amount of interaction is limited. The teacher asks a few questions and calls on a couple kids to answer them. No one must think about the information because they aren’t likely to be called upon.

That suggests a useful way of evaluating classroom instruction. How many opportunities do kids have to respond in an hour? The traditional teacher might end up with a very low rate of response – asking few questions, calling on few students. In another classroom, the teacher might provide slates and all students are expected to respond at least in writing to every question.

In decoding lessons, I’m often concerned about how many words kids get to segment, or sound out, or spell. Some teachers move those lessons along better, getting everyone to do those kinds of things multiple times in a lesson.

And what about the amount of writing that occurs in a writing lesson or the amount of reading in a comprehension lesson? (How many words are written or read in the time provided?)

We want substantial amounts of time devoted to key aspects of literacy learning. But these time allotments should be replete with reasonably high rates of action and response.

6.     Not all learning time is equivalent.

Too often teachers assume that all activities common to language arts lessons are equally valuable. That’s not the case. Some activities have higher payoffs – in terms of learning – than do others.

Some examples: studies of free or independent reading in which kids pick the texts and read on their own with little teacher involvement provide learning opportunities. However, studies show that the payoffs from using time in that way is markedly lower than when engaged in instructional activities with more teacher input (e.g., text selection, purpose, monitoring, feedback, direct instruction) (Shanahan, 2022).

Or, think about a phonics lesson. There is likely to be more learning payoff from a highly interactive lesson that provides opportunities to hear sounds matched to letters and words, and to sound out words with teacher guidance than would accrue from having students completing worksheets quietly at their desks. Kids need to learn to connect phonology (sounds) with orthography (spellings) and that is best done with audible lessons.

I understand that at times teachers need time fillers, but instructional planning should always be a quest for what kind of lesson is most likely to foster the learning that we’re aiming for.

7.     Time and Tier 2 success.

Some kids have trouble learning. They just don’t make the same progress as the other kids.

That’s why we have the so-called Tier 2 programs; additional opportunities for kids to catch up and keep up.

Tier 2 programs should focus on important reading skills that kids might lag in (that means having instruction available for supporting both the decoding and language gaps that might occur).

Tier 2 programs should provide enhanced learning opportunities – focused, purposeful, specific, well-presented lessons with minimal of distractions and minimal need for adjustments for student heterogeneity.

Tier 2 programs – and here is the time issue – should provide additional instruction, not replacement instruction. Pulling kids out of reading lessons, to get other reading lessons down the hall is unlikely to increase learning. Tier 2 gives kids a chance for a double dose of instruction, but that means that schools need to schedule Tier 2 teaching thoughtfully so that it adds to the teaching the children receive.  

If you want to raise reading achievement, take a careful look at the amount of time allotted for reading, how that time is divided among key learning goals, how engaged children are in that time, and the amount of actual reading, writing, and interaction that is taking place. I think you might be sadly surprised at what you see. We can do better.

READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Allen, J., Gregory, A., Mikami, A., Lun, J., Hamre, B., & Pianta, R. (2013). Observations of effective teacher-student interactions in secondary school classrooms: Predicting student achievement with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary. School Psychology Review, 42(1), 76–98.

Carroll, J. B. (1989). The Carroll Model: A 25-year retrospective and prospective view. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 26-31.

Fisher, C., Berliner, D., Filby, N., Marliave, R., Cahen, L., & Dishaw, M. (1981). Teaching behaviors, academic learning time, and student achievement: An overview. Journal of Classroom Instruction, 17(1), 2-15.

Folmer-Annevelink, E., Doolaard, S., Mascareño, M., & Bosker, R. J. (2010). Class size effects on the number and types of student-teacher interactions in primary classroom. Journal of Classroom Interaction, 45(2), 30-38.

Gay, B., Sonnenschein, S., Sun, S., & Baker, L. (2021). Poverty, parent involvement, and children’s reading skills: Testing the compensatory effect of the amount of classroom reading instruction. Early Education and Development, 32(7), 981-993. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2020.1829292

Shanahan, T. (2022, February 12). 

Smith, J. B., Lee, V. E., & Newmann, F. M. (2001). Instruction and achievement in Chicago elementary schools. Chicago: Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Sonnenschein, S., Stapleton, L. M., & Benson, A. (2010). The relation between the type and amount of instruction and growth in children’s reading competencies. American Educational Research Journal, 47(2), 358-389. doi:https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831209349215

Walberg, H. J., Fraser, B. J., & Welch, W. W. (1986). A test of a model of educational productivity among senior high school students. Journal of Educational Research, 79(3), 133-139. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1986.1088566

I want to clarify the definitions of reading skills vs reading strategies. I know you have written about this, but I’m still confused. I’ve read your blogs, the National Reading Panel Report, Zimmerman's Mosaic of Thought book, Oakhill et al.’s language skills, Chris Such’s book, Scarborough's reading rope, etc. I tried to summarize what those sources had to say about each of more than a dozen strategies and I found several contradictions and lots of general confusion. Some of them label background knowledge as a strategy, while others say it is a language comprehension skill. Comprehension monitoring shows a similar pattern of disagreement, though the various authors might change sides about how to classify that one (and some treatments ignore it altogether). Scarborough shows language – which most classify as a skill – to become increasingly strategic with development. I could go on, but who is right here? 

RELATED: What's the Role of Amount of Reading Instruction?

Shanahan response:

That’s an easy questiom. I’m right!

Aren’t I always? I’m surprised that you didn’t know that. I thought you said you’ve read my blogs before.

Okay, maybe we’ve all been a tad sloppy with the old language, carefully delineating these concepts when addressing their distinctions explicitly, but not so much when we are just referring to skills and strategies in other treatments. Unfortunately, our carelessness is needlessly confusing and, perhaps, it is even a barrier to supporting the highest quality comprehension instruction.

Let’s see if I can cast light on this problem.

And, that, in fact, is a very good place to start…. with light.

Physicists during the 19^th century and early part of the 20^th, were all in a tizzy over the nature of light. Did light travel in waves or particles?

They argued back and forth over that. Scientists would conduct an experiment proving that light must be moving in waves. Which was convincing right up until some contradictory experiment showed that it must be transmitted as a series of discrete packets, particles, or photons.

That argument raged for quite a while before Erwin Schrödinger let the wind out of all their balloons with his equation that described the dual nature of light. He showed that light possesses both qualities under various conditions and put an end to the argument so they could get on with business. (Schrödinger was good at that kind of thing. You might remember he was the guy with the cat that was both dead and alive. I’m sure glad you didn’t ask me to explain that one!)

Much like Herr Schrödinger, I think this dead cat is amazingly lively.

That is, it’s possible for something to be both skill and strategy.

Sometimes we teach something as a strategy initially, and with development it gains skill status. The reverse can happen as well (à la, Hollis Scarborough’s rope, with language becoming increasingly strategic with development).

Background knowledge, for instance, plays a fundamental role in reading comprehension. This role, however, is often not intentional. Our minds seem to be designed to make connections. We almost can’t stop ourselves from making comparisons (“Mom liked you best”), recognizing similarities, and seeing contrasts.

That’s why Jimmy Kim’s latest work (Kim, Burkhauser, Relyea, Gilbert, Scherer, Fitzgerlad, Mosher, & McIntyre, 2023) is gaining so much attention these days. It seems to be showing that building children’s knowledge about a topic can generalize – automatically, without prompting – to other related or analogous topics. That would make background knowledge a skill.

That’s exciting because most of the people promoting background knowledge as the golden road to high reading comprehension have been viewing it as a skill – as something that can be used productively in reading without conscious intentions of the reader. If students know a lot of science and social studies, this would mean that they’ll often connect that body of information to whatever they read and as a result comprehension will rise.

However, other researchers have demonstrated that we can successfully teach people to use their background knowledge intentionally – that is, more strategically – to improve their understanding of what they read (Hattan & Alexander, 2021; Hattan, Alexander, & Lupo, 2023; Lupo, Tortorelli, Invernizzi, Ryoo, & Strong, 2019).

Intentional?

Well, for example, what if, prior to reading, I look over the material and see if any of it is familiar and ponder how I think it may connect up with what I already know? Maybe I’ll decide to pay more attention to some sections than to others.

Or, what if I identify the major topic and then brainstorm for a few minutes before reading that text – bringing what I already know to conscious attention? That seems to improve comprehension, too.

Or, what if, as I read, I intentionally stop whenever I see something familiar and try to connect that information explicitly with what I already know – maybe even trying to identify what’s new and where it may fit with what I already know? Again, a winning strategy.

Those kinds of intentional steps are strategic and that makes the use of background knowledge a strategy. Whereas just building up knowledge and hoping it will have relevance to what you read someday is betting on knowledge as a skill that can improve reading comprehension. 

The studies seem to say that knowledge can operate as both skill and strategy – it just depends how we try to apply it.

Vocabulary knowledge (knowing the meanings of lots of words) is certainly a skill. When I read, for the most part, recognizing the words triggers the meanings without much conscious attention. For example,

if I read the word, “green,” I think of that color automatically, I don’t usually make decisions about it because I have that word firmly in my lexicon. I can’t say I don’t “think about it”, because my mind must be thinking about (as I know the term to mean). And, yet, the process seems to keep conscious Tim out of the equation altogether. I do it, but I’m not aware that I’m doing it.

On the other hand, had the author used, prasine, smaragdine, greeny, viridescent, or verdant, that choice might change everything. I’d have various strategic decisions to make with those words. I kind of know what “verdant” means and the shade of green that may imply. I likely would do nothing with that one. The same would be true for “greeny.” I might be able to gain purchase on “viridescent” through a moment of morphological analysis (yeah, it does have something to do with iridescent). But “prasine” and “smaragdine” are not in my vocabulary. For those, I’d have to decide how much I cared. Whether it would be worth trying to ken those from context or by looking them up in the dictionary (my most likely strategy for solving those) would depend on my desire to fully comprehend the message.

Those schemes that we have for dealing with unfamiliar words – context, morphology, reference guides, ignoring – tend to be strategic, intentional choices the reader deploys to address a potential problem.

Lessons in which children memorize the definitions of vocabulary words are skills lessons.

Lessons in which children must identify unknown words in passages and figure out their meanings are strategies lessons.

That means vocabulary can be skill or strategy, just as light can be waves and packets. It just depends.

I think you should worry less about classifying them and more about how you think students need to apply them. Is the goal to teach students to respond automatically, without conscious direction, without intention, without being triggered by some conditional event? If so, automaticity is going to be important and you are going to want to work hard at memorization and repetition, to ensure that your students master these skills.

Or, are you preparing students to respond flexibly when confronted with a particular challenge or problem, that they are going to have to make decisions about?

Then, you want to teach it as a strategy. Here you teach them what it is, why it has value, when to use it, and you give them guided practice in applying it in various situations. 

We tend to think of those kinds of situations as belonging to the comprehension realm. How would you read a short story differently from a science text? That passage made no sense – now what are you going to do?

However, as much as we consider decoding to be a skill, there are situations when students must make choices and at least some of those will require conscious decisions. at least for a while…

“I know CVCe words tend to have long vowels, but that pattern doesn’t seem to be working when I try to read the word done.” The best strategy in that situation is to consider other possible pronunciations of the vowel.

That kind of word reading problem is interesting and complicated. Early on, I want students to see that CVCe pattern as a skill to be learned to the point of automaticity because of its high likelihood of working. But I also want them to know how to respond to it strategically because of the important exceptions that exist. Over time, as students gain familiarity with the exceptions (e.g., done, have, one, live, come) the need for a strategic response will become unnecessary as reading these kinds of words will move into the house of skills.

How we use it and how we learn it are what determines whether something is strategy or skill. I suspect those apparent contradictions that you are seeing may be more due to differences in what those experts were focused on rather than to real differences in our understanding of skills or strategies.

It also can help to think about whether what you are teaching can really be a skill or a strategy. For years, we've tried to teach the various question types as comprehension skills. Kids are supposed to to learn the approrpriate way to answer main idea, supporting details, inference, and drawing conclusions questions. The problem with that is that there isn't any systematic way to answer those kinds of questions. 

There are question types that could be learned. For example, teaching kids the various words that signal cause-and-effect relations can be helpful in guiding them to respond appropriately to many cause and effect questions. Likewise, how to connect cohesive links across a passage (such as connecting pronouns with the subjects they refer to) is teachable and should allow students to respond to a whole category of inferential questions (it isn't too clear how to teach other kinds of inferencing). However, in both of those cases, the instruction would focus on how to read the text and think about it, rather than how to answer particular questions. That's just not a skill or strategy that good readers use and it doesn't prepare students to excel with future test performance (despite the certainty of many school administrators).

Teaching kids to be strategic in teasing out the author's point of view in a social studies text, or the characters' conflicting goals in literature, or to connect up the causes and effects in science all could be strategies that students could learn to wield in various kinds of texts. Over time, with lots of practice, they may take those actions on as habits of mind that they engage in without much conscious decision making. In other words, those strategies may become more skill like with acquistion. 


READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Hattan, C., & Alexander, P. A. (2021). The effects of knowledge activation training on rural middle-school students’ expository text comprehension: A mixed-methods study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(5), 879–897. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000623

Hattan, C., Alexander, P. A., & Lupo, S. M. (2023). Leveraging what students know to make sense of texts: What the research says about prior knowledge activation. Review of Educational Research, doi.org/10.3102/00346543221148478

Kim, J. S., Burkhauser, M. A., Relyea, J. E., Gilbert, J. B., Scherer, E., Fitzgerald, J. Mosher, D., & McIntyre, J. (2023). A longitudinal randomized trial of a sustained content literacy intervention from first to second grade: Transfer effects on students’ reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology. doi.org/10.1037/edu0000751

Lupo, S. M., Tortorelli, L., Invernizzi, M., Ryoo, J. H., & Strong, J. Z. (2019). An exploration of text difficulty and knowledge support on adolescents’ comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(4), 457-479. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.247

I’m a fourth-grade teacher. This year, because of the COVID shutdowns, I’m seeing more students than ever before who don’t know how to decode. I don’t see how I can teach them what I have in previous years, and I don’t have the ability to deal with the decoding problems. Our district is making a long needed serious effort to upgrade to phonics in our K-1 classrooms, but my students won’t benefit from that. What can I do?

RELATED: Shedding Light on Reading Skills and Strategies

Shanahan responds:

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing these kinds of complaints from across the country. Third and fourth grade teachers wanting to know what to do with their students who have serious gaps in decoding ability. Some tell me that it is a new problem for them, others say it has just gotten worse recently.

That may be surprising given the big emphasis these days on “science of reading” and the response of many states, districts, and schools to improve their programming for K-2 instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics.

It appears that this problem is part of the backwash from our COVID shutdown tragedy – and it is not the only ongoing disruption that pandemic has wreaked on our children’s education. I’ll address your question, and then want to talk about another COVID concern that I think deserves greater attention.

Primary grade kids missed out on a lot of teaching in the teeth of the pandemic. Some managed to parlay their shortened Zoom lessons and mom and dad’s kitchen table efforts into adequate and appropriate decoding ability. Hooray!

But, sadly, for too many others – and this appears to vary by locale – things haven’t worked so well. This school year they entered third and fourth grade at lower levels of reading ability than their teachers have witnessed previously.

Apparently, many schools started the 2022-2023 school year with the idea that things were back to normal. They were for the most part, for our young’uns entering our K-2 classrooms. Those kids may have been behind in these foundational skills, but their teachers usually have had the training, materials availability, and Tier 2 back up support needed to address those gaps.

Unfortunately, often those upper grade teachers have not received similar support. Under normal circumstance, that has been okay for most kids. But these are far from normal circumstances.

Too many kids in the upper grades missed out on the full regimen of decoding instruction usually available in the primary grades. They now find themselves in classrooms unlikely to fill those gaps. Given the ETS research on decoding thresholds and later literacy success, this is potentially a big, and perhaps, long term problem (Wang, Sabatini, O’Reilly, & Weeks, 2019).

It is up to educators to try to minimize the difficulty. Efforts should be made to evaluate the decoding status of kids in grades 3-5 and then fitting instructional responses need to be made.

If the numbers and percentages of decoding laggards are high, then explicit decoding instruction – at the appropriate levels, levels usually addressed in the earlier grade – should temporarily become a part of the upper grade Tier 1 curriculum. I know this will tick off my friends who worry about phonics taking over the world like a Dungeons and Dragons monster, but that’s the reason for the assessments – so that kids who’ve mastered those skills already can proceed as usual.

It is also important to remember that this adjustment is for a year or two – just long enough to recover from the heartrending loss of education these youngsters have suffered.

If – fingers crossed – the numbers are a bit worse than usual, but far from universal, then it would be best to clean up the mess through a stronger Tier 2 effort. No reason to disrupt the regular upper grade curriculum for small handfuls of additional needy students.

What is clear from the teachers I’ve been hearing from is that in too many places these kids really are slipping through the cracks, and this should not be happening. These teachers are frustrated by what they are confronting but they are uncertain how best to respond.

Remember, these are not the teachers to whom professional development aimed at foundational skills has been provided. Nor are they the teachers who have been assigned curriculum materials aimed at basic decoding skills. But what has been appropriate in the past, doesn’t appear to be sufficient for our current situation.

Someone in each school or district needs to assess the problem, determine its extent, and then provide a sound response to the fourth and fifth graders for the upcoming 2023-2024 school year.

The scary part of this is that we don’t have a lot of models of high quality, successful upper grade phonics instructional efforts. However, those ETS data suggest that if kids don’t reach threshold levels of decoding, then they don’t improve in reading in the middle and high school years – no matter what we try. This is not just something we should let pass by; we need to get on this before these kids leave the elementary grades.
Additionally, there is another COVID education problem lurking in the shadows.

Over the past several weeks, news reports have begun to detail some of the most serious wreckage of the pandemic. Although no national statistics are available that I’m aware of, it is evident that school enrollments are seriously down. Districts across the country, large and small, are reporting markedly higher chronic absence and lower daily attendance than usual.

U.S. schools in the 2010s were providing teaching to the largest numbers and largest percentages of students in our nation’s history. It took more than a century of effort, since education became compulsory in all our states, to accomplish that. There is no question that a big part of the reading achievement gains that we experienced from 1880-1970 were due to more kids spending more time at school.

Those attendance increases flattened out in the 1970s – as we digested Brown v. Board of Education – right about the time that educational achievement stopped increasing much in the U.S.

I suspect reversals in those enrollment and attendance figures will mean lower reading achievement nationwide for the foreseeable future. This is one that the schools can’t handle on their own. But it is one that needs to be handled.

States should assist their local districts in securing sufficient transportation so kids can get to school.

Media could help a lot by stressing to parents the importance of school attendance for their children.

Educators should think hard about how we can best reintroduce our schools to our communities, so parents feel that it is safe for their kids to be at school and understand better the need for vigilance in getting their kids to school every day.

Politicians, media, and school boards should make efforts to minimize the controversies that swirl around their local schools rather than ramping up nut-bag complaints that in the past would have been dealt with expeditiously and quietly. No one wants to send their kids into a hotbed of antagonism and animosity. 

Recently, I posted a blog that emphasized the importance of amount of instruction and curricula focused on those things that students need to learn to become successful readers (including decoding). There should be no need to retrace that ground here.

However, COVID, the greatest public health threat of our lifetime (with more than 7 million deaths worldwide and counting) has undermined the amount of teaching our kids get and has managed to prevent some kids from fully experiencing key parts of the reading curriculum. Sadly, COVID may turn out to be the biggest threat to public education of our lifetime as well. But that is up to us.

READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

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. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000302

I’m the lead reading coach in our school district. We want to present one of the reading models to our teachers and administrators to guide our efforts to improve reading achievement in the elementary and middle schools. Which of the models do you favor (e.g., simple view, Scarborough’s rope, active view)?

RELATED: If You Want Higher Reading Achievement, You’re Going to Have to Deal with the COVID Aftermath

Shanahan responds:

All those models have some value… and they all miss a key issue it seems to me. Let’s first take a quick tour of those models that you are trying to choose among and then let me suggest a more relevant model that I think you might want to consider, Shanahan’s Wheels of Reading Improvement.

Philip Gough and William Tunmer put forth the simple view as a hypothetical construct that could be tested in future research. The power of this model is in its simplicity. Its basic premises are that reading only has one special or unique set of skills – decoding, and that if you decode well enough to translate print to oral language (that is, if you can read text aloud), then your listening comprehension abilities should determine your degree of comprehension. In this model – which is expressed as a tidy multiplication problem – reading comprehension is a product of decoding and oral language comprehension. (The initial idea was for the model to act as an Occam’s razor of reading research; Phil was concerned that reading scholars were over-complicating our understanding of reading comprehension and he wanted proof that their contributions were really adding something).

Hollis Scarborough’s rope had a different genesis. Her model accepted the idea of those same two constellations of skills and abilities in reading. Hers wasn’t a model to be tested or a criterion for determining what matters, but a quick summary aimed at communicating what was then known about the reading process, in broad strokes. The rope sums up what scientists had determined to be component parts of decoding and comprehension. Accordingly, she expresses those two abilities as strands of rope that must be twisted together to become reading and it explicitly lists the skills and knowledge included in set. She also adds the helpful idea that the decoding skills need to be automatic (executable without conscious attention) and that comprehension is strategic (intentional).

The more-recently issued active view model is the work of Nell Duke and Kelly Cartwright. This one is a response to what they view as the now-outdated simple view. Consistent with that purpose, the active model is significantly denser and more complicated. They still include those two major constellations of abilities (word recognition and language comprehension) including expanded lists of component parts, à la Scarborough. Usefully, they connect these two constellations with a third, a set of bridge variables implicated in both word reading and comprehension, such as vocabulary knowledge and reading fluency. It also introduces a fourth group of abilities under the moniker of active self-regulation which includes executive function and motivation – and these processes govern the whole thing.

Each of these models can be useful. The spareness of the simple view is its major value. From it, it is easy to understand the centrality of both decoding and language comprehension in reading. The simple view should convince your faculty that substantial instructional attention is needed for both. Scarborough’s rope complicates things a bit of course, but only by identifying some of the abilities that are included in decoding and comprehension (and specifying the importance of automaticity and strategic processing). To teach reading it is necessary to operationalize decoding and comprehension so they can be taught. A bit more complicated, but still easy enough to understand. The active view is even more complicated; it requires a deeper dive into research findings to gain purchase on it. But it manages to add some useful variables omitted or only implied in the earlier models. It also better characterizes those bridge variables – knowing of their complex nature can be useful for teachers.

Just as I can point up the benefits of each of these, I can highlight their deficiencies (e.g., simple view misses those language skills that are unique or high specialized to written language, the rope leaves out important variables identified since the 1990s (e.g., executive function), and the active view includes some variables not yet well proven to play an important role in reading development (e.g., theory of mind).

Those concerns are bothersome, but only one shortcoming strikes me as being critical – and all these models suffer from that one. All three of these are models of reading, not of reading instruction or learning to read. They describe the process of reading, the abilities one must marshal to read. But they have little to say about what a school district or even a classroom teacher needs to do to raise reading achievement.

I think you might find helpful my Reading Improvement Wheels – a model of school reading improvement.  

When it comes to what we can do directly with children to improve reading achievement there are three things that make a difference: the amount of instruction that we provide, the content or curriculum of that instruction, and the quality of the delivery of that content. Those variables are especially productive because they represent variables that if altered will change the students’ experience.

All things being equal, the teacher who keeps her kids on task 94% of the time is going to end up with higher achievement, than the teacher who only manages to accomplish that 62% of the time. Likewise, the teacher who engages students in learning how to read (like those abilities included in those three processing models) will be more successful than the teacher who emphasizes other stuff during the Language Arts block. And, the teacher who has clear purposes, explains things well, and provides kids with lots of opportunity to respond will out teach those who do not manage to do those things.

As such those models of reading advise what should be included in a curriculum – what we should try to teach the students to know or do – but they don’t emphasize how much attention we should pay those curricular components or how they may most effectively be delivered. Teachers often under- or overvalue some components, according too much time to some and too little to others. Seemingly, their actions are consonant with the various models – they are teaching items from the models, but mis-dosage can easily undermine success, as would a lack of quality in lesson delivery.

There is another whole tier of variables that should be attended to as well. These variables are important, but they are not as powerful as time, curriculum, and quality of instruction. They are secondary in nature. They can be successful in delivering higher reading achievement but only to the extent that they alter time, curriculum, and quality.

Think about it. If your school provides teachers with the highest quality professional development, it can only improve reading to the extent that it increases the amount of instruction, better focuses that instruction on essential curriculum goals, and/or improves the quality of the learning experience for students.

If any teacher comes away from that training not wanting to implement it for some reason, then it will have none of those outcomes – which means achievement won’t improve since the PD won’t have affected the children’s experience.

The same can be said about several other of these useful, but decidedly subsidiary school improvement levers. There is evidence supporting the potential value of leadership/supervision, parent involvement, textbooks/programs, assessments, special programs, and motivational efforts for improving reading achievement.

But none of these variables directly impacts student learning. They all operate through their ability to influence amount of instruction, content of instruction, or quality of instruction. These outer ring actions always must exert their impact, if there is impact, through some intermediary person or process. The best textbook program in the world will only work to the extent that teachers are willing and able to implement it. Supervision can only improve achievement if it leads to better implementation; and so on. As such, none of these secondary variables has the power to raise reading achievement – at least not directly – and all of them can do so if the intermediary person or process comes through.  

My Reading Improvement Wheel is meant to help you to think about these different types of school improvement variables. The students are in the middle. It is their learning that matters. The golden circle includes those three potent aspects of student experience that teachers and parents can shape. Appropriately, the golden circle is the one closest to the children, summarizing their academic learning experiences; experiences that can impact learning directly.

The outer blue ring includes those levers that we use to try to influence what happens in classrooms. These variables tend to have lesser effects when it comes to learning, since they only work to the extent to which they alter children’s experiences. If you download the circle and put in slide show mode, click the model snd the outer ring will rotate. This is important because each of those variables in the blue circle may affect any and all of the variables in the golden circle.

My advice? Start with the Wheels and determine what actions you intend to take to raise reading achievement, considering how that is all going to work. Think about how you will ensure that your actions on the perimeter will collaborate powerfully enough to exert changes in the inner circle. Then think about how you would organize the information in those reading process models to support instruction – Which lessons in the textbooks connect with those variables? How much time should teachers devote to these? How will teachers know these are being learned? What will they need to know to present such lessons effectively? How will supervisors monitor and shape students’ learning experience? How can parents contribute?

In other words, providing teachers with any of these models of reading processing will only be helpful if they can be translated into instructional actions that teachers can implement in their classrooms. Those models address only a small amount of what needs to be considered (they suggest, in broad strokes, some of the content for that curriculum variable in the golden circle – though they do not even attempt to organize that information in any way that would guide teachers in how to address these abilities in the classroom.


READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

Recently, I saw results of a meta-analysis that showed phonics instruction to have a much smaller effect size (.19) than many other approaches to reading instruction. Doesn’t that mean that we are overdoing phonics? If we want to improve reading comprehension it looks like it would make more sense to emphasize motivation, fluency, and inferencing than teaching phonics.

RELATED: Which Reading Model Would Best Guide Our School Improvement Efforts?

Shanahan responds:

In 1986, Gough and Tunmer presented a model indicating that reading comprehension was the product of decoding ability (the ability to translate written or printed text into oral language – that is, the skills that would allow someone to read a text aloud) and language comprehension ability (listening comprehension which would allow an understanding of that oral rendition of text).

According to this so-called “simple view,” reading comprehension could be completely explained by those two sets of abilities – decoding and language comprehension.

Over time, data have accumulated supporting the key roles of both decoding and language in reading (Hoover & Tunmer, 2021; Sleeman, Everatt, Arrow, & Denston, (2022), and indicating diagnostic and pedagogical benefits to the scheme.

Nevertheless, the theory tends to break down around the edges.

Oral language and written language operate somewhat differently (Daniels & Bright, 1996) – complicating the idea that reading comprehension is no more than a listening skills applied to text. There are vocabulary words that appear often in text, but rarely in oral language (e.g., occur, peruse, enumerate, venerate). Likewise, written sentence complexity often outstrips what we confront orally. Reading is like oral language, but mostly when we are being lectured – think about the sustained attention and memory demands of listening to an extended monologue. Oral language usually tends more to dialogue, reading to monologue. Also, oral language tends to allow for interaction between speaker and listener; not so much in reading (Olson, 1994). Treating oral language development as the sole basis of reading comprehension would fall woefully short.

The simple view is not especially specific about the skills included in either of those two constellations. Does phonemic awareness belong in decoding? What about the roles of reasoning and knowledge in listening comprehension? How do I know if I’m omitting a critical part of decoding or language?

Another complaint is that the model makes it look like decoding and language are equivalent – in what it takes to learn them, in their developmental horizons, and so on (Catts, 2018). Many children, perhaps most, can gain full benefits of decoding instruction during the first two or three years of school. Who would claim this to be true of language development?  

Perhaps most damning is that statistical analyses of reading can't account for all the variation in reading ability with those two sets of variables alone (Wagner, Beal, Zirps, & Spencer, 2021). In fact, according to that rigorous analysis, the simple view only accounts for a bit more than half the reading variation – suggesting the need for additional variables or different ways of measuring the variables already identified.

In response to these limitations, Duke and Cartwright (2021) have advanced a more elaborate model of reading. Their Active View Model is more specific about what goes in those word reading and language comprehension bubbles. With their model you don’t need to guess about that. Enumerating those items complicates things, a bit, and evidentiary support for individual items is pretty uneven. Some of the variables have a great deal of research support, others not so much (as of yet, anyway).

Duke and Cartwright also have included domains not part of the simple view. For instance, their model includes an Executive Function bubble that oversees word reading and comprehension. Another new category holds variables that don’t fit neatly into either word reading or language. For example, research has found that vocabulary plays important roles both in decoding and comprehension. Two-headed abilities like that populate a “bridge variables” constellation.

Just as one can marshal evidence that both decoding and language comprehension are important parts of reading – one can provide similar evidence for the active view variables.

The study that you noted (Burns, Duke, & Cartwright, 2023) was such an attempt.

These researchers examined relevant meta-analyses reported since 2006 – a rather arbitrary cut point (and one particularly unfortunate for the decoding variables). Doing it that way ensures that the largest body of research on elementary phonics instruction (the National Reading Panel Report) would be omitted from consideration.

If this study was aimed at understanding the impacts of phonics instruction, this approach would likely have been shot down by reviewers. A major concern with meta-analysis is sampling error. Ignoring a major corpus of data without persuasive theoretical and/or methodological reasons would be unacceptable.

However, their purpose was not to be comprehensive or even to suggest the relative importance of the variables in the model. They simply wanted to demonstrate that each of the constellations was supported by some empirical evidence. If all the phonics studies were included, the overall effect size might have been a bit bigger – it certainly wouldn’t have been lower. But the absence of those data wouldn’t alter the point that the major domains included in the active view are supported by evidence; that would be also be true if the phonics effect size had turned out to be much larger.

This study accomplished its goals – it showed that the active view provides an efficient and coherent compendium of reading abilities (at least in terms of those major domains.

Perhaps this model will generate useful research or curriculum development going forward.  But remember it’s just a model, and a partial one at that. This model is more complete than the simple view and does a better job of accommodating some of the knowledge about reading that has been developed over the past several decades. But it doesn’t suggest anything about how these variables fit together, how their relative importance changes with development, or many other issues relevant to reading instruction.

Other reasons not to be overly concerned about the relatively low phonics effect size in this study?:

1.     The study put forth two phonics effect sizes: the one you noted for average readers, and one for striving readers. That second effect size, the one for the strivers, was .48. That put phonics in the top tier of interventions for kids who struggle with reading. That effect size is based on 32 independent studies (the .19 was based on only 8), and remember, these effects were in terms of impact on reading comprehension or overall reading achievement – not on decoding.

2.     The reporting of this study poses some important challenges to scholars, since it is difficult to identify which studies contributed to these main effects estimates. Usually in a meta-analysis, the studies are chosen because they provide data about the effect of a particular variable or approach. In this case, there are 12 variables for which main effects are reported based on data from 27 meta-analyses. But there is no linkage between the studies and the outcomes. That makes it almost impossible to evaluate the appropriateness of the analyses for any of the variables.

3.     An example, of the kind of further analysis that would be needed to evaluate a specific statistic like effect size for phonics instruction is posed by the Galuschka et al. (2014) meta-analysis. Galuschka combined the effects of studies that I would think of as learning trials, rather than efforts to raise general reading comprehension or overall reading achievement. Some of the phonics studies included in that meta considered instruction in which the “phonics” entailed no more than 4 half-hour lessons in which students memorized 25 two-letter syllables each day. I couldn’t figure out how any of the studies in that meta-analysis fit the purpose or selection standards of this Burns et al. study. My concerns about the inclusion of that odd meta-analysis doesn’t alter my overall estimate of the value of the Burns study, but it reveals why I wouldn’t be overly concerned about a specific effect size being higher or lower than you anticipated given that it isn't clear which data contributed to it.

4.     Another example of my concerns about the original meta-analyses that were the basis of this study is presented by the Suggate, 2016 study. My concern about that one is that it focused on long-term benefits of skills (most of the other meta-analyses were more immediate in,focus). Including long-term outcomes for some variables, but not for others presents an an unfortunate confound if the purpose was to compare variables – as it would suppress the relative impact of some variables. This is especially challenging given the odd classifications of original studies in the Suggate meta. For example, several studies conducted by Patricia Vadasy and her colleagues were classified as fluency interventions – not phonics, despite their focus on phonemic awareness, phonics, and code-oriented instruction (not fluency). This apparent misclassification may matter since these studies reported some of the biggest effect sizes in that analysis.

5.     Another problem for the Burns et al. study is its failure to focus on interventions that addressed a single issue. Motivation, for example, was rarely if ever a variable on its own. A study included in the motivation set might have taught reading comprehension strategies along with some student choices for books, while the control groups received neither the strategy teaching, those books, or the chance to make choices. Attributing outcomes from such studies to motivation alone is misleading.

6.     The developmental nature of reading raises additional concerns. Decoding has been identified as a skill set with a relatively low ceiling. The importance or value of phonics instruction depends upon how well students can decode. Young children are likely to benefit more from phonics than older ones. Struggling readers will usually benefit more from such teaching than average readers, especially with older students. Just comparing effect sizes across very different interventions with very different samples of students cannot provide meaningful relative estimates of importance. (This is also true for vocabulary and fluency development – their value in supporting comprehension changes over time.)

7.     Decoding is often described by scientists as a necessary but insufficient condition. That is, you can’t learn to read without learning to decode, but learning to decode will not be sufficient to make you a reader. This is like the food groups in nutrition. No nutritionist would ask, “Which food groups do we need to provide children?” They would recognize it as a trick question – to be healthy kids need all of these food groups, of course – it isn’t a competition between proteins and carbohydrates. In reading, making sure all kids reach threshold levels of decoding ability (Wang, Sabatini,  O'Reilly, & Weeks, 2019) should be a non-negotiable -- no matter the relative effect sizes in this kind of rough analysis.

8.     The simple view is unable to account for all the variance in reading ability, which makes the identification of a more complete model a worthwhile pursuit. The active view model seems to provide greater completeness. However, this first attempt to quantify the additional power that this model provides for explaining variation in reading attainment is not convincing. The new model with its new domains and it additional variables was only able to pick up an additional 2% of variance. This 2% was statistically significant, but I am dubious as to its eduational importance. Given the problems with this analysis, I suspect the 2% added value is meaningless. That rather modest supposed added value wouldn't convince me to treat decoding or language differently than in the past. 

Basically, this study has nothing to say about the relative value of phonics instruction (or of instruction of any of the dozen variables it included).

References

Burns, M. K., Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2023). Evaluating components of the active view of reading as intervention targets: Implications for social justice. School Psychology, 38(1), 30-41. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000519

Catts, H. W. (2018). The Simple View of Reading: Advancements and False Impressions. Remedial and Special Education, 39(5), 317–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932518767563

Daniels, P. T., & Bright, W. (Eds.). 1996. The world's writing systems. New York: Oxford University Press.

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

Gough, P., & Tunmer, W. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6–10.

Hoover, W. A., & Tunmer, W. E. (2021). The primacy of science in communicating advances in the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.446

Olson, D. R. (1994). The world on paper: The conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sleeman, M., Everatt, J., Arrow, A., & Denston, A. (2022). The identification and classification of struggling readers based on the simple view of reading. Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 28(3), 256-275. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1719

Wagner, R. K., Beal, B., Zirps, F. A., & Spencer, M. (2021). A model-based meta-analytic examination of specific reading comprehension deficit: How prevalent is it and does the simple view of reading account for it? Annals of Dyslexia, 71(2), 260-281. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-021-00232-2

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. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000302

Our school is trying to follow the science of reading. We are teaching phonemic awareness and phonics in Grades K-2 and assessing student progress in those skills throughout those grade levels. However, we don’t begin to assess or teach fluency until mid-first grade. Are we doing it right?

RELATED: What about the new research that says phonics instruction isn’t very important?

Shanahan response:

I think it’s okay to neglect fluency instruction until later in first grade, at least with most students. However, I suspect that you’re missing out on a valuable opportunity to teach your students to read disfluently. I hope I can convince you to devote some of your instructional time to developing the kind of disfluency that research has identified as having an important role in early reading development. Once kids are sufficiently disfluent, it would be an appropriate time to start up the fluency teaching. (I've come to think of this work as the "roots of fluency."

First, let’s think about fluency instruction and why it matters.

The earliest explanation of fluency teaching that I ever encountered was written by Carol Chomsky (1978). Her concerns were with third graders who knew their phonics skills, but who were low in reading achievement. She focused on the idea of teaching these students to implement their decoding skills with text by having the kids read and reread the text.

And, it worked.

Research (National Reading Panel, 2000) has shown that various approaches to having students read and reread text aloud help students to read more proficiently (usually as measured by reading comprehension tests). But as you point out, the research record on such instruction doesn’t begin until later in Grade 1.

This kind of practice both helps kids to learn some of the words (Rashotte & Torgeson, 1985), and to apply and integrate the decoding skills that enable one to read and comprehend text.

However, there is another body of research.

It focuses on something called fingerpoint reading.

This refers to children’s ability to match or synchronize spoken words to written words in text.

Let’s say a group of kindergartners have memorized, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The teacher then provides them with a written version.

            Mary had a little lamb,

            Its fleece were white as snow.

            And everywhere that Mary went

            The lamb was sure to go.

She wants the children to recite the memorized poem and to point to each word as they say them.

Some children say, “Mary,” and point to the letter ‘M”. They then say “had” and point at the “a.” Others say, “Ma-ry” and point to “Mary” and “had” in turn, as they say each syllable.

Of course, the goal is for kids to match the oral words to the written words – pointing 5 times in that first line, not 18 times (the letters), or 7 times (the syllables), or 4 times (ignoring the little words). To do that, students must know the purpose of those spaces between words, the sound-symbol correspondences of those first letters, some simple words (e.g., had a), and recognize that some words are multisyllabic (Mesmer & Lake, 2010). Students must know those things and be able to coordinate them successfully.

The research shows just that (Uhry, 1999; Uhry, 2002). Fingerpoint reading – like text reading fluency – requires the application and integration of multiple skills, in this case, knowledge of the alphabet, a degree of phonemic awareness, some understanding of syllabication, insights about the spaces between words in print, and so on.

“Pure letter name or sound instruction does not readily transfer to reading and spelling without instruction and practice in using alphabet knowledge for these purposes” (Piasta & Wagner, 2010, p. 494). Thus, engaging students in activities that facilitate fingerpoint reading may serve as an important bridge or scaffold for phonemic awareness development (Morris, Bloodgood, Perney, 2003; Morris, Bloodgood, Lomax, & Perney, 2003), or may mark the beginnings of moving children from print into meaning (Ehri & Sweet, 1991).

I believe that engaging kids in fingerpoint reading – and activities the teaching that supports it – can beworthwhile.

However, that means encouraging kids to read – initially – in a somewhat choppy, word-for-word way. When young kids pretend to read, they can often make the text sound like language, fluently telling the story. But such reading, rarely entails much attention to the actual words on the page. Fingerpoint reading requires that students learn to coordinate those skills and pay attention to the print, rather than the pictures.

I have one caution here. Although there are several studies that have shown that an understanding of the concept of word (Bowling & Cabell, 2019; Flanigan, K. (2007; Roberts, 1992) and the ability to point to words during reading are skills that fit well statistically into early reading development models, there are no studies showing that if you engage kids in such activities or try to facilitate kids learning of these particular skills that they necessarily will do better in learning to read. There are good reasons to think that would be the case (and personal experience tells me that it would be), but as of yet there is no direct experimental evidence.

As regular readers of this blog know, I usually limit my recommendations to actions that instructional research has shown to improve reading achievement. Some of you might choose to ignore my advice on this one for that reason (and that, to my way of thinking, is quite reasonable). However, the existing correlational and descriptive data, the judgment of colleagues who tend to be right about such things, my own teaching judgments and observations, and the fact that the kinds of activities that it takes to enable kids to fingerpoint properly are generally beneficial to phonemic sensitivity and decoding ability have convinced me that this is a reasonably good bet.

How do you teach kids to read disfluently initially?

First, make sure you are successfully teaching its component skills – it is hard to apply and coordinate skills that you don’t possess. Teach the ABCs, teach the letter sounds and beginning decoding, teach phonemic awareness, teach some of those simple high frequency words, make sure your students can perceive syllables, and encourage them to memorize poems, nursery rhymes, and songs.

Then, involve students in tasks that require them to think about the words in texts. Many parents and teachers point to the words when they are doing book sharing with children. These kinds of read alouds can draw kids’ attention to print and may give them an initial sense that the words are separable.

Another, possibility is to have students dictate language experience stories, transcribe these, and engage the students in “reading” them. This kind of reading is more like remembering, since the text is a transcription of the students’ own words, but it creates a great opportunity for matching words to text.

You can also engage in the Mary’s-Little-Lamb task described above to explain what you want kids to do. Memorizing poems and songs are helpful language activities, and this work can then offer useful contexts for trying to match fingerpointing to pronunciations.

Encourage young students to write – to write stories or retell events in their lives, to label pictures, to make signs, and so on. Encourage them to spell words the way they think they are spelled and support their attempts to use the letters and sounds. This kind of activity bolsters phonemic awareness and phonics and requires students to contemplate where words begin and end.

Involve students in sentence building with word cards. As children, learn words (both from memorization and decodable texts), they should be able to assemble sentences – emphasizing the idea that sentences are made of separable words.

Those kinds of activities should facilitate your students figuring out how words work in text. That should enable the kids to recite text while pointing to the proper words. That will sound pretty choppy, but it is an important milestone. When your students can do that kind of word-by-word “reading,” successfully pointing to each word as they recite or remember, then you can start to think about addressing text reading fluency -- building up accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. For most kids, that will likely be sometime during first semester of grade one.


READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Bowling, E. C. C., & Cabell, S. Q. (2019). Developing readers: Understanding concept of word in text development in emergent readers. Early Childhood Education Journal, 47(2), 143-151. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-018-0902-1

Chomsky, C. (1978). When you still can’t read in third grade: After decoding, what? In S. J. Samuels (Ed.), What research has to say about reading instruction (pp. 13-30). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Ehri, L. C., & Sweet, J. (1991). Fingerpoint-reading of memorized text: What enables beginners to process the print? Reading Research Quarterly, 26(4), 442-462. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/747897

Flanigan, K. (2007). A concept of word in text: A pivotal event in early reading acquisition. Journal of Literacy Research, 39(1), 37-70.

Mesmer, H. A. E., & Lake, K. (2010). The role of syllable awareness and syllable-controlled text in the development of finger-point reading. Reading Psychology, 31(2), 176-201. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710902754341

Morris, D., Bloodgood, J., & Perney, J. (2003). Kindergarten predictors of first- and second-grade reading achievement. Elementary School Journal, 104(2), 93-109. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/499744

Morris, D., Bloodgood, J. W., Lomax, R. G., & Perney, J. (2003). Developmental steps in learning to read: A longitudinal study in kindergarten and first grade. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(3), 302-328. doi:https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.38.3.1

Rashotte, C., & Torgesen, J. K. (1985). Repeated reading and reading fluency in learning disabled children. Reading Research Quarterly, 20, 180-188.

Roberts, B. (1992). The evolution of the young child's concept of word as a unit of spoken and written language. Reading Research Quarterly, 27(2), 124-138. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/747682

Uhry, J. K. (1999). Invented spelling in kindergarten: The relationship with finger-point reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11(5-6), 441-464. doi:https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008032502132

Uhry, J. K. (2002). Finger-point reading in kindergarten: The role of phonemic awareness, one-to-one correspondence, and rapid serial naming. Scientific Studies of Reading, 6(4), 319-342. doi:https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532799XSSR0604_02

I recently read an interview that you did. When you talk about kids needing to recognize when they don’t know a word and how to figure it out – did you mean to leave them on their own to do that? When you mention ‘passive scaffolding’ it makes me think you do. I know a lot about vocabulary instruction and my view of passive scaffolding as a first-line technique is pretty dim. Glossaries or dictionaries are frustrating. What kids need is to be able to integrate relevant aspects of word meaning into the context to come up with an understanding of what the sentence means and how it adds to understanding of the text overall. And helping students cultivate that ability is best achieved through teacher-student interactions, questioning and discussion. Am I misunderstanding your views on this?

RELATED: Why I Encourage Teaching Children to Read Disfluently

Shanahan responds:

I believe good vocabulary instruction has five goals: (1) Increase the numbers of words that children know and the richness of their understanding of those words; (2) Build an understanding of morphology (the meaningful parts of words and how words relate and make meaning); (3) Develop an ability to infer or estimate word meaning on the basis of context; (4) Foster an appreciation of diction and awareness of how words convey tone and an author’s attitude; and, (5) To teach students to use dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauruses effectively. A good regime of vocabulary instruction will try to accomplish all of those.

My comments in that interview were focused specifically on goal 3, teaching students to use context to determine the meanings of unknown words that readers may confront in text. My belief is that most reading programs tend to include a handful of context exercises and then undermine those lessons with how they guide reading the rest of the year.

Think about it.

The publisher or teacher tries to anticipate words that students might not know in an upcoming reading selection. This prediction invariably leads to pre-reading lessons aimed at building familiarity with those likely-to-be-unknown words. This makes a certain kind of sense. To the extent that the kids manage to learn the words their reading comprehension of that text should be elevated.

But I don’t think that’s the right goal.

I don’t care how well the students comprehend a story that I’m teaching. At least not initially. I do care about what they learn that will help them to read successfully on their own.

To me that means that those kinds of words should not necessarily be pre-taught.

Someone should take a good look at the text. Can the meanings of any of those words be figured out from context (or from morphological analysis)? If they can be, then those words should not be pre-taught.

We need to give students a chance to deal with such of words in real reading situations.

Think questions – not reading preparation lessons.

If a word’s meaning can be determined from context, the teacher should be prepared with a question that will reveal whether students got it. If they did, that’s great. There’s nothing more to be done.

But if they don’t, then teachers need to take them back to the text and guide their efforts to determine the meaning. In some cases, this might be a demonstration. In other cases, the teacher may point out the key information. In still others, it might be nothing more than a direction to reread the sentence or paragraph.

That’s what I mean by passive scaffolding. The teacher should know what she is trying to teach – she wants the kids to use context to determine word meanings. The students, however – in this kind of lesson – won’t even know which words the teacher has focused on. Their task isn’t to use context, like in a worksheet exercise, but to read the text with comprehension. That’s why I prefer questions about the text rather than questions about the words.

For example, look at the following sentence that I lifted from a fourth-grade text:

When the prairie plants were uprooted, the animals that depended on them lost their food source.

Students, I think, can get the meaning of “uprooted” from the context, the morphology, or a combination of the two. Of course, I can ask students right out, “What does uprooted mean?” Or, “What does the author mean by uprooted?” Those are legitimate vocabulary questions.

However, my preference would be a question like, “What caused the animals to lose their food source?” That is not a direct vocabulary question, but a comprehension question that can only be answered by dealing with the vocabulary.

If the student answers, “Because the prairie plants were uprooted,” then I’ll ask directly about the meaning of that word. Or, if they say, “Because the prairie plants died,” I might ask, what word did the author use to reveal that fact.

The point is to get them to use the vocabulary to make sense of the text and those kinds of questions guide them to think about the word meanings in a comprehension-centric fashion.

Defining words is just one of many skills that one must orchestrate during a successful read. The teacher should only scaffold if the students fail to make sense of what the author was trying to communicate with that word. That’s what makes it passive. The teacher is observing carefully and responding to student behavior, not trying to lead things or to head things off.

That doesn’t mean there is no place for introducing some words prior to reading. Not all words can be kenned through context or morphology, so giving kids a leg up on a challenging text is very reasonable – especially if you think those are valuable words.

That doesn’t mean that there is no place for worksheets or digital exercises for practicing with context or morphology. But students need support in using context and morphology in real reading situations, too. You can’t provide that kind of support if you’re always pre-introducing the words, trying to avoid a problem instead of getting the kids to confront it.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t still teach those words that you had the students deal with through context or morphology. The meaning of those words can be reinforced through direct instruction after the reading.

If I understand your concern:

No, my point was not to suggest that just having kids read would be sufficient to build vocabulary skills. As a student myself, I read a lot, but paid little attention to word meanings. If I didn’t know a word, I just kept rolling. My comprehension didn’t take off until I made a concerted effort to expand my vocabulary – an effort that included being sensitive to unknown words, using context and dictionaries to figure them out, and lots of drill and practice. With that kind of regimen, my reading comprehension soared.

I had to do that on my own.

Our students should have more help than that, including that kind of passive or responsive vocabulary teaching. I think the confusion has to do with the word, “passive.” The lesson is passive from the students’ point of view since no one is going to tell them ahead of time the purpose of the lesson or the words that are the focus of this part of the lesson. But what is passive for the student is highly active for the teacher. She has familiarized herself with the affordances of the text and is going to probe to determine whether the students successfully made use of these affordances to comprehend the text. If not, she is ready to intervene with teaching geared to getting students to address that omission. Her teaching is responsive (perhaps a better description) and, yet, her watchfulness is not that general attentiveness to teachable moments, but a highly focused sensitivity to specific student behaviors in very specific parts of the text.


READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

How expressive should young children’s reading be? We are told that oral reading fluency consists of accuracy, rate, and prosody, but our monitoring tests only consider accuracy and rate. Does prosody matter in first and second grade and if it does how do we measure it?

RELATED: What is linguistic comprehension in the simple view of reading?

Shanahan responds:

Experts have long accepted the idea that oral reading fluency (ORF) or, these days, “text reading fluency”, improves simultaneously with reading development. As readers progress, they can read more words accurately, they are able to do this with less conscious effort (automaticity), and their prosody gets better, too.

The funny thing is that no one questions whether those accuracy or automaticity gains are central to reading development. The benefits of teaching kids to recognize words proficiently seems obvious to everyone.

But the role of prosody is not as well accepted.

Some experts view prosody as no more than a positive side effect. These experts believe that when students can read with comprehension, they’ll automatically make the text sound meaningful. Their advice to teachers?  Don’t sweat the prosody!

While other authorities believe prosody is just like accuracy and automaticity – if prosody doesn’t improve, then reading can’t get better either. According to this view, teachers should try to teach prosody.

My sense is that more and more, the evidence is coming down on the “prosody matters” side.

So, what is prosody?

The National Reading Panel described prosody rather straightforwardly as “proper expression.” I wrote that definition myself, but when I talk to teachers (and kids) I tend to offer an even more down to earth explanation… it just means “making the text sound like spoken language.” (Don’t take me too literally on that… when I read silently, I want the text in my head to sound like spoken language, too.)

For a more scholarly definition, I turn to Melanie Kuhn and her colleagues: Prosody is “appropriate expression or intonation coupled with phrasing that allows for maintenance of meaning” (Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, & Meisinger, 2010). This, they clarify, includes variations in frequency or pitch, duration of vowels, stress on syllables, and pausing. They believe that these prosodic features are used to break up or parse text into meaningful units, to manage the information included in the syntax of the sentences and the discourse properties of the text (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008).  

Given that definition, then text reading fluency is about both decoding and comprehending. That’s why, in the Active Model of Reading (Duke & Cartwright, 2021), fluency is included in the “Bridging Variables” category – the place for variables that are both fish and fowl.

The earliest conjectures on the value of fluency instruction focused on decoding alone: fluency practice increases sight vocabulary (Rashotte & Torgesen, 1985), enhances the ability to apply phonics skills (Chomsky, 1978), and supports automaticity development (Samuels, 1979). Each of these claims, hypothesizes fluency to be about better decoding, which in turn might enable better comprehension. Fluency practice, then, was not expected to have any direct impact on understanding.

Accordingly, it shouldn’t be surprising that most studies of fluency teaching have focused either on beginning readers or struggling readers (National Reading Panel, 2000), those students most likely to need attention to their decoding skills.

But more recent research shows that text reading fluency is more closely related to reading comprehension than is word reading fluency (Kim, 2015; Wise, et al., 2010). You wouldn’t expect to see that kind of difference if text fluency was nothing more than decoding. If word reading fluency and text reading fluency were the same, they’d have a similar relationship with comprehension. But that’s not the case. Something else is evidently going on in text reading that doesn’t happen in word reading, and it appears that this difference is bound up in the prosody part of fluency.

Recent research shows there to be a significant, though moderate relationship between prosody and comprehension (Wolters, Kim, & Szura, 2022). I don’t think we should expect more than that from prosody since other factors that play a role in comprehension, too.

Complicating matters here is the fact that prosody is a complex variable with multiple parts, and – at this point – with unclear connections among those parts. Scientists are still trying to figure out the best way to measure each of those parts.

In any event, the durations and frequencies of pausing, intonation, expressiveness, smoothness, and pitch are complicated things to measure, especially in the varying contexts that different texts present.

The reading of more difficult text leads to less prosodic reading and no one knows what reader-text match is most appropriate for estimating prosody properly. Perhaps the best estimate would come not from the reading of a single text or even from an average of multiple readings of texts at a given level. Maybe it would entail multiple readings of different levels of text or some kind of improvement score based upon rereading.

An important finding that Wolters and company (2022) reported was that, at this point, the prosody rating scales do better than the more technical spectrogram assessments that more precisely measure sound waves to the milliseconds. That’s good to know. It suggests that teachers can monitor prosody sufficiently by listening to students’ oral reading and rating its quality.

My favorite among the rating schemes?

For classroom use, I prefer the simplest one. I think teachers would be most able and willing to use the National Assessment’s scale (Daane, Campbell, Grigg, Goodman, & Oranje, 2005). I’ve used it myself in many schools and have found it to be satisfactory.

The NAEP measure one is a 4-point-scale and it focuses mainly on pausing, a variable with a clear relationship to reading comprehension. Rather than trying to quantify expressiveness (since our goal isn’t to get kids to deliver lines like Jack Nicholson or Meryl Streep), this approach emphasizes how the words are grouped by the students.  

If a text is read choppily word by word, it is rated a 1.

If the pauses usually come every second or third word but without attention to the grammar or punctuation, that reading gets a 2.

Both of those scores show disfluency that would be expected to undermine or interfere with comprehension.

Threes and 4s reflect pauses between multiword segments, but most importantly, these pauses reflect the punctuation and grammar of the sentences. The text so read will sound meaningful.

If you listen to that kind of reading, you can grasp the meaning by ear without having the text before you. It’s hard to do that when the pausing merits lower ratings.

Obviously, there is more to prosody than pausing. But pausing seems to be a powerful proxy for the whole thing. Kids who aren’t pausing in appropriate places probably aren’t doing much else to make the text meaningful.

Here’s a sentence that I have taken from a fourth-grade reading textbook: Good business is not always about the bottom line.

Here are four ways this text may be read. The slashing lines show the pauses, and the numbers indicate their ratings.

1.     Good // business // is not // always // about the // bottom // line.

2.     Good // business is // not always // about the // bottom// line.

3.     Good business // is not // always about the // bottom line.

4.     Good business // is not always about // the bottom line.

The differences may not seem especially great when considering only one 9-word sentence, but now imagine that you are reading (or listening to) an entire passage presented in those ways – along with the word reading errors, repetitions, and intonation problems that are also likely to accompany these pausing patterns.

You ask how expressive your students should be? My response is that their oral reading should suggest that they are understanding what they are reading. These renditions should be adequate to support a listener’s comprehension as well. If it doesn’t sound like the student understands the text, then it lacks sufficient prosody.

Teachers should listen for those kinds of weaknesses and should provide students with instruction aimed at helping them to do better.

One instructional approach found to improve the prosody of early readers is repeated reading (Logan, 1997; Stoddard, Valcante, Sindelar, O'Shea, & et al., 1993). Having students read texts aloud that they cannot already read well – and doing so two or three times to try to read it better can have positive effects on accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. One small study found that having the kids work on their expressiveness during repeated reading improved comprehension (Calet, Pérez-Morenilla, & De los Santos-Roig, 2019). Such rereading practice may include encouraging kids to make questions sound like questions or using their voice to allow a listener to distinguish narration from dialogue.

Another successful approach is to provide guidance in how to group words within sentences.

One of my favorite studies of all time administered standardized reading comprehension tests to students. The test passages were either parsed for the students – marking where the pauses should go – or they weren’t. The kids who had the parsed texts outscored the others by a full grade level (Stevens, 1981)! Knowing where the pauses went had a powerful impact on these students’ abilities to answer questions about the text.

Studies have shown – though usually with older students – that we can teach students to chunk sentences into their meaningful parts (O’Shea & Sindelar, 1983). Do guided practice with that, help students to figure out where to pause, and how to recognize prepositional phrases (and other kinds of phrases). As with other kinds of teaching, your lessen the guidance as students gain proficiency.

I would do such work with texts that the class would otherwise be working with – such as this week’s reading selection or the chapter in our social studies book.

I know there are materials aimed at giving kids practice reading phrases. I know of no research into the effectiveness of such practice, though as students gain reading proficiency, the amount of time between the words in high frequency phrases declines. In other words, those phrases stat to become identifiable as phrases – and this occurs as early as Grade 1. That could mean that such phrase reading practice deserves some attention.

Also, there has been a good deal of work into sentence comprehension, and I suspect that, too, would help with prosody development. Here is a link to a recent blog I wrote on that subject: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/trying-again-what-teachers-need-to-know-about-sentence-comprehension

Remember, the point of all of this is to make the reading sound meaningful. If students can convert the words on the page into sentences that sound meaningful, they will then be on their way to fuller comprehension and better reading.

READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Calet, N., Pérez-Morenilla, M. C., & De los Santos-Roig, M. (2019). Overcoming reading comprehension difficulties through a prosodic reading intervention: A single-case study. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 35(1), 75-88. doi.org/10.1177/0265659019826252

Chomsky, C. (1978). When you still can’t read in third grade: After decoding, what? In S. J. Samuels (Ed)., What research has to say about reading instruction (pp. 13-30). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Daane, M.C., Campbell, J.R., Grigg, W.S., Goodman, M.J., & Oranje, A. (2005). Fourth-grade students reading aloud: NAEP 2002 special study of oral reading (NCES 2006-469). U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

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.org/10.1002/rrq.411

Kim, Y. G. (2015). Developmental, component?based model of reading fluency: An investigation of predictors of word?reading fluency, text?reading fluency, and reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(4), 459-481. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.107

Kuhn, M. R., Schwanenflugel, P. J., & Meisinger, E. B. (2010). Aligning theory and assessment of reading fluency: Automaticity, prosody, and definitions of fluency. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(2), 230-251. doi:https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.45.2.4

Logan, G.D. (1997) Automaticity and Reading: Perspectives from the Instance Theory of Automatization. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 13, 123-147. doi.org/10.1080/1057356970130203

Miller, J., & Schwanenflugel, P. J.  (2006). Prosody of syntactically complex sentences in the oral reading of young children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(4). doi:10.1037/0022-0663.98.4.839

Miller, J., & Schwanenflugel, P.J. (2008). A longitudinal study of the development of reading prosody as a dimension of oral reading fluency in early elementary schoolchildren. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(4), 336–354. Doi: 10.1598/RRQ.43.4.2

National Reading Panel. (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.

O’Shea, L. J., & Sindelar, P. T. (1983). The effects of segmenting written discourse on the reading comprehension of low- and high-performance readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 18, 458–465.

Rashotte, C. A., & Torgesen, J. K. (1985). Repeated reading and reading fluency in learning disabled children. Reading Research Quarterly, 20(2), 180-188. doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.20.2.4

Samuels, S. J. (1979). The method of repeated reading. Reading Teacher, 32(4), 403-408.

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., & et al. (1993). Increasing reading rate and comprehension: The effects of repeated readings, sentence segmentation, and intonation training. Reading Research and Instruction, 32(4), 53-65.  doi.org/10.1080/19388079309558133

Wise, J. C., Sevcik, R. A., Morris, R. D., Lovett, M. W., Wolf, M., Kuhn, M., . . . Schwanenflugel, P. (2010). The relationship between different measures of oral reading fluency and reading comprehension in second-grade students who evidence different oral reading fluency difficulties. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 41(3), 340-348. doi:https://doi.org/10.1044/0161-1461(2009/08-0093)

Wolters, A., Kim, Y.G., & Szura, J.W. (2022). Is reading prosody related to reading comprehension? A meta-analysis. Scientific Studies of Reading, 26(1), 1-20.

Are we supposed to teach reading strategies or not? I keep coming across contradictory information. Some writers say the research supports strategy teaching and some say that we should teach background information instead. I respect your opinion. What do you think?

RELATED: Can we really teach prosody and why would we want to?

Shanahan response:

Many studies – hundreds actually – have shown that teaching comprehension strategies can improve reading comprehension (Filderman, Austin, Boucher, O’Donnell, & Swanson, 2022; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). That’s a pretty strong argument for teaching strategies.

That’s why I’ve taught them to students myself.

That’s why I sometimes use them when I’m reading.

The first question to ask ourselves, it seems to me, is why do strategies help? How do they make someone a better reader?

I remember Dick Venezky telling me that one of the big benefits of phonics instruction was that it got kids to look at the words, to look at all the letters in the words. At the time, I thought that was glib. But over time, I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom in that explanation.

My answer for why and how strategies work is as glib as that.

Strategies do two things for readers.

First, they require readers to think about a text more than they would if they just read it.

If readers think more about the ideas in a text, they are more likely to remember them later. Strategies slow you down. It takes more time to read a text and implement a strategy than to only read the text.

Too many readers are satisfied with comprehending a text. They may understand it as they read, but they don’t retain the information. We use the term “reading comprehension” too generally. When we use it, we usually intend more than just understanding.

No, it often includes the idea that readers should remember what they read so that they can successfully answer questions, participate in discussions, or use the information in some other way.

Strategies arm readers with purposeful actions they can take before, during, and after reading. Basically, they get readers to think about the ideas more than once. They facilitate learning from text. (That’s why Ron Carver used to argue that the term comprehension strategies was a misnomer; he thought a more apt label was study skills, skills one would use to study a text or learn from it.)

The idea of strategies is to provide readers with the tools that will allow them to accomplish purposeful learning – and the tools work by slowing us down and getting us to think more than once about the ideas in the text. A rather blunt tool admittedly, but, according to the empirical studies, an effective one.

As such, strategies play a very different role in the reading process than knowledge.   

It should not be a choice between the two.

Second, strategies may also play a useful role in guiding student attention to key information in a text. (I tend to think of most strategies as “paying attention strategies.”)

When I’m reading something that is very hard for me, I write down the most important idea from each paragraph or section. That ensures that I pay attention to all the key ideas, without the details distracting me.

Other strategies encourage readers to depend on the author’s organizational scheme. Doing so focuses attention on certain key information that they may neglect without that strategy.

Further distinguishing knowledge and strategies in reading are those strategies that emphasize making connections between the text and the knowledge that we bring to the text.

Prediction, for instance, is a strategy that leads readers to anticipate what the author will reveal. Predictions require that readers combine information from the text with the knowledge they bring to the text. Predicting is a tool readers can apply in certain reading situations, but it can only work if there is relevant knowledge available.

Inferencing is another such strategy. Readers can be sensitized to the concept that texts won’t provide explicitly all the needed information so readers must draw inferences to fill in the blanks and make connections. But the inferencing strategy only works to the extent that there is background knowledge available from which to generate those inferences.

A third strategy that depends on knowledge and encourages readers to connect knowledge to text is comprehension monitoring. With this one, students are taught to pay attention to whether they are understanding a text or if it is making sense. Determining whether something makes sense means that you can compare it with some standard and that standard for this is the knowledge that you bring to the text.

In all these examples, the strategy gives the reader some insights about text (e.g., it has a structure, the text should make sense, text sometimes implies rather than states information) and some action steps that if taken will improve understanding and memory for what is read.

But none of these strategies pays off unless the reader possesses sufficient topical knowledge to make them work.

As such strategies are useful and knowledge is essential.

That sounds like reading lessons would be better off emphasizing the learning of content, rather than developing insights about text and reading and developing actions students can use in a purposeful way to think more about the text.

But that is not necessarily the case. Our emphasis on knowledge should not be the central goal of reading instruction. It should be the central goal of schooling. Yes, kids should read texts worth knowing in their reading lessons and they should be held accountable for the content learning that can be gained from such texts. But learning also needs to come from social studies, science, and the arts, as well as from all the other sources of information that children confront in the media, in their play activities and social interactions, and so on.

Reading strategies are something students are likely to learn only in a reading lesson. As such, they deserve special attention in those lessons.

I don’t accept the premise of what you are hearing – that reading lessons should either teach strategies or knowledge. They need to accomplish the former and contribute to the latter.

Although I didn’t cite many specific studies in this blog entry, it heavily benefited from the brilliant contributions of the late Ernst Z. Rothkopf, whose pioneering work on “mathemagenic activities” presaged all the strategy research in reading.


READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O’Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12^th grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163-184. doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups (00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Rothkopf, E. Z. (1970). The concept of mathemagenic activities. Review of Educational Research, 40(3), 325-336.

Rothkopf, E. Z. (2008). Reflections on the field: Aspirations of learning science and the practical logic of instructional enterprises. Educational Psychology Review, 20(3), 351-368. doi.org/10.1007/s10648-008-9076-5

Shanahan responds:

Generally, research has found that digital books are read with lower comprehension and more mind wandering (Clinton, 2019; Vargas, Ackerman, & Samerón, 2018). Admittedly, most evidence on this comes from studies of college students. However, even when the studies have focused on elementary age students, the results are the same. Kids don’t read as well digitally as they do more traditional text.  

Even more discouraging than studies showing lower comprehension with digital text, there is a small amount of data suggesting that the more time kids spend reading digitally in school, the lower their reading comprehension tends to be (Samerón, Vargas, Delgado, & Baron, 2023).

Why is this?

Adults and older students seem to have difficulty adjusting to demands when reading screens as opposed to book pages. For example, in one recent study (Delgado & Salmerón, 2021), students were asked to read either in a time pressured situation or in one with no time demands. They found that with traditional paper books, the students reduced their mind wandering under timed conditions. That didn’t happen when reading screens. Their mind wandering continued much as it had done when there was no time pressure, and comprehension fell accordingly.

Media often characterize kids as “digital natives,” distinct from we antediluvian grown-ups, as if being young conferred a predisposition to all things computer. Think of all those television shows and movies where the kids fix mom or dad’s phone in a nanosecond!

This research says adults don’t read screens as well as they do old-fashioned paper. And, neither do kids.

But to be fair, that isn’t really what you asked me.

Your question wasn’t whether kids do a good job reading digital text. No, you asked about whether digital text was useful for teaching students to read – quite a different matter in my opinion.

Personally, I used to do little digital text reading – rarely for work, never for pleasure. I still prefer hard copy, but I read a lot on my tablet. For some kinds of reading, I even prefer electronic text.

At one time, when someone would send me a PDF, I’d print it before taking it on. But someplace along the way, I stopped that intermediary step reading the electronic file instead of the paper.

And, for those who believe that reading instruction should be more about joy than the quotidian, it is worth noting the steady increase in the purchase of digital fiction. Whether some readers prefer electronic ink or are just giving in to the conveniences of this kind of text, clearly pleasure reading doesn’t preclude digital.

I bet many people have gone through – or are going through – some version of this transformation. That means kids will need to learn to read electronic text more successfully than they do now. If they don’t, they won’t succeed in academia or the workplace – futures for which we are supposedly preparing them.  

There have been many studies comparing digital and traditional reading, and that enterprise continues unabated. But there have been few studies exploring the advantages of digital reading – and even fewer (none?) aimed at identifying strategies readers could use to adjust their digital reading in ways that will allow it to be successful.

Introspection tells me that I tend to skim more with digital than paper text. I don’t know why, but I sense a kind of hurrying. Perhaps the electronic displays are harsh and less pleasant, so I try to move it along or surrender to mind wandering. That has been improving for me, but I’m not sure why? It could just be experience – I’m more used to the format – or it could be the adjustments that I’ve made to font size.  

Wouldn’t it be cool if the device itself monitored your speed and called it to attention in a 2001: Space Odyssey voice: “Dave, you read that screen faster than the last several. Did you mean to start skimming?”

Some research suggests that digital readers give in to distraction more, sliding into Google instead of maintaining their reading. Many of the digital mechanisms for children’s reading supplement the texts with games and puzzles and the like. Research shows that those mechanisms are more of a distraction, undermining reading comprehension rather than fortifying it (Furenes, Kucirkov, & Bus, 2021).

That tells me that electronic readers need to try to resist distraction, since giving into it has unfortunate consequences.

I suspect that my memory for what I read electronically may be a bit deficient, too. It seems to deteriorate more quickly. Highlighting text as I read and then reviewing those parts before I “close the book” helps. Kids are usually discouraged from highlighting school textbooks, but they can markup electronic copy to their hearts’ content and instruction can provide a helpful guide to that kind of annotation.

Unfortunately, many electronic books are not particularly flexible or supportive of highlighting, marginal notes, or annotation. Electronic publishers interested in the children’s market should be thinking how to facilitate better such reader-text interaction. Likewise, as helpful as the dictionary assistance is (it has been found to improve children’s vocabulary), it isn’t doing much to either improve comprehension or to help young readers to independence – such as guiding them to use context to determine word meanings or providing more precise and helpful definitions.

There is another kind of memory loss I have noticed. When reading traditional text my brain works a bit like a GPS device. It tells me that certain information was presented on the verso or recto page (left or right), near the top or near the bottom, and that sometimes allows me to go back and find something later. I can’t do that on my tablet. My memories don’t seem to have that kind of physical orientation. To regain that I find I need to find a more specific verbal link – memorizing an uncommon word or phrase, so that I can depend upon the marvelous search capacity of the computerized “books.”

I’m happy to encourage electronic publishers to improve their products, and researchers to explore how readers can effectively overcome the limitations of electronic reading. But those are seeds planted for the future – perhaps a far-off future.

What can teachers do now that will help?

1.     Reading instruction should focus on both electronic and paper texts.

2.     Teachers should be frank with students. They should let kids in on the fact that their comprehension is likely to be lower with a tablet or phone. Talking about the problem openly may help them to resist distraction and intensify effort.

3.     I’ve suggested here some adjustments that I have made to try to be more effective in digital reading, but don’t know whether these are helpful to others. I’d suggest encouraging kids to experiment with some of these kinds of ideas – and I’d also encourage some brainstorming on their part to see what works for them.

4.     Obviously, there is no research on much of what I have suggested here – very different from a usual Shanahan on Literacy blog. However, there is plenty of research that shows developing agency among learners can be motivational and can empower greater success with other tasks (e.g., Bandura, 2001; Winne, 2018). Maybe it isn’t too big a leap to see the consistency of these suggestions with that body of research.

I guess I’m saying that your school has done a good thing (I think), but it will only be a good idea if you and your colleagues figure out how best to make it work for learning. Otherwise, they’ve likely set your kids back a bit.


READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 1-26.

Clinton, V. (2019). Reading from paper compared to screens: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Reading, 42, 288-325. doi.org/10.1111/146-9817.12269

Delgado, P., & Salmerón, L. (2021). The inattentive on-screen reading: Reading medium affects attention and reading comprehension under time pressure. Learning and Instruction, 71, 13. doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2020.101396

Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., & Salmerón, L. (2018). Don’t throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23-28. doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003

Furenes, M. I., Kucirkova, N., & Bus, A. G. (2021). A comparison of children’s reading on paper versus screen: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 91(4), 483-517. doi.org/10.3102/0034654321998074

Salmerón, L., Vargas, C., Delgado, P., & Baron, N. (2023). Relation between digital tool practices in the language arts classroom and reading comprehension scores. Reading and Writing, 36, 175-194. doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10295-1

Winne, P. (2018). Cognition and metacognition within self-regulated learning. In D. Schunk & J. Greene (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation of learning and performance (2^nd ed., pp. 36-48). New York: Routledge.

I am an Assistant School Superintendent. We are moving toward explicit phonics instruction this year and are debating between using the nonsense words assessment or the decodable words assessment. Do you have thoughts about this? I have consulted with several people who I respect, and opinions are varied and passionate. 

RELATED: Is digital text a good idea for reading instruction?

Shanahan response:

I feel your pain.

Recently, a colleague asked me to make a similar recommendation to help figure out something about a grandchild’s reading. I suggested the use of DIBELS Nonsense Word test, given the specific purpose and its easy availability.

You’d have thought I’d recommended drowning kittens or banning the Barbie movie!

People do get passionate about the strangest things.

I try to save my passion for non-empirical questions (Go Cubs, go!). If we have data that will allow us to make a sound determination, I’d turn the heat down and try to follow the numbers. Remember this is about trying to do what’s best for kids. It is not an opportunity to vent your spleen or espouse your philosophy.

There are two different kinds of tests used to determine student progress in decoding. Both kinds have a proven ability to evaluate how well students are learning their phonics and both can predict later success with oral/text reading fluency and reading comprehension.

Word identification tests have been around for a long time – more than 100 years. Nonsense word or pseudoword tests are a newer development.

Researchers were concerned about the validity of word identification tests for determining the effectiveness of decoding instruction. Word identification tests often focus on irregular spellings (e.g., the, of, done), the kinds of words that are inconsistent with the spelling patterns usually stressed in phonics. Such tests couldn’t tell much about the effectiveness of phonics instruction. Even word tests with more common spellings were suspect. With such tests it was impossible to know if a student decoded a word or just remembered it from previous exposures.

The solution to the problem was the creation of nonsense word or pseudoword tests. Because the researcher (and, later, the test designer) constructs the words by mimicking English spelling patterns, there are no exceptional spellings, one offs, accidents of morphological history, and the like. Whether teachers are leading the kids to memorize Dolch or Fry list words or are just providing them with repeated exposure to certain words through phonics instruction, it was certain that the students wouldn’t have previously seen before letter combinations like dop, lan, or sepe. 

The idea was that a nonsense word measure would provide a purer look at how well students can decode, and their performance on such a test should reveal their decoding progress.

As is often the case, scientists often may identify a real problem, but solving it may not be so easy.  

At first blush, the nonsense test appeared to do a terrific job of assessing decoding ability, perhaps, more valid than the traditional word identification test.

Over time, their faults became evident.

Often, if teachers know that their students are to be evaluated with nonsense words, they start teaching them to the students. This teaching is a waste of time for producing readers and renders useless the intended improvement in test design. Researchers and school district administrators must be vigilant in discouraging teachers from fraudulently enhancing their students’ test performance. (I don’t think most teachers are intentionally trying to defraud – they just want to make sure their kids do well on the test, and teaching the specific test items seems logically to be the most direct route to that outcome.) well meaning but unfortunate

A more important issue has to do with the nature of decoding. There is more to decoding than pronouncing letter patterns. Pseudoword tests provide a useful assessment of that part of the process, but not of the rest.

As Richard L. Venezky so aptly described the process:

“A third function of phonics is to generate a pronunciation for a word…. This

function is problematic, in that the imperfections in English orthography make

such generation uncertain. If a word is totally unknown, the reader has little basis

for deciding whether any particular pronunciation is correct or not (Venezky, 1999, p. 202)

Phonics is a tool for helping readers to decode the words in a text. But that is a necessarily imperfect process due to the complexity of the English spelling system. Some “experts” throw up their hands, ready to surrender; for them, phonics would be useless because of the complexity of our spelling system. But as Venezky points out, readers don’t need to arrive at exact pronunciations. Reasonable approximations are good enough, and then the readers make adjustments and consider alternatives based on their knowledge of the English language.

Nonsense tests, by their very design, can tell us whether students have managed to master particular spelling patterns, but they prevent students from any kind of self-evaluation and adjustment of pronunciation, key aspects of decoding. As such, these tests may do a good job of evaluating student learning from a decoding program, but they are unlikely to do equally well in predicting later reading achievement, as measured by oral reading tests, or reading comprehension tests.

What do the research studies have to say about the usefulness of these measures?

For the most part, word identification tests and nonsense word reading tests tend to be interchangeable early on. There are copious amounts of validation data showing the value of both (e.g., Fien, Baker, Smolkowski, Kame'enui, & Beck, 2008; Vanderwood, Linklater, & Healy, 2008). They both work reasonably well (i.e., there are high correlations between these measures and other reading tests).

However, in direct comparisons in which students are taking both tests so that they can be evaluated head-to-head, the word identification tests tend to do a bit better. For example, in one well-done study it was found that word ID tests provided a “clearer index of reading growth” (Clemens, Shapiro, Wu, Taylor, & Caskie, 2014). Early in first grade, the tests were indistinguishable, but by second semester the word identification tests inched ahead.

Similarly, in a very large study of first graders (n = 3,506, from 50 schools), it was reported that the Nonsense word Fluency tests did the best job of predicting end of year reading fluency and comprehension for most kids (Fien, Park, Baker, Smith, Stoolmiller, & Kame'enui, 2010). There are other studies of this with similar results (e.g, Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2004). However, this was not true for the higher achieving students. As kids’ reading advanced, leaving out those word identification skills that Venezky noted becomes a real problem.

By third grade the correlations between NSW and word ID separate to a greater degree with the real word performance becoming the best predictor of ORF for most kids (Doty, Hixson, Decker, Reynolds, & Drevon, 2015).

Finally, a recent meta-analysis of data show that across many studies, word ID tends to have the best relationship with various reading outcomes (January & Klingbeil, 2020).

None of these differences just noted are especially large, though they are often statistically significant. Nevertheless, some authorities suggest including both in early reading inventories, and that makes a certain kind of sense since they tap a slightly different array of skills.

I certainly have no problem with ongoing monitoring of decoding skills with nonsense words, alongside a word reading check to determine how well kids can read those most frequent words.  

If you are only going to give one, and your specific interest is monitoring phonics progress in grade K-2, I’d go for a real word reading test – especially second semester of grade 1 or later and with my highest achieving schools. Those tests should do a slightly better job of revealing student progress towards success in reading. Just make sure, given your purpose, that the word ID test that you choose includes many words with regular spelling patterns.

But remember the differences here aren’t large. In a different situation (e.g., I’m a school psychologist and a student has been referred to me due to a concern about his/her phonics ability), I would likely give you a different answer. You really can’t go too far wrong in this case.


READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Clemens, N. H., Shapiro, E. S., Wu, J., Taylor, A. B., & Caskie, G. L. (2014). Monitoring early first-grade reading progress: A comparison of two measures. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 47(3), 254-270. doi.org/10.1177/0022219412454455

Doty, S. J., Hixson, M. D., Decker, D. M., Reynolds, J. L., & Drevon, D. D. (2015). Reliability and validity of advanced phonics measures. Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 33(6), 503-521. doi.org/10.1177/0734282914567870

Fien, H., Baker, S. K., Smolkowski, K., Smith, J. L. M., Kame'enui, E. J., & Beck, C. T. (2008). Using nonsense word fluency to predict reading proficiency in kindergarten through second grade for English learners and native English speakers. School Psychology Review, 37(3), 391-408.

Fien, H., Park, Y., Baker, S. K., Smith, J. L. M., Stoolmiller, M., & Kame'enui, E. J. (2010). An examination of the relation of nonsense word fluency initial status and gains to reading outcomes for beginning readers. School Psychology Review, 39(4), 631-653.

Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., & Compton, D. L. (2004). Monitoring early reading development in first grade: Word identification fluency versus nonsense word fluency. Exceptional Children, 71(1), 7-21. doi.org/10.1177/001440290407100101

January, S. A., & Klingbeil, D. A. (2020). Universal screening in grades K-2: A systematic review and meta-analysis of early reading curriculum-based measures. Journal of School Psychology, 82, 103-122. doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2020.08.007

Vanderwood, M. L., Linklater, D., & Healy, K. (2008). Predictive accuracy of nonsense word fluency for English language learners. School Psychology Review, 37(1), 5-17.

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

Shanahan responds:

Ah, for the chance to live life’s unfortunate moments again…

I’m suspicious of those who say they have no regrets and would change nothing if they could go back. For real for real?

A major error in my Chicago Reading Initiative experience was not pulling the principals in early enough or thoroughly enough. My attentions were laser focused on hiring coaches and readying them for their important role.  

I eventually turned my thoughts to the principals, not just to try to smooth the way for the coaches, but to try to help them to have a bigger and more positive impact on their school’s reading achievement.

No doubt about it, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, today I would reverse that equation: bring the principals on board first and then bring coaches in to support and extend what the principals have started.

These days many states and districts are planting their flags. They are going to improve reading achievement (huzza, huzza) and are hiring reading coaches (more huzzas). Rarely do I see much acknowledgement of the need to incorporate the principals into these efforts in any substantial or meaningful ways.

What does research have to say about this?

My take has been that much of the research on principals and school achievement is a bit misleading, though it has repeatedly underlined principals’ potential for positive impacts on learning to read (Karadag, Bektas¸ Cogaltay, & Yalcin, 2015).

The misleading part? Principal research tends to emphasize leadership styles. Different leadership styles (in terms of characteristics like authoritarianism or willingness to distribute leadership) supposedly mediate academic outcomes. Such studies conceptualize principals as leaders with coherent philosophies – usually in terms of qualities only vaguely related to what affects learning.

I question that approach. I can imagine principals with very different styles making similar choices when it comes to consequential reading decisions. Principals who may go about establishing the same literacy policies in very different ways (the style part) could, ultimately, have the same outcomes. [The distributional leadership principal may or may not gain greater buy in from the teachers; I’ve seen charismatic, inspirational principals with very centralized leadership styles who have no trouble getting and keeping teachers on board with their visions.]

When I have been successful as a reading coach, I have always been in supportive, collaborative relationships with the school principals. Some of those principals had very different styles than my own, but together we made things work for the teachers and kids. Without such supportive collaboration, I’ve never been successful.

There are so many ways that principals can undermine efforts to improve reading. Studies, for example, have revealed how principals may reassign their best reading teachers to the grade levels to be tested rather than placing them in the primary grades or matching them to the kids in need of the greatest support, and how that weakens reading achievement over time (Grissom, Kalogrides, & Loeb, 2017). I’ve personally dealt with principals who divert coaches from efforts to improve reading achievement, to efforts to make it look like the school is improving by assigning them to tutor kids near the achievement criterion.

Unfortunately, there are few experimental studies into whether principals can be trained to be more effective as reading leaders – leaders capable of instigating higher reading achievement. And the results are not uniformly pretty.

An example of the kind of study that scares me is one that trained principals in how to improve reading instruction. Its results were negative (Corcoran, 2017). Kids did worse when their principals had this training. I don’t know the specifics of what the principals were told in that study, but I’d guess that much of it was baloney (inconsonant with sound research) or correct but irrelevant to the principal’s role.  

Though I’m more interested in principals’ actions than their philosophies or styles, these studies make it clear that school leadership has a significant and moderate sized impact on student learning including reading achievement (Brewer, 1993; Chin, J. M. C., 2007; Hattie, 2009; Heck, Larsen, & Marcoulides, 1990;  Hallinger, Bickman, & Davis, 1996; Karadag, Bektas¸ Cogaltay, & Yalcin, 2015; Leithwood & Mascall, 2008; Mark & Printy, 2003); Marzano, Waters, & McNulty, 2005;  Robinson, Hohepa, & Lloyd, 2009; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008).

My research quibbles aside, one of the most important things I’ve ever learned about reading improvement I have drawn from this scholarship on principals.

Unlike so many other areas of research on reading achievement, only the leadership studies heavily emphasize the idea of “indirect effects” (Hallinger, Bickman, & Davis, 1996).

I’ve previously posted my “Reading Improvement” model and this notion of indirect impact is central to it. I’ve reposted that model here for the sake of convenience.

In this model, direct impacts on learning are limited to those things that directly touch the students, that define or characterize their experiences – how much reading engagement and reading instruction the students receive, the focus of this work (e.g., phonics; phonemic awareness; text reading fluency; language; comprehension strategies; content knowledge; writing; spelling), and the quality of the instruction.

All other variables that influence school learning exert their impacts through those direct influence variables.  

That includes leadership.

A principal may set a school policy aimed at raising reading achievement. The impact of that on classroom instruction will vary greatly depending upon individual teachers: how they interpret the requirements, whether they agree with them, their ability to implement them, and so on. Almost all principal efforts will be filtered through other people and other mechanisms. That’s what makes their outcomes indirect.

The major ways that principals raise achievement are in the actions they take that get teachers, parents, and communities to increase the amount of literacy teaching, to focus those efforts on the key things that students need to learn, and that improve the effectiveness or efficiency of the teaching that is provided.

Principals play an important role in increasing, maintaining, or suppressing reading achievement.

They play a major role in creating a school culture focused on higher literacy achievement.

They hire teachers and assign them to grade levels or particular students.

They observe instruction and provide evaluation and feedback to teachers.

They create work environments that help to retain the services of the best teachers.

They promote orderly, safe, and supportive learning environments that minimize distraction from learning.

They sometimes guide and approve the purchase of textbooks and instructional programs.

They shape school day schedules and control external interruptions that will take place in classrooms.

They may play an important role in professional development.

They take the leadership in establishing school improvement plans and other policy efforts. They matter in gaining parent support – and in establishing productive community partnerships.

What am I suggesting?

I don’t think principals require a great deal of general training in reading. Studies claim that they tend to not have adequate knowledge of that type (Davidson & Algozzine, 2002; Franz, Vannest, Parker, Hasbrouck, Dyer, & Davis, 2008; McHatton, Boyer, Shaunesy, Terry, & Farmer, 2010; Pazey & Cole, 2013; Petzko, 2008; Steinbrecher, Fix, Mahal, Serna, & McKeown, 2015).

But, sadly, those who have such training appear to be no more effective at improving reading than those who do not (Bettini, Gurel, Park, Leite, & McLeskey, 2019).

But principals do require more specific kinds of professional development; professional development based heavily on the best reading research. Enough professional development to enable them to understand, appreciate, and facilitate teachers’ efforts – including the efforts of coaches.

What might these specifics look like?

Here are a few examples:

Principals need questions to ask for hiring or assigning teachers to different grade levels.

They need specific guidance in what to watch for in classroom observations and lesson plan reviews for different kinds of literacy lessons.

Principals need support and training in how to evaluate and use assessment results and how to discuss those results with teachers and to use them strategically.

They need guidance in how to maximize parent and community support – in ways that can impact reading achievement.

No one who is trying to raise reading achievement doubts that teachers can do a better job when provided with high quality professional development, sound curriculum materials, and other helpful professional supports. That’s the driving purpose behind hiring coaches.

That principals need similar – but different – specific supports and guidance to do their jobs effectively, shouldn’t be as surprising as it seems to be to many of these well-meaning initiatives.

Let’s, from the start, include the principals and let’s provide them with the tools that will allow them to do their jobs better in terms of improving reading achievement. Let’s make it more possible for them to use their leadership skills to work collaboratively and effectively with these reading coaches.

References

Bettini, E., Gurel, S., Park, Y., Leite, W., & McLeskey, J. (2019). Principals’ qualifications in special education and students with and at risk for disabilities’ reading achievement growth in kindergarten, Exceptionality, 27(1), 18-31, DOI: 10.1080/09362835.2017.1351367

Brewer, D. J. (1993). Principals and student outcomes: Evidence from U.S. high schools. Economics of Education Review, 12(4), 281–292.

Chin, J. M. C. (2007). Meta-analysis of transformational school leadership effects on school outcomes in Taiwan and the USA. Asia Pacific Education Review, 8(2), 166–177

Corcoran, R. P. (2017). Preparing principals to improve student achievement. Child Youth Care Forum, 46, 769-781.

Davidson, D. N., & Algozzine, B. (2002). Administrators’ perceptions of special education law. Journal of Special Education Leadership, 15, 43–48.

Franz, D. P., Vannest, K. J., Parker, R. I., Hasbrouck, J. E., Dyer, N., & Davis, J. L. (2008). Time use by special educators and how it is valued. Journal of School Leadership, 18, 551–576.

Grissom, J. A., Kalogrides, D., & Loeb, S. (2017). Strategic staffing? How performance pressures affect the distribution of teachers within school and resulting student achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 54(6), 1079-1116.

Hallinger, P., Bickman, L., & Davis, K. (1996). School context, principal leadership, and student reading achievement. Elementary School Journal, 96(5), 527–549.

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. London, UK: Routledge.

Heck, R. H., Larsen, T. J., & Marcoulides, G. A. (1990). Instructional leadership and school achievement: Validation of a causal model. Educational Administration Quarterly, 26(2), 94–125.

Karadag, E., Bektas¸ F., Cogaltay, N., & Yalcin, M. (2015). The effect of educational leadership on students’ achievement: A meta-analysis study. Asia Pacific Education Review, 16, 79-93.

Leithwood, K., & Mascall, B. (2008). Collective leadership effects on student achievement. Educational Administration Quarterly, 44(4), 529–561.

Mark, H. M., & Printy, S. M. (2003). Principal leadership and school performance: An integration of transformational and instructional leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 39(3), 370–397.

Marzano, R. J., Waters, T., & McNulty, B. (2005). School leadership that works: From research to results. Aurora, CO: ASCD and McREL.

McHatton, P. A., Boyer, N. R., Shaunesy, E., Terry, P. M., & Farmer, J. L. (2010). Principals’ perceptions of preparation and practice in gifted and special education content: Are we doing enough? Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 5, 1–21.

Pazey, B. L., & Cole, H. (2013). The role of special education training in the development of socially just leaders: Building an equity consciousness in educational leadership programs. Educational Administration Quarterly, 49, 243–271. doi:10.1177/0013161X1

Petzko, V. (2008). The perceptions of new principals regarding the knowledge and skills important to their initial success. NASSP Bulletin, 92, 224–250. doi:10.1177/0192636508322824

Robinson, V. M., Hohepa, M., & Lloyd, C. A. (2009). School leadership and student outcomes: Identifying what works and why. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Ministry of Education.

Our reading program has us evaluating students on several strategies and reading skills (e.g., orienting, predicting, monitoring, story elements, identifying point of view, word solving, retelling, inferring character traits, determining theme). It provides grade level rubrics so that we can tell the difference between whether students are doing 4^th grade or 5^th grade work. We are also encouraged to have the students themselves self-assess their progress on these elements. The idea is that we are to use these evaluations to help students see where they are. Is this kind of thing useful or is it a waste of time? 

RELATED: A Big Mistake in Reading Improvement Initiatives – Don’t Make This One

Shanahan response:

There are really two questions here – one dealing with whether this kind of qualitative evaluation of students’ reading ability provides useful information that would facilitate teaching and learning and one concerning whether we should involve kids in self-evaluation of their own reading ability.

What would it take for such a teacher evaluation tool to be useful?

First, it’s important that the skills and abilities evaluated must be central to reading growth. I have no doubt that someone can evaluate how well a student makes predictions, but I‘m  dubious that improving prediction will result in higher reading achievement. Likewise, I’d expect a real payoff from getting kids to pause appropriately during oral reading – makes sense to evaluate that – but getting the student to alter his or her voice when reading aloud probably wouldn’t pay off, so I wouldn’t take the time to assess that.

I think you could profitably jettison many of those rubrics without any loss.

Frankly, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to evaluate specific comprehension behaviors. Instead, I’d evaluate kids’ comprehension by having them read texts and write summaries, engage in retellings, or answer questions.

Second, the evaluation must describe not just the reading behavior, but also the context in which that behavior must be demonstrated. The items that you sent me don’t do that. What level should the text be? How clear should the theme be? Are the students supposed to read the text on their own and write a theme statement or are they going to discuss it with the group? And so on. Let’s face it: If the text is easy enough, most of your kids will meet many of those goals. If it’s a hard text, then not so much.

I’d recommend standardizing how you will make those judgments.

Also, it’s important that these evaluations be made about specific reading events. You can’t assess generally. Often teachers will flip through these kinds of assessments at the end of a report card marking or to prepare for parent conferences. The problem with that approach is “haloes and horns.” We all tend to expect coherence. We make an overall judgment: “Jamal is not a very good student/reader.” Then, when asked about his vocabulary, fluency, comprehension strategies, and so on, we try to make those judgments consistent with our overall view. In other words, kids have either haloes or horns. We are not good at developing separate – and perhaps contradictory – judgments on long lists of related skills and abilities. But, if asked to evaluate something specific that we just observed, that we can do reasonably well – at least with some training and practice.

That last point isn’t unimportant. I’d feel better if the publisher could provide evidence that teachers have successfully and accurately made these judgments – and that doing so improved their teaching and student learning. Barring that, there is at the very least a need for some kind of professional development, aimed at guiding teachers to assess students’ reading. Again, my hunch is that is not what is being done – which to me means these assessments are probably not very useful.

But what about student self-evaluation?

I’m not big on the idea of kids grading themselves or trying to determine if they’ve learned a strategy adequately. Those kinds of evaluations are better relegated to the teachers.

But involving students in self-assessment should have more of an instructive purpose than an evaluative one. Peter Afflerbach, a professor at the University of Maryland, says that he groups “self-assessment with closely related metacognition, self-awareness, comprehension monitoring and even executive function.” All of which, of course, are related to reading comprehension.

Reading instruction should help kids to develop metacognition when they’re reading (Lin & Zabrucky, 1998). For example, your seven-year-old, Olivia, is reading her new library book. She reads, “I love my supper.” She pauses, looks at the picture with a puzzled expression, and re-reads that last line: “I love my surrr—prise… I love my surprise.”

Or let’s say your boss asks you to read a document. She tells you that she wants to talk to you about it this afternoon. She isn’t specific about what she wants to know. You read the text and think you understand it generally but recognize that there are a lot of specifics that need to be reviewed before the meeting.

Those two examples show metacognition at work. These readers are thinking about their thinking. They are paying attention to their reading and making the adjustments necessary to be successful.

Developing those kinds of abilities for reading is an important instructional goal.

Involving students in self-evaluation can be an important part of instruction towards that goal.

There is a lot of research showing the importance of metacognition to reading (Johansson, 2013), and several studies show that we can teach students to monitor comprehension, fix up misunderstandings, and select appropriate strategies (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).

However, I know of no studies that have evaluated the self-evaluation part of their instructional routines. It is easy to think that would be a useful step, but at this point I’m not convinced the evidence is adequate.

Again, from Professor Afflerbach: “In terms of practice, I think there’s a demonstrable gap between the promise of late 70’s and early 80’s metacognition research and realization of that promise in reading curricula.”

I think he’s right about that.

Research reveals the challenges and complexity of self-evaluation (Dunlosky & Lipko, 2007; Glenberg, Wilkinson, & Epstein, 1982; Österholm, 2015; Pressley & Ghatala, 1990), but overall it shows that it can contribute to learning (Andrade, 2023). Most readers aren’t especially good at determining how well they have comprehended a text. And, the research hasn’t been especially articulate about how to successfully teach kids to evaluate themselves – at least in ways that make them better readers.

Nevertheless, it makes sense to me to involve kids in evaluating how well they are reading text passages, and if they recognize where their comprehension is falling short, to consider what strategies might address the problem.

How to best do this?

Remember there isn’t a lot of research direction here. One thing that I would do, however, would be to have students read texts at a range of difficulty levels. It is a lot easier to self-evaluate if you can experience a range of degrees of comprehension.

Also, studies show that readers do better with self-evaluation when they are actively reading; for instance, self-assessment improves when readers read and summarize rather than when they only read (Maki, Foley, Kajer, Thompson, & Willert, 1990).

The scheme you showed me isn’t very good in my opinion, but its heart is in the right place. I’d suggest that you trim it down, standardize it, and convince your district to invest in professional development aimed at enabling you and your colleagues to evaluate successfully.

But remember, the purpose of student self-evaluation is less about assessment and more about teaching. Getting kids to evaluate how well they understand paragraphs or sections of a text – which ones they are certain they understand, which ones are confusing them – can be a good starting place for starting those instructional conversations.

READ MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Blog

References

Andrade, H. L. (2023). A critical review of research on student self-assessment. Frontiers in Education. Doi: 10.3389/feduc.2019.00087

Dunlosky, J., & Lipko, A. R. (2007). Metacomprehension: A brief history and how to improve its accuracy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(4), 228–232. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00509.x

Glenberg, A. M., Wilkinson, A. C. & Epstein, W. (1982). The illusion of knowing: Failure in the self-assessment of comprehension. Memory & Cognition, 10(6), 597-602.

Johansson, S. (2013). The relationship between students self-assessed reading skills and other measures of achievement. Large Scale Assessemnts in Education, 1(3).

Lin, L., & Zabrucky, K. M. (1998). Calibration of comprehension: Research and implications for education and instruction. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 23(4), 345-391.

Maki, R. H., Foley, J. M., Kajer, W. K., Thompson, R. C., & Willert, M. G. (1990). Increased processing enhances calibration of comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16(4), 609–616. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.16.4.609.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: Reports of the subgroups (00-4754). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Österholm, M. (2015). What is the basis for self-assessment of comprehension when reading mathematical expository texts? Reading Psychology, 36(8), 673–699. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2014.949018

Pressley, M., & Ghatala, E. (1990). Self-regulated learning: Monitoring learning from text. Educational Psychologist, 25, 19-33.

If you would like to listen to this entry on podcast:

https://player.cohostpodcasting.com/7763ba9d-7746-4eeb-83a5-38e6bfd1c124/495b8963-4f00-41df-adae-5781df3322bf

I am working through my state’s “Literacy Plan.” There are several instructional practices that get the “thumbs down” here as being “not in alignment with evidence-based instruction.” The list is long and includes guided reading, leveled readers, and informal reading inventories. I’m curious what your take on those practices is? 

Shanahan response:

Thanks for sharing.

The list you sent was long and I agree with your state on some of the items (e.g., three-cueing, miscue analysis, balanced literacy – whatever that is), but I suspect those who are calling the shots are reacting more to social media buzz words than to any real knowledge about classroom teaching or reading research.

Let’s just explore those three examples that you highlighted above – guided reading, leveled readers, and informal reading inventories.

Should those really be banned or seriously discouraged by state education departments?

I get that everybody wants to be “cool” but banning practices because the Twitterverse doesn’t seem to like them is a dopey way to make policy.

What’s the problem with “guided reading?”

I suspect this one is at least in part a definitional issue. Perhaps it’s more of a complaint with Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell’s use of the term. Their concept of guided reading carries lots of baggage, including the emphasis on matching kids to texts by reading levels, minimization of explicit and planful instruction, and the emphasis on 3-cueing systems.

If those were the hallmarks of guided reading, then your state would be on the mark.

However, the term “guided reading” is now more than a century old, and the concept the term has been used to describe is much more specific and sensible than the F&P version. I think if we go with its more widely used meaning, it is a concept well worth preserving. That doesn’t mean that guided reading in practice is always a good thing – no, I’d admit many teachers use it badly. But I’d rather see your state providing guidance to teachers in how to implement guided reading well in their classrooms than banning or discouraging the practice.

RELATED: Are Qualitative Assessment and Student Self-Assessment Useful in Reading Instruction?

What is guided reading?

The term refers to the group reading of text under the guidance or direction of a teacher or group leader. Most often, this guidance takes the form of a series of questions asked by the leader.

Guided reading experiences as such provide readers with social opportunities to practice their reading comprehension as well as to gain knowledge from the texts being read.

Originally, guided reading was an adult education practice. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, created a successful guided reading group, the Junto, in the 18^th century. This was a tool of self-education used by Franklin and his leather-aproned buddies. They’d read books communally and then discuss their content and value. Franklin even provided a list of questions that could be used to guide the reading discussions.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that guided reading formally became a part of the daily practice of American elementary schools; that was when basal reader publishers began providing lesson plans for the selections in their textbooks. Teachers were to convene instructional groups that would read the selections together and then talk about them by answering the teacher’s questions. 

These kinds of communal reading experiences have a long history in education at all levels and in many cultures. It is hard to imagine teaching someone to read without including this kind of guided or directed reading practice.

Of course, there are a variety of versions of guided reading. In the U.S., especially in modern times, it’s not unusual for kids to be encouraged to develop varied interpretations of the shared reading stories. While in some cultures, one of the purposes of the guided reading is to ensure that everyone accepts an official text interpretation. You’ll see more questioning in the former case, and more leader explanation in the latter.

Even within American culture, there are important variations on the kinds of reading guidance provided. The teaching of comprehension strategies, for example, usually introduces strategies within the context of guided reading lessons. The teacher demonstrates how to use a strategy and then students try to use it with a group read selection.

Often, in such lessons, the point is less to gain the text information and more to learn to apply the strategy.

Textbook versions of guided reading have often emphasized the mastery of comprehension skills. This has been done by having teachers ask certain kinds of questions as this supposedly would improve the students’ ability to answer such questions. (This approach isn’t particularly effective. But its failure has not been due to guided reading, but to the wrongheaded idea that question answering is a generalizable or transferable skill.)

These days comprehension skills and strategy teaching are often criticized by those who think that time would be better used in helping students to increase their knowledge of the world. However, these critics aren’t opposed to guided reading, they are just advocating a different emphasis to the practice. That’s where concepts like close reading come in, a guided reading approach that emphasizes a more thorough analysis of text content. Not surprisingly, guided reading of text is a widely used approach to review content information in science and social studies classes.

Personally, some form of guided reading of shared texts would be a centerpiece of my reading comprehension instruction (which would be accompanied by strong instructional efforts to build word knowledge – including phonics, morphology, and vocabulary, oral reading fluency, and writing/spelling).

Of course, if it makes your state department of education happy, I’d gladly refer to guided reading as “directed reading.” Perhaps they’d be more comfortable with that (you don’t see many mentions of directed reading on social media). That’s what one of the basal reader companies did in the 1950s to differentiate their group reading lessons from those of the “Dick and Jane readers.” A rose by any other name… well you know.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, but I guess I’m saying that I think your state would be making a mistake to discourage guided reading.

he next practice to be avoided – according to your state – is the use of “leveled readers.”

This one makes me nervous, because I don’t think anyone has written more than I about the problems of teaching kids at their instructional level in grades 2-12.

But, even with that admission, I’m a little lost about how we teach kids to read without having kids read texts.

No, I get it, the mandate isn’t against using text to teach reading, only against using leveled text.

However, what texts don’t have levels? What texts can’t be placed upon a continuum of difficulty?

Let’s face it, some texts are harder than others. Yes, and some are easier. And, we can measure or estimate those levels.

Studies show that even decodable texts have difficulty levels – are we going to ban those, too?

There are various problems with leveled texts, and I agree that we should be careful not to make those mistakes again, but the notion that schools should rid their shelves of books with levels would mean that no books would have a place in education.

What mistakes must we avoid?

Well, the F&P approach to book leveling encouraged the use of so-called “predictable texts” with beginning readers. Predictable texts repeat whole sections of text to make them easily readable… “I like candy. I like toys. I like bikes. I like swimming.” Such books have value but not for teaching reading.

Research shows that such books discourage students from looking at the words, and it can be hard to learn to read if you don’t look at the words.

The F&P leveling scheme didn’t pay much attention to decodability and that’s a mistake, too. Early reading books need to be relatively easy, and that ease should come from decodability and word repetition (using certain words again and again throughout a text).

Also, leveled readers have been used to ensure that students were placed in books that would be relatively easy to read – books that were supposedly at the students’ instructional levels. Research shows this to be a weak approach to instruction in Grades 2-12 (not totally ineffective, that is kids can learn from such texts, but higher reading levels can be accomplished using more challenging text – that is, books at higher levels). I’d teach most students reading using texts at their grade levels rather than at their so-called instructional levels. However, if the books aren’t leveled how will we know which ones are most appropriate for a grade level?

Leveled readers aren’t the problem so I wouldn’t ban them… though some of the ways those leveled readers have been used should go!

Okay, the last item on this list is the informal reading inventory (IRI). This instrument has students reading grade-level representative passages aloud and the teacher calculates the oral reading accuracy and the students’ comprehension of the passage to determine a student’s reading level.

Historically, the IRI was used to place students in reading books. Usually this meant placing them in books out of grade level (you know, fourth graders being taught to read with second grade books). As I pointed out earlier, this approach hasn’t panned out, so testing to make such placements would not be how I would use IRIs today.

I’ve long argued for teaching reading with grade level texts. In my version of guided reading, the teacher would review a text prior to the group reading. She would try to identify those text features that may block student reading success (e.g., words the students might have trouble decoding, unknown word meanings, literary devices, complex syntax, subtle cohesive ties, unusual text structure, knowledge gaps, and so on). Her guidance should then both make visible the problems her students had with the text and provide them with tools for successfully dealing with those barriers.

Examples of this kind of support would include things like showing students how to use context to figure out a key word meaning or how to break down a complicated key sentence so that it can be comprehended (tools students could use with other texts).

The benefits to having IRI estimates of student reading levels is that it informs the teacher as to who is likely to need the most help and how much help might be necessary. If I’m teaching a group of 4^th graders with a 4^th grade book, it would be useful to me to know that half the group was reading at a second-grade level. I’ll need to provide more support to a group like that than I would with a group in which most of the kids are reading at a 3^rd or 4^th grade level. I’d schedule the time differently in those cases and I might be on the lookout for different kinds of barriers in those situations. In one case, I might do more oral reading fluency work, for instance.

Your state’s approach here reminds me of lists of vegetables to avoid serving children, since kids don’t like vegetables. I’d rather have suggestions of ways to prepare those vegetables so that even finicky kids might enjoy them. (“Skip the creamed spinach, it’s too much like baby food. But spinach and strawberry salad can be a hit among the preschool set.”)

The problem with discouraging the use of guided reading, leveled books, and informal reading inventories is that it ignores the pedagogical value of those tools. It focuses teacher attention on tool avoidance (trying to look like somebody thinks they should look), rather than on how to deliver effective instruction. Personally, I’d make use of all these tools in my teaching. Please pass the spinach.

Listen to Podcast: Shanahan on Literacy Podcast

Our local school district still teaches "sight words." I know that people mean various things when they call words "sight words"-- words that kids don't have the phonics principles for yet, words that are high frequency, and words that "are not decodable." I also understand that brain research says memorizing whole words is a poor practice, and I know that "sight words" is a term that is being phased out in order to communicate that 80% of words are decodable, and emphasizing helping kids flexibly solve words using the parts that do follow predictable phonics rules. Will you please weigh in?

RELATED: My state is banning instructional practices… or, how to look like you are teaching effectively…

Shanahan responds:

I know of no brain research that shows memorizing words to be a bad practice. In fact, we don’t know what information is stored in the brain about words (rules?, patterns?, images of the words themselves?), so memorizing some words could be beneficial to the overall reading process. There certainly is research that shows sight word instruction contributes positively to fluency and comprehension (Griffin & Murtaugh, 2015), and it isn’t clear t what role words themselves play in the development of orthographic mapping -- only that they may play some role (Price?Mohr, & Price, 2018; Schmalz, Marinus, & Castles, 2013).

When it comes to sight vocabulary definitions, I’m in the camp that reserves that label to words the students can recognize seemingly instantaneously. Curricula or instructional intentions play no role in the matter. If a student recognizes a word immediately on sight, then it is a sight word no matter how or why that word was learned.

Think of a sight word as being something akin to your best friend’s name. I’m not especially gifted when it comes to learning names. But I can tell you that my wife, Cyndie, would make life a bit unpleasant around here if I hesitated on her name. Sight words are like your best friends’ names. They are words that you know immediately with no hesitation.

Reading programs may fuzz this definition up a bit. They rather hopefully label words that they designate for direct instruction as sight words, as if the instructional success were a certainty already accomplished. As you point out, they may focus on high frequency words, words that aren’t easily decoded, or words that they simply want to use in their stories. Those are all good reasons for trying to teach some words, but whether those words will become sight vocabulary has more to do with how they are taught or how much time is spent on them.

Naïve observation, behavioral research, and brain study concur that sight vocabulary is about memory (Berglund-Barraza Tian, Basak, & Evans, 2019; Joseph, Nation, & Liversedge, 2013). However, that shared insight leads to very different conclusions about teaching and learning.

Historically, the recognition that young readers benefit from knowing words was translated into graded word lists, flash cards, word drills, and special instructional texts with specific word repetition routines. Psychologists expended much effort trying to determine how many times a student had to see a word before it entered the sight vocabulary: rote repetition was imagined to be the most efficacious approach.

More recent study proposes more nuanced conclusions about what it takes to “memorize” a word.

We can, of course, memorize individual words through brute force paired associate repetition. The issue isn’t whether one can learn words that way, but whether it’s efficient enough for readers to master 40,000 sight words or whether it describes how readers gain the ability to read most words.

Anyone who has carefully monitored young children’s progress in learning to read notices a magical transformation. Initially, learning words seems to be mainly about rote memorization, but for those boys and girls who become readers, new sight words seem to accumulate almost effortlessly.

Something changes.

Students are doing more than remembering more words.

They seem to be learning how to learn words. When children are learning to read, they are learning how to remember words – how to organize them in memory, how to recognize them without decoding or with minimum of decodable effort. Linnea Ehri (2014, 2020) has best described this memory development process.

But if that is the case – and there are many good reasons to think that it is – then it makes sense to try to get words into memory through analysis rather than repetition alone (Hickey, 2007; Newman, Jared, & Haigh, 2012; Steacy, Fuchs, Gilbert, Kearns, Elleman, & Edwards, 2020; Stuart, Masterson, & Dixon, 2000). Memorization often focuses on trivial features (e.g., first letter alone, shape of the word) that may facilitate recall of a small set of words, but which do little to help organize these words into the word reading/spelling system that must develop. There is some evidence that memorized words are stored in memory differently than words that are learned through analysis (Yoncheva, Wise, & McCandliss, 2015), but this appears to be just an immediate effect as word memorization and analysis interact over time making it appear to be a much more fluid and flexible process (Barr, 1984-1975; Biemiller, 1970). [I suspect this Yoncheva study to be what you were referring to. It does show that initially upon learning we store memorized and analyzed words in different parts of the brain, but it says nothing about how words are learned best or what the long-term significance of those differences are. It is important to not try to read too much about learning into such studies.]

I think it makes sense to have students master some words early on – including high frequency words, and those with exceptional spelling patterns. But such word instruction should focus attention on what it is that makes these words unique – their sequences of letters.

This is not outlandish, even with a language like English that has such complex spelling patterns. I’ve long called for first grade teachers to make sure kids can read the 100 most frequent words (and for second grade teachers to do the same with the first 300 words). How would focusing on sound-symbol relations facilitate the learning of these words?

My analysis of the 100 most frequent words (the Fry list) concludes that 55 of these words are entirely decodable – that is, all the orthographic features of these words match the most common pronunciations for letter combinations. Words like and, or, had, but, we, she, up, and will can easily be learned through beginning decoding instruction alone. Another 42 of these frequent words at least partially meet this criterion. Words like the, their, you, were, and his have elements that make them exceptional (that e in the is kind of funky, as is the ou in you, and the s in his is a little strange too), but they also include conventional elements (there is nothing unusual about the th in the, the y in you, or the hi in his).

My advice on attempts to teach sight vocabulary:

1.     Provide beginning readers with a substantial decoding program that shows students how to use letters and spelling patterns for reading words.

2.     When you are teaching spelling patterns make sure those high frequency words are included in the instruction where relevant (e.g., if you are teaching the consonant digraph th, words like them, these, the, and their should be included in the examples or practice items). 

3.     Providing a small amount of direct instruction in some key words that you want students to master is very reasonable. (Experience tells me that as little as 5 minutes a day is enough for this part of a reading curriculum).

4.     Words that you teach – either directly or through their inclusion in a decoding program – should receive frequent repetition both in isolation and context – I want kids to learn those patterns, of course, but also want them to know those exemplars.

5.     Monitor learning to be sure students have mastered those highest frequency words because of their impact on fluency and comprehension (and the role they might play in anchoring decoding skills).

6.     When teaching specific words, facilitate word learning by focusing student attention on the letter sequences, spelling, and decodability of the words. Such teaching reduces the numbers of repetitions needed to accomplish learning.

References

Barr, R. (1974-1975). The effect of instruction on pupil reading strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 10(4), 555-582. doi.org/10.2307/747502

Biemiller, A. (1970). The development of the use of graphic and contextual information as children learn to read. Reading Research Quarterly, 6(1), 75-96. doi.org/10.2307/747049

Berglund-Barraza A., Tian, F., Basak C., & Evans J. L. (2019). Word frequency is associated with cognitive effort during verbal working memory: A functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 433. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00433

Ehri, L. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21. doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Ehri, L. (2020). The science of learning to read words: A case of systematic phonics instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1), S45–S60. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.334

Hickey, T. M. (2007). Fluency in reading Irish as L1 or L2: Promoting high-frequency word recognition in emergent readers. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 10(4), 471-493. doi.org/10.2167/beb455.0

Joseph, H. S. S. L., Nation, K., & Liversedge, S. P. (2013). Using eye movements to investigate word frequency effects in children's sentence reading. School Psychology Review, 42(2), 207-222.

Newman, R. L., Jared, D., & Haigh, C. A. (2012). Does phonology play a role when skilled readers read high-frequency words? evidence from ERPs. Language and Cognitive Processes, 27(9), 1361-1384. doi.org/10.1080/01690965.2011.603932

Price?Mohr, R. M., & Price, C. B. (2018). Synthetic phonics and decodable instructional reading texts: How far do these support poor readers? Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 24(2), 190-196. doi.org/10.1002/dys.1581

Schmalz, X., Marinus, E., & Castles, A. (2013). Phonological decoding or direct access? regularity effects in lexical decisions of grade 3 and 4 children. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(2), 338-346. doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2012.711843

Stuart, M., Masterson, J., & Dixon, M. (2000). Spongelike acquisition of sight vocabulary in beginning readers? Journal of Research in Reading, 23(1), 12-27. doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.00099

Steacy, L. M., Fuchs, D., Gilbert, J. K., Kearns, D. M., Elleman, A. M., & Edwards, A. A. (2020). Sight word acquisition in first grade students at risk for reading disabilities: An item-level exploration of the number of exposures required for mastery. Annals of Dyslexia, 70(2), 259-274. doi.org/10.1007/s11881-020-00198-7

Yoncheva Y. N., Wise, J., & McCandliss, B. (2015). Hemispheric specialization for visual words is shaped by attention to sublexical units during initial learning. Brain Language, 145-146, 23-33. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2015.04.001.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

You say that we cannot successfully teach comprehension skills like main idea. But our standards require that we teach main idea, and our state tests ask main idea questions to assess whether our students are accomplishing that goal. I don’t get it, your advice on this is not helpful.

RELATED: Should We Still Teach Sight Vocabulary?

Shanahan response:

For years, comprehension skills like “main idea” were taught by having kids read texts and answer main idea questions. The idea is that question-answering practice will improve the ability to answer the kinds of questions the students are practicing with. Often the question types themselves have been labeled as comprehension skills and, as everyone knows, practice is a great way to learn skills. Some of these supposed skills include main idea, supporting details, literal recall, comparison/contrast, drawing conclusions, inferencing, and so on.

There are still scads of books and programs aimed at just such pedagogy – that present brief texts accompanied by questions of a particular type so kids can do that kind of thing over and over. Many schools have even developed their own pools of such items to prepare kids for standardized tests – hoping to make kids better at answering such questions.

Learning outcomes show a pronounced lack of sympathy for such teaching. Dolores Durkin (1978-1979) long ago classified it as assessment rather than instruction.  

Studies show that question types do NOT distinguish different kinds of comprehension (ACT, 2006; Davis, 1944; Eason, Goldberg, Young, Geist, & Cutting, 2012; Kulesz, Francis, Barnes, & Fletcher, 2016; Muijselaar, Swart, Steenbeek-Planting, Droop, Verhoeven, & de Jong, 2017; Spearritt, 1972), which means practice with answering specific kinds of questions WON’T have a specific impact on reading comprehension. There is certainly nothing wrong with asking questions about what the kids have read, just don’t expect such practice to exert much impact on the ability to deal with specific question categories, nor even to have any impact on reading comprehension. It just doesn’t work that way.

This problem is quietly acknowledged by reputable test makers who appropriately do not report performance on different types of comprehension questions – they don’t because they can’t honestly do so.

Those are the facts, ma’am.

However, main idea is an interesting case in point because everyone seems to agree on the importance of main idea in comprehension. Everyone!

And, yet I don’t believe that main idea is the main thing in reading comprehension, and it appears that much of the teaching of this is wrongheaded.

People don’t even agree on what a main idea is. Different studies and programs use different labels and have different ideas as to what those labels describe: topics, important ideas, central ideas, themes, and idea-most-referred-to are all thought to be main ideas (Williams, 1988). One study reported nine different conceptions of main idea (Moore, Cunningham, & Rudisill, 1983), and studies of instructional programs show similar inconsistencies (Afflerbach & Walker, 1992; Jitendra, Chard, Hoppes, Renouf, & Gardill, 2001). Apparently, the different labels can even lead to different responses on the part of the question answerers (Butterfuss, McCarthy, Orcutt, Kendeou, & McNamara, 2023). If you ask the “main idea question” in different ways, you get very different responses.

That’s problematic, but it isn’t the main problem here.

No, the main problem is that – for the most part – studies show that just having students read texts and answer main idea questions does not consistently or significantly improve main idea identification or reading comprehension (e.g., Sjostrom & Hare, 1984; E. A. Stevens, Vaughn, House, & Stillman-Spisak, 2020; R. J. Stevens, Slavin, & Farnish, 1991; Stoeger, Sontag, & Ziegler, 2014; Taylor, 1986; Toonder & Sawyer, 2021).

One reason for this failure is that figuring out main ideas is not very skill-like. Test your students’ ability to answer main idea questions and you’ll get different results depending upon the text. The ability to determine a main idea is affected by text type (narrative, exposition), text structure, the explicitness with which the idea is stated, the length of the text, the amount of topic knowledge possessed by the readers, and any and all these variables may interact with each other making it even more complicated (Afflerbach, 1990; Hare, Rabinowitz, & Schieble, 1989; Pressley, Ghatala, Woloshyn, & Pirie, 1990). It is hard to provide a skill-like response in that complicated a context.

Given that, it’s not surprising that the tests used by researchers to evaluate main idea interventions tend to be “over-aligned” with how the students were taught. Outcome assessments may use texts and tasks so like the training that it isn’t clear whether students mastered a skill or just got used to the lessons. That may be why, in many of the studies, the trained kids improved on main idea tasks with no benefit to their reading comprehension!

Nevertheless, several of the experimental instructional regimes have managed to accomplish improvements in both main idea performance and reading comprehension. But instruction that invests heavily in question-answering practice can take no comfort in these results. In many of the studies in which the intervention succeeded, the control groups were the ones that received the question-answering practice. Oops!

What are the takeaways from this diverse collection of studies?

One thing that is clear is that the successful interventions provided considerably more thorough and more extensive main idea instruction than the questioning schemes usually do. Often the successful teaching was explicit, took place daily for considerable amounts of time, and continued across several weeks.

The most effective instruction went far beyond question-and-answer practice. These interventions didn’t emphasize main idea as, as they did a comprehensive understanding of the texts, with main idea as just one element in that. The main idea is really not the main idea.

Three kinds of instruction paid off the most: summarizing, developing an understanding of text structure, and/or paraphrasing (Brown & Day, 1983; E. A. Stevens, Park, & Vaughn, 2019; Zhang & Wijekumar, 2023).

Main ideas unify the parts of a text (so summarizing and text structure make sense) and the successful restatement of a paragraph or text (paraphrasing) will necessarily capture the main idea, but along with other key information, as well.

I’ve come to believe that the difference is that main idea questions steer students into thinking about a specific fact in a text, while these three instructional emphases – summarizing, text structure analysis, paraphrasing – require more integrated, extensive, and thorough thinking about a text’s content; hence the power to improve reading comprehension.

Also, some of the more successful schemes provided students with guided practice in analyzing structure and formulating paraphrases with systematically varied texts.

Teacher guidance matters because it provides timely explanations of why certain responses are sound and offers support for reanalysis of the text when necessary – this is teaching, not practice in responding to faux assessments.

Varying the texts is important because text plays such an influential role in determining how well readers can summarize, paraphrase, or analyze structure. Concentrated practice with one or another kind of text should help students to learn how to deal successfully with the relevant text features, and then over time, the types of text can be varied so that students gain insights about how to adjust their efforts Baumann (1984) had students work with texts that had explicit main ideas and then shifted to those that did not. I would add another step of then working with a more mixed collection.

If you are serious about teaching students to comprehend better (and to master the kinds of “skills” cited in your state standards), knock off the question-answering practice and teach students how to comprehend better. Asking lots of main idea questions won’t cut it.

One more valuable bit of advice:

The texts that schools usually use for specific comprehension skill practice tend to be vapid, stupid, and wasteful (no, these are not four of Santa’s reindeer or Snow White’s dwarves). Reading comprehension should be taught with texts worth reading – texts from which we want students to gain knowledge. Kids need to learn how to summarize texts using an author’s organizational plan and how to translate text information into their own words, but they need to do this while trying to gain worthwhile knowledge from the texts they are reading during this work.

Getting the main idea should not be the main idea. Students do better when reading goals are more demanding and more integrated.

References

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

Afflerbach, P. P. (1990). The influence of prior knowledge on expert readers' main idea construction strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 25(1), 31-46. doi.org/10.2307/747986

Afflerbach, P., & Walker, B. (1992). Main idea instruction: An analysis of three basal reader series. Reading Research and Instruction, 32(1), 11-28. doi.org/10.1080/19388079209558102

Baumann, J. F. (1984). The effectiveness of a direct instruction paradigm for teaching main idea comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 20(1), 93-115. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/747654 

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

Butterfuss, R., McCarthy, K. S., Orcutt, E., Kendeou, P., & McNamara, D. S. (2023). Identification of main ideas in expository texts: Selection versus deletion. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10431-5

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

Durkin, D. (1978-1979). What classroom observations reveal about reading comprehension instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 14(4), 481-533. 

Eason, S. H., Goldberg, L. F., Young, K. M., Geist, M. C., & Cutting, L. E. (2012). Reader–text interactions: How differential text and question types influence cognitive skills needed for reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(3), 515-528. doi.org/10.1037/a0027182

Hare, V. C., Rabinowitz, M., & Schieble, K. M. (1989). Text effects on main idea comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 24(1), 72-88. doi.org/10.2307/748011

Jitendra, A. K., Chard, D., Hoppes, M. K., Renouf, K., & Gardill, M. C. (2001). An evaluation of main idea strategy instruction in four commercial reading programs: Implications for students with learning problems. Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 17(1), 53-73. doi.org/10.1080/105735601455738

Kulesz, P. A., Francis, D. J., Barnes, M. A., & Fletcher, J. M. (2016). The influence of properties of the test and their interactions with reader characteristics on reading comprehension: An explanatory item response study. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(8), 1078-1097. doi:https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000126

Moore, D. W., Cunningham, J. W., & Rudisill, N. J. (1983). Readers’ conceptions of the main idea. In J. A. Niles & L. A. Harris (Eds.), Searches for meaning in reading/language processing and instruction (32nd Yearbook of the National Reading Conference). Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference.

Muijselaar, M. M. L., Swart, N. M., Steenbeek-Planting, E., Droop, M., Verhoeven, L., & de Jong, P. F. (2017). The dimensions of reading comprehension in dutch children: Is differentiation by text and question type necessary? Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(1), 70-83. doi.org/10.1037/edu0000120

Pressley, M., Ghatala, E. S., Woloshyn, V. E., & Pirie, J. (1990). Sometimes adults miss the main ideas and do not realize it: Confidence in responses to short-answer and multiple-choice comprehension questions. Reading Research Quarterly, 25(3), 232-249. doi.org/10.2307/748004

Sjostrom, C. L., & Hare, V. C. (1984). Teaching high school students to identify main ideas in expository text. Journal of Educational Research, 78(2), 114-118. doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1984.10885584

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

Stevens, E. A., Park, S., & Vaughn, S. (2019). A review of summarizing and main idea interventions for struggling readers in grades 3 through 12: 1978–2016. Remedial and Special Education, 40(3), 131-149. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932517749940

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. doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2019.1684925

Stevens, R. J., Slavin, R. E., & Farnish, A. M. (1991). The effects of cooperative learning and direct instruction in reading comprehension strategies on main idea identification. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83(1), 8-16. doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.83.1.8

Stoeger, H., Sontag, C., & Ziegler, A. (2014). Impact of a teacher-led intervention on preference for self-regulated learning, finding main ideas in expository texts, and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(3), 799-814. doi.org/10.1037/a0036035

Taylor, B. M. (1986). Teaching middle-grade students to read for main ideas. National Reading Conference Yearbook, 35, 99-108.

Toonder, S., & Sawyer, L. B. (2021). The impact of adaptive computer assisted instruction on reading comprehension: Identifying the main idea. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12573

Wijekumar, K., Beerwinkle, A., McKeown, D., Zhang, S., & Joshi, R. M. (2020). The “GIST” of the reading comprehension problem in grades 4 and 5. Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice, 26(3), 323-340. doi.org/10.1002/dys.1647

Williams, J. P. (1988). Identifying main ideas: A basic aspect of reading comprehension. Topics in Language Disorders, 8(3), 1-13. doi.org/10.1097/00011363-198806000-00003

Zhang, S., & Wijekumar, K. K. (2023). Teacher professional development and student reading comprehension outcomes: The heterogeneity of responsiveness to text structure instruction in grade 2. Technology, Knowledge and Learning: Learning Mathematics, Science and the Arts in the Context of Digital Technologies, doi.org/10.1007/s10758-023-09693-3

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Each 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 providing books and literacy instruction to populations in need,
  • Provide these services directly to children,
  • Are transparent in their reporting, and
  • Spend all or most of their donations on their missions rather than 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 will keep these listings on the charity page of my website through the coming year: Shanahan Charities

Since I started doing this, my list has included 5-7 worthy charities. This year something remarkable has happened. Charity Navigator awarded their cherished 4-stars designation to a record 11 children’s literacy charities in the U.S., and Charity Intelligence included two more as well. It is wonderful that so many organizations are putting their shoulder to the wheel to make sure children become successful readers.

In case you’re wondering, I have no connection to any of these organizations.

Remember this list only includes charities with a broad reach – internationally, nationally, or regionally. It would be impossible for me to draw attention to the more than 1,000 highly ranked literacy charities that are local in nature. Nevertheless, I encourage you to also support such charities in your own communities as I do in mine.

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

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 for themselves. During the past year, Book Trust has served more than 45,000 children in 13 states – and they have distributed about 10 million books over the past two decades.

Books for Africa.  Founded in 1988, Books for Africa collects, sorts, ships, and distributes books to children in Africa. Their goal is to end that continent’s book famine. 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. They send enough good books for whole classes to use. Since its inception, Books for Africa has shipped more than 56 million books, reaching every African country.

Children's Literacy Initiative.  Children's Literacy Initiative works with educators to transform instruction so that children can become powerful readers, writers, and thinkers. It works with teachers to transform literacy instruction in public, charter, and parochial schools to ensure that students can read on grade level. They provide job-embedded coaching, workshops, and books aimed at improving teachers’ instructional expertise. This year, they are serving nearly 17,000 students.

Curious Learning.  Curious Learning works with partners to curate, localize, and distribute free open-source apps that empower 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, to the parent who wants more for their children, and to the teacher striving to help many. This year their technological resources have reached 3.5 million children around the world. 

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. Their efforts focus on children in low-income communities. They ensure that children have age-appropriate books in their homes and that their parents have the literacy resources needed to support early learning and book sharing. By mailing a new book every month to enrolled children, birth to five, Ferst Readers is committed to providing early learning opportunities. They have distributed more than 7 million books over the past 24 years (about a half million each year now)!

First Book. First Book is dedicated to ensuring that all children, regardless of their background or zip code, can succeed, by removing barriers to equitable education. They reach 5 million kids each year in low-income communities across North America, providing books and resources through a powerful network of more than 575,000 educators, the largest online community of its kind. By infusing high-quality resources into classrooms and programs nationwide, they help ensure that children are ready to learn.

Reach Out and Read. Reach Out and Read was founded in 1989 to help families make reading a part of their routines, and to supply the books they need to get started. They are now in all 50 states, with 6,200 program sites that provide 7.1 million books each year. Their pediatric network provides families at routine check-ups with the knowledge and tools they need to make reading a part of their daily routine. Currently, they reach 4.4 million children across the country — more than three-fourths of whom come from low-income families.

Reading is Fundamental. Reading is Fundamental was founded in the 1960s with the purpose of making books available to children growing up in poverty. This year alone they have distributed almost 6 million books, and their efforts reach 91 percent of all elementary schools in the United States, the insight that

Reading Partners. Founded in 1999, the mission of Reading Partners is to help children become lifelong readers by empowering communities to provide individualized instruction with measurable results. they do this by focusing on children from low-income communities; giving one-on-one instruction at the student's reading level; recruiting and training community volunteers to work with children; partnering with high-need elementary schools to offer free services on the school campus; and providing a way for volunteers to give a small amount of their time to make a huge difference in a child's life. of RIF

Room to Read. 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, they 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 35 million children and they have distributed more than 39 million books.

United Through Reading. United Through Reading 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, it 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. Services can be accessed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When service members read to children they love and send the video recordings and books home: family morale is boosted; separation-related stress is reduced; family reading routines are maintained; children remain connected to their service members, making family reintegration easier; and children's literacy and language skills develop.

Canadian Charities

CODE. CODE promotes every child’s right to read. It works in partnership with locally based

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

First Book Canada. Over the past 14 years, First Book Canada has distributed more than 7 million 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.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Teacher’s Question:  

Is there a particular order in which teachers should teach the letter sounds? 

RELATED: Why Main Idea is Not the Main Idea – Or, How Best to Teach Reading Comprehension

Shanahan’s response:

Sequence matters. It makes sense to put on your underwear before you put on a skirt, shirt, blouse, or pants.

That is, unless you’re Madonna.

Then the usual ordering of things doesn’t necessarily get the job done. Madonna altered the approved sequence from bra/blouse to blouse/bra and became a star. (That she is wildly talented may also have had something to do with her success).

However, when it comes to curriculum, teachers, principals, parents, and policymakers expect the ordering of lessons to be more than a matter of convention or style.

Not surprisingly, this teacher’s question comes up often.

I find it hard to explain to them that there is no research-proven best sequence for teaching the ABCs or phonics.

But that is the case.

Back when the National Reading Panel (2000) report to Congress came out, there was a similar hubbub among our legislators. The Panel had reported that phonics programs with a clear sequence of instruction – “systematic phonics” – were most successful. Consequently, they wanted to require that all teachers teach phonics using that best sequence.

The problem was that the Panel wasn’t touting any specific curricular sequence. No, it was just emphasizing the benefits of a planful and planned curriculum. About 18 different phonics curricula were examined in that collection of studies, and each of them had its own sequence for introducing letters and sounds.

And they all worked. That is, those phonics programs were successful in conferring a learning advantage on the children who were taught them.

Programs that had planned sequences of instruction – any planned sequence – did better than approaches that promoted the idea of responsive phonics -- the notion that teachers should teach skills as the children seemed to need them.

Personally, I wasn’t surprised by this finding, since as a classroom teacher I had tried to teach phonics in such an individual, diagnostic way, keeping track of what I had covered with each child. It was an unholy nightmare. It required way too much managing on my part and way too little learning for the kids.

Teaching in a sequence is important because it ensures that all of the skills get taught – and taught thoroughly. But no sequence has proven to be superior to any other.

That doesn’t mean that letter or sound orderings should be completely arbitrary in a curriculum, just that many variations are going to be effective.

It makes sense, for example, to start out teaching some of the most useful or frequently appearing letters and sounds. Children learn such letters — including the ones in their own name — more quickly than the letters they don’t see as often (Dunn-Rankin, 1978). It is wise to teach the vowels along with letters like t, h, s, n, before taking on the much less frequent ones z, q, x, or k. Kids can successfully learn these letters in any sequence, but teaching the most frequent ones early, enables them to read words sooner.

When I was a becoming a teacher there was a controversy over whether it was best to introduce consonants or vowels first. Lots of argument, but not much data. Our professors demonstrated that if you took all the vowels out of a message you could still read the text, so they claimed consonants were most useful and therefore more worthy of early attention. Other authorities argued back that there are no words without vowels and vowels have some of the highest frequencies. Accordingly, they thought vowels merited earlier instruction.

Common sense eventually won out.

Instead of making it an all or none proposition, teaching a combination of consonants and vowels makes the greatest sense since it allows kids to read and write words earlier. Teach a few consonants along with a single vowel, and kids will be able to read and write several three letter words (CVCs). Then teach a few more consonants and another vowel and this number of words multiplies.

Another valuable sequencing criterion has to do with avoiding ambiguity. We should try to minimize confusion to make early reading easier. That means we need to separate the introduction of very similar letters and sounds.

At one time, psychologists flirted with the notion of teaching highly similar letters together since that would allow teachers to highlight the features that distinguished those letters from each other. But empirical studies found that it was much better to separate similar elements (Gibson & Levin, 1975). Teaching them together turned out to be confusing.

Don’t teach b and d together, or m and n, for instance. Letters that are visually or phonemically similar need to be kept separated in their introduction.

Teach one item of the confusable pairs thoroughly, before introducing its partner. A student who already has strong purchase on either the /p/ or /b/ sounds, will have less trouble mastering the other. The same can be said about learning the letters b and d. If students are taught one of these well prior to taking on the other, they will master them. But teach them together and they are likely to be unsure of which is which.

Another sequencing issues has to do with capitals and lower-case letters. Which of these do we teach first?

Lower case letters have greater value in reading. You simply see more of them, so the knowledge of such letters is more predictive of eventual reading achievement (Busch, 1980).

But kids are more likely to come to school knowing their capitals (these are somewhat easier to teach because they tend to be a bit more distinctive visually, and because so many preschool alphabet toys emphasize capitals).

Since we want children to see capitals and lower-case forms to be functionally identical in reading (a G and a g will represent the same phonemes), I prefer to teach these together. This is especially useful many lower-case letters that are miniature versions of the capitals: c, k, m, o, p, s, v, w, x, y, z.

Beyond these very general guidelines (usefulness, avoid ambiguity, consonants and vowels, upper and lower case), the “appropriate” sequences of instruction for letters and sounds are arbitrary and you have a wide range of choices in the order that you intend to introduce them. Likewise, beyond these general guidelines, sequence of instruction is not a useful distinguisher among commercial programs you might be considering.

Basically, when it comes to teaching phonics and the alphabet, sequence doesn’t matter very much.

That said, I’m still not letting my daughters to school with their underwear on the outside. But then they aren’t Madonna.
References

Busch, R. F. (1980). Predicting first-grade reading achievement. Learning Disability Quarterly, 3, 38-48. 

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

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast