He noticed a problem and pointed it out to me. It was something that I had recently noticed myself in a very different context, so I was intrigued. He and I became a kind of mini “committee of correspondence”, exchanging emails about our concerns.

These days there is much attention to the science of reading in public discourse and policy making. It is aimed at instruction for both native speakers and English Learners. Claude and I are cool with that.

However, some of what is being promoted is not really science. It fits into the science drawer about as well as Kanye West fits into a Taylor Swift festival. 

This blog emerged from our round robin – providing you with the wisdom of two experts for the price of one.

Sometimes an argument ends up in court. The plaintiffs and defense hire experts to support their case. Judges evaluate their expertise to determine the value of their testimony. Not every tool in the shed is sharp enough to gain “expert” status.

Journalists face a similar problem when it comes to literacy education. They usually address this by seeking a range of opinions. Expert #1 says phonics is effective and helps young children learn to read. Expert #2 disagrees.

The resulting news story concludes something like: “Educators don’t agree on the value of phonics.”

The problem with that is that most educators do not disagree over that issue.

Trying to reveal both sides of an issue is admirable. 

But this kind of “on the one hand, on the other hand” reporting can make it look like a raging “reading war” when most reading scientists agree that some early phonics instruction is a good idea and should be part of any complete reading program, including those aimed at English Learners. 

But what counts as expertise in this kind of kerfuffle?

Recently, I was asked about phonics by a reporter. After I told him about the instructional studies that had consistently found phonics instruction conferred a learning advantage, he expressed skepticism. He had already discussed the matter with another expert, whom he indiscreetly named. That expert assured him phonics couldn’t work.

I was gob smacked. 

The named expert did know reading, but his/her expertise regarding decoding was decidedly circumscribed. This expert had never taught or supervised at the grade levels in question, had never done research on phonics or any related topics, had never prepared teachers to teach beginning reading. The study proving phonics didn’t work was an analysis of phonics generalizations from 1963 that showed exceptions to many of the “rules” then being taught!

That expert failed to note later large-scale analyses of tens of thousands of English words that found much greater spelling consistency (e.g., Venezky, 1967) and ignored all the instructional studies.

RELATED: ’Tis the Season of Test Prep: Bah Humbug

I felt bad for the journalist. 

He knew neither of us. He had to evaluate our contributions based only on credentials. The other expert’s credentials were impeccable in terms of degrees, university appointments, and recognition in the field. That his/her expertise included little that would provide deep knowledge on the issue in question would not be readily apparent.

I’ve been in a similar situation. Journal editors must identify reviewers with sufficient knowledge to adequately referee research articles for publication. I would select experts with the kind of specific and specialized expertise that a decoding researcher would bring to a phonics study. However, I would also choose someone else – knowledgeable in the field more generally – to try to avoid any bias that might enter the review process due to unstated assumptions or beliefs that the more specialized reviewers might possess.

Even with that, I probably wouldn’t have chosen the same informant this journalist did; just not knowledgeable, conversant, or up to date enough to justify using him or her for an outsider’s view. 

Claude pointed out a similar, less public and more in-the-weeds, disagreement between Stanislas Dehaene and Steven L. Strauss concerning the interpretation of neuroscientific research on reading. Dehaene is a noted neuroscientist with a long history of research contributions, while Strauss is a practicing neurologist with a PhD in linguistics and strong opinions about teaching reading. He neither has research credentials, nor does he appear even conversant in the neuroscientific literature that has accumulated over the past couple of decades (Dehaene, 2024). He not only has disdain for the work of pretty much every eminent scholar in that field, but rejects much of the instructional research, too. (Beware of “expert opinions” from other fields of study. A neurologist’s opinions about the best way to teach reading are about as useful as reading educators’ opinions about how best to treat neurological problems).

Advocates more interested in advancing ill-informed positions than weighing the evidence take advantage of false equivalences such as these to obscure relevant facts and neutralize relevant—but inconvenient to their position—evidence.

In a recent posting, for example, members of the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) wondered how “a dispute between two highly respected neuroscientists, Dr. Strauss and Dr. Dehaene” could possibly be resolved by mere mortals such as journalists or the rest of us.

Easy: Compare their credentials. This one is an easy call if we dig below the surface of competing claims. See here.

Reporters, too, wanting to surface adversarial positions (often at the behest of editors who likely know even less about the issues than they do) will report such a disagreement as if the two sides are equivalent. Then teachers and teacher educators who may themselves have little knowledge about research may cling to opinions such as Strauss’s or CABE’s to justify their own.

Misinformation among educators and advocates for English Learners (also known as Emergent Bilinguals or Multi-Lingual Learners) has especially proliferated over the past few years.

Claims have been made, for example, that these students have different brains, learn differently, and therefore require fundamentally different approaches to teaching reading. Or that reading research (aka “science of reading”) does not apply to these students because relevant studies have only included monolingual, mostly English-speaking students.

These claims have been shown to be flatly untrue in articles for a broad education audience and for those particularly interested in these populations of students. But these and other misguided beliefs can still influence unwary and uninformed educators.

Teachers and teacher educators are seemingly in the same spot as the courts and the reporters when it comes to evaluating expertise. But there is one important difference. Journalists and judges rarely have made up their minds on the issue before they start. 

Professional educators often have already developed strong ideological positions about pedagogical topics, phonics instruction just being one of many.

In such cases, these educators aren’t seeking knowledge but affirmation.

Think about it: Do you believe that kids learn to read best from reading and that schools should, therefore, devote considerable time to just letting kids read on their own? Do you believe that textbooks are bad for kids? Do you think that since it is possible sometimes to guess the next word accurately without looking, there is no need to teach decoding? Do you believe that kids who speak different languages are wired differently so they need to read and learn to read differently?

If you answered yes to any of those (or to dozens of similar queries), then the question is, would any amount or type of evidence change your mind?

Over my career, I have often had to adjust my thinking because empirical studies revealed things that I did not know or believe. I consider myself to be data driven rather than ideology driven. I try to use the right kind of evidence to answer a question.

The complications and inconsistencies of English do give one pause. Maybe kids don’t need that kind of help?

Likewise, the language learning needs of English learners would seem to dwarf their decoding needs. Maybe phonics won’t help them? 

Research can help answer those kinds of questions. Studies, again and again, have revealed learning benefits for such teaching – including for English Learners.

Personally, I’m less interested in opinions on this kind of issue – especially the opinions of individuals with limited knowledge on the subject in question. Journalists often seek such “experts” to provide supposedly “balanced reporting” and to humanize an issue – human voices are more appealing than research findings to most readers, whether they are educators, policy makers, or members of the public.

The problem is that one side of some arguments—such as whether phonics should be a part of reading instruction for all students, regardless of their English language proficiency—is supported by large numbers of independent studies that have been impartially reviewed. Those studies show that including phonics in a comprehensive reading program reduces failure and raises average literacy levels. 

Relying on dubious expert opinion in the face of scads of actual data may not be the cause of the reading wars, but it sure keeps them going.

The solution? 

Journalists should be careful of the “on the one hand, on the other hand” kind of reporting.

Real, or presumed, experts should beg off replying to journalist’s questions when they have little or no special knowledge on a topic.

Teachers and principals need to be skeptical about expert claims – especially claims made without evidence.

For a variety of reasons, none of these is easy to accomplish. But we must try to do so, and we should challenge others to do so. The alternative is continued confusion and misinformed policies and practices. Our students, their families, and our society will continue to bear the brunt.

READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

August, D., & Shanahan, T. (2006). Developing literacy in second-language learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Baker, S., Lesaux, N., Jayanthi, M., Dimino, J., Proctor, C. P., Morris, J., Gersten, R., Haymond, K., Kieffer, M. J., Linan-Thompson, S., & Newman-Gonchar, R. (2014). Teaching academic content and literacy to English learners in elementary and middle school (NCEE 2014-4012). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from the NCEE website: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/publications_reviews.aspx.

Bond, G. L., & Dykstra, R. (1967). The cooperative research program in first-grade reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 2(4), 5–142. https://doi.org/10.2307/746948

Chall, J. (1967). Learning to read: The great debate. New York: Harper & Row.

Clymer, T., & R. G. S. (1963). The utility of phonic generalizations in the primary grades. The Reading Teacher, 16(4), 252–258. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20197636

Gersten, R., Baker, S.K., Shanahan, T., Linan-Thompson, S., Collins, P., & Scarcella, R. (2007). Effective Literacy and English Language Instruction for English Learners in the Elementary Grades: A Practice Guide (NCEE 2007-4011). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Gottardo, A., Chen, X., & Huo, M. R. Y. (2021). Understanding within? and cross?language relations among language, preliteracy skills, and word reading in bilingual learners: Evidence from the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56, S371-S390. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.410

Li, S., & Woore, R. (2023). How Chinese learners decode L2 English words: Evidence from a phonics instruction program. Reading Research Quarterly, 58(4), 584-600. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.515

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

National Early Literacy Panel. (2008). Developing early literacy. Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy.

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

Washburn, E. K., Gesel, S. A., Fitzgerald, M. S., Beach, K. D., & Kingsbery, C. R. (2023). The impact of a comprehensive, evidence-based approach to summer literacy intervention on the K-3 reading skills of economically and culturally diverse students. Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 39(6), 510-529. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2022.2147463

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Blast from the Past: This entry first appeared September 6, 2016, was reissued June 27, 2020, and January 25, 2025. I’ve updated it a bit – based on my new book (which is currently in production and should be out soon). Avoiding teaching students with grade level texts, holds most kids back rather than propelling them forward. This blog entry provides practical advice as to how to teach successfully with such books.

Teacher Question:

My district is currently "grappling" with the idea of asking students to read complex text if they are significantly below the grade level. As an example, within one fourth grade class, a teacher identified that more than half her class is 1-2 grade levels below the expectation for reading (using multiple measures). Her response is to change the level of the text and try to move the students forward. The common theme in our schools is that growth is what matters, not proficiency. However, our new reading series expects students to perform in more complex texts. Even the "approaching" level books are above what we typically would ask struggling students to read. Could you give some specific examples of how to scaffold, when students are unable to read half the words on a page?  

RELATED: Are We Getting the Right Information When It Comes to the Science of Reading?

Shanahan Response:

First, if students are reading like first graders—that is, they are struggling with decoding then you should be trying to teach them out of easier books, with lots of word repetition and high decodability. The complex text prescription is not for them. You indicate that they can’t read half the words on the page which sounds a lot lower than one or two grade levels off. If they are that low, you will need to do a lot more than just placing them in much easier books. They also should be receiving substantial amounts of phonics and fluency training (30 minutes per day of each), and some may even need more of those in Tier 2 interventions.

However, if these fourth graders are reading at a second or third grade level, then, place them in the grade level texts. Doing that not only means that they’ll be taught what your state requires, but you’ll be exposing them to content or ideas more appropriate to their maturity, intellectual functioning, and interests.

Second, vary the reading demands on these students so that they are not always working with challenging text. You should do what athletic trainers dp, varying the degree of difficulty of the training. Some texts should be easier, and these will merit less scaffolding and support, some texts should be harder and those will require more teacher guidance.

Traditionally, experts have argued that all instructional texts must be at the instructional level. That makes no sense, and I suspect it undermines students’ recognition of their own progress – except when there are text level changes. Harder texts give students opportunities to negotiate the features of text that can be barriers to comprehension, while easier ones allow them to consolidate that learning.

Third, let the kids in on the secret. Tell them what you are doing. Make sure they know that instead of teaching them out of easy below-grade books (“baby stuff”), they’ll be taking on grade level texts. The point isn’t to scare them. Instead, make sure they recognize the respect inherent in your approach, and assure them that you’ll do everything you can to help them succeed. 

Fourth, if students are far behind, reverse the order that you normally use with guided reading and fluency practice. Most teachers will have kids read a selection for comprehension, with fluency practice as a follow up. That allows kids to quickly achieve fluency with that text. However, with kids two or more grade levels behind, it makes greater sense to reverse things. Give them a chance to read the text aloud once or twice before taking on the text for comprehension. This can be done many ways: tape recorders, parent volunteers, paired reading, echo reading with the teacher… whatever. 

If kids have read through the text once or twice before hand, they’ll be in much better shape for comprehending it. Studies show that such “pre-reading” fluency work can “raise students’ reading level” with that text by at least one grade level.

Fifth, preteach words. This might be preparing students to deal with words they may not decode easily or preparing them to take on vocabulary the author doesn’t explain or define. If a word is explained in the text or you think kids can figure it out from context, don’t take time to preteach it. But words that you don’t think students will know, tell them ahead of time or provide them with a glossary.  

Sixth, when reading the text for comprehension, chunk it into small sections (a paragraph, a page). Ask questions at the end of each section and guiding rereading when kids can’t answer the questions. As they get better with this, “stretch them out”, by providing longer text segments. This approach will help the students to develop reading endurance.

Seventh, identify some of the especially complicated sentences in the texts (e.g., long sentences, sentences in passive voice, sentences with multiple clauses). During discussion, question students about the ideas expressed in those sentences. If students can’t answer them, guide them to examine and break down those sentences to help them to unlock their meanings.

Eighth, pay special attention to cohesion… kids get lost in synonyms, pronouns, etc. Get students to be explicit about who “he” is, or what animal was being referred to as “the mammal.” There are worksheet exercises that can be used to strengthen such skills, but scaffolding this kind of work in the complex text can be powerful.  

These kinds of supports can go a long way towards making students successful with challenging texts. There is now an extensive body of research supporting their effectiveness, both in improving student reading achievement and in transforming texts from frustration level to instructional level.



READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Brown, Lisa Trottier, Kathleen A. J. Mohr, Bradley R. Wilcox, and Tyson S. Barrett. “The Effects of Reading and Text Difficulty on Third-graders’ Reading Achievement.” Journal of Educational Research 111, no. 5 (2017): 541-553. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2017.1310711

Burns, Matthew K., Vincent J. Dean, and Sarah Foley. “Preteaching Unknown Key Words with Incremental Rehearsal to Improve Reading Fluency and Comprehension with Children Identified as Reading Disabled.” Journal of School Psychology 42, no. 4 (2004): 303–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2004.04.003

Morgan, A., Wilcox, B. R., & Eldredge, J. L. (2000). "Effect of difficulty levels on Second-grade delayed readers using dyad reading. Journal of Educational Research, 94(no. 2): 113-119. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220670009598749

Shanahan, T. (In press). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

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

Shanahan, T. (2019). Why children should be taught to read with more challenging text. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 44(2), 17-23.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Earlier Comments 

Texts are not just lists of sentences. Authors organize what they have to say so that readers can follow the discourse and remember the information

For example, stories depend on plot structure or story grammar. Characters have goals and confront problems in trying to achieve those desired outcomes. Accordingly, stories include one or more events with settings, characters, problems, attempts to solve the problems, outcomes, and reactions to the outcomes. Knowing plot structure makes it easier for readers to anticipate what’s going to happen, to seek key information, and to later retrieve that information from memory.

Informational text structure tends to be a bit more complicated. While stories gain complexity through variations on that basic structure (e.g., altered time sequences, introduction of multiple characters with conflicting problems), expository text does that through the combination of multiple structures. These rhetorical structures include description, collection, sequence, problem-solution, cause-and-effect, comparison, hierarchy.

The research is clear: Readers benefit from recognizing and using such structures when they read. Teaching those rhetorical moves can be, and often is, beneficial.

So why revisit this issue now? Because I have a bone to pick with this approach.

Not that I disagree with the idea of teaching rhetorical structure, just that I have come to believe it to be incomplete and, sometimes, misleading.

For instance, a good deal of scientific writing is about causation, even when a text isn’t organized around a “cause-and-effect” structure.

A science passage may devote many words to a detailed description of an experiment using a “sequential” structure. But a good science reader must zero in on the causal relations implied by such a text. What did the experiment do to cause the outcome? What causal relationship did the study reveal?

RELATED: Eight Ways to Help Kids Read Complex Text

The author organized the information sequentially to describe how the scientists went about determining or proving causality, but causality was the real point of the matter. Readers focused on the sequence (the rhetorical vehicle) instead of the causation (the substantive purpose) will not do well in a science class

For the most part, text structure pedagogy tends to neglect the underlying purposes for the rhetorical structures that it emphasizes.

Here’s a different example.

I was asked at the last minute to deliver a demonstration lesson focused on reading in a fourth-grade social studies class. I quickly skimmed the chapter (and the book), typed up a graphic organizer, printed 25 copies, and hurried off to class.

My plan was to focus on text structure – but not text structure studied in most of the research.

Fourth-grade social studies often focuses on world cultures (e.g., Egypt, Greece, Rome). In this case, the textbook devoted a chapter to each of those civilizations. Each chapter tackled the history, economics, government, geography, and culture (e.g., arts, language, religion) of a particular civilization.

My graphic organizer encouraged students to summarize information into each of those categories.

It was not that the chapter included no comparisons, sequences, descriptions, or problem-solutions. In fact, it was rife with those rhetorical moves. But I thought those content categories to be more salient and pertinent to the purposes of social studies.

Think about it. Getting students to focus on civics, economics, and geography is more central to understanding social studies, than getting them to focus on problem-solution, cause-and-effect, description, and the like. The content structure will almost always be more specific to the knowledge we are trying to develop.

Instead of focusing reader attention on the author’s presentation strategy, we should get them thinking about the information itself. 

If kids are reading about biomes, we can get them to identify the various collections of facts, sequences, causes-and-effects or any of the other rhetorical structures the author may have chosen to use. But it would usually be better to emphasize that the chapter explores five types of biomes (aquatic, grassland, forest, desert, tundra) and five categories of information about each (flora, fauna, climate, relationship among those, geographic placements).

When scholars began examining the role that discourse structure plays in reading comprehension, they acknowledged the possibility of relying on alternative structures, not necessarily the ones studied. Those acknowledgements tended to be in vague asides rather than specific prescriptions. I suspect they intended the kinds of idiosyncratic content organizations that I am referring to.

Obviously, this is not an “either or” issue. Readers can rely both on the content organization and the author’s rhetorical strategies. Nevertheless, we need be careful not to allow the latter to obscure the former. When teachers get students to grapple with how information is presented rather than on the information itself, mixed results seem likely. Doing that should help students to remember more information from the text – a real plus – but sometimes it does this at the expense of undermining understanding – like obscuring the causal emphasis in science or leading students to ignore the nature and purpose of social studies as a discipline.

The trick is to not allow the structure to sidetrack meaning.

Recently, there have been arguments about comprehension teaching. Should we teach strategies like the use of text organization? Or should the emphasis be on mastering the content of the texts (building knowledge)? A focus on the identification and use of a text’s content organization is valuable because it contributes to the accomplishment of both.

I have come to think of this kind of content organization as being akin to the specialized vocabulary of a subject. Those “tier 3” vocabulary terms tend to be labels for key concepts about a particular topic. Words like organism, climate, ecosystem, adaptation, taiga, tundra, canopy, understory, and so on will not necessarily have much general value for supporting the reading of texts on other topics. But knowing their meanings and relationships is an essential part of having knowledge of biomes and for being able to read well about them.

Understanding that a biome will include organisms (flora and fauna), non-organic or abiotic elements (like rock, water, or soil), climate, and their inter-relationships should help students to make sense of a text that is organized in that way. But understanding this structure is more than that. Recognizing the major elements of a concept and how those elements effect each other is a substantial part of knowing the subject. The student who focuses on trying to understand this substantive content organization will not only improve their reading comprehension but will increase their content knowledge.

As with tier 3 vocabulary, these content structures will not necessarily generalize to other texts, while the rhetorical structures will. Knowing those four key elements of a biome won’t buy you much when it comes to reading a social studies chapter on the Great Depression.

That content structure itself may not be immediately transferable to other subjects and other texts. What can transfer is the insight that authors organize their content, and that comprehension can be enhanced by identifying and using the author’s organizational scheme. Those common rhetorical structures may be useful, but they will rarely be as central to the knowledge we want students to gain as these content structures are.

Teaching kids to identify text structure is a really good idea. However, focusing those efforts on how the content is structured will usually be more beneficial than on the common rhetorical structures. This approach seems to be more consistent with the kind of schema building emphasis of some of the best recent studies on knowledge building through reading (e.g., Mosher, Burkhauser, & Kim, 2024).


READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

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

https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.311

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

Hebert, M. Bohaty, J. J., Nelson, J. R., & Brown, J. (2016). The effects of text structure instruction on expository reading comprehension: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(5), 609-629. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.311

Bonnie J. F. Meyer, Brandt, D. M., & Bluth, G. J. (1980). Use of Top-Level Structure in Text: Key for Reading Comprehension of Ninth-Grade Students. Reading Research Quarterly, 16(1), 72–103. https://doi.org/10.2307/747349

Mosher, D. M., Burkhauser, M. A., & Kim, J. S. (2024). Improving second-grade reading comprehension through a sustained content literacy intervention: A mixed-methods study examining the mediating role of domain-specific vocabulary. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(4), 550-568. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000868

Meyer, B. J. F. (1975). The organization of prose and its effects on memory. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co.

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

Pyle, N., Vasquez, A., Lignugaris/Kraft, B., Gillam, S., Reutzel, D., Olszewski, A., . . . Pyle, D. (2017). Effects of expository text structure interventions on comprehension: A meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(4), 469-501. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.179

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

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

Wijekumar, K. (K.), Meyer, B. J. F., & Lei, P. (2017). Web-based text structure strategy instruction improves seventh graders’ content area reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(6), 741–760. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000168

Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B. J. F., Lei, P., Hernandez, A. C., & August, D. L. (2018). Improving content area reading comprehension of Spanish speaking English Learners in grades 4 and 5 using web-based text structure instruction. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(9), 1969-1996. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9802-9

Williams, J. P., Kao, J. C., Pao, L. S., Ordynans, J. G., Atkins, J. G., Cheng, R., & DeBonis, D. (2016). Close analysis of texts with structure (CATS): An intervention to teach reading comprehension to at-risk second-graders. Journal of Educational Psychology, 198, 1061-1077. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000117

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Teacher question:    

With all the talk about the science of reading (phonics, phonemic awareness, knowledge building, etc.), I’m not hearing anything about print awareness. Should we still teach that and, if so, how do we do that?

Shanahan response:  

I don’t hear much about print awareness these days either, though I think it is included in every set of state educational standards. But I never (until now) get asked about it.

I think there are many reasons for the lack of interest.

First, is its transience. It only matters for a brief window of time. Once kids are reading, print awareness can be assumed and there’s no more reason for concern.

Also, it is kind of a grab bag. “Print awareness” or “concepts of print” are terms used to describe a disparate collection of knowledge and skill:

• Recognition that print (not pictures) tells the story,
• Print represents words,
• Words are made up of letters,
• Blank spaces separate words,
• Words don’t include numbers,
• Print has orientation,
• Directionality,
• What to do at the end of a line of print,
• Distinguishing front and back book covers,
• Etc.

Some schemes even toss letters and letter names into this pot. Print awareness lacks conceptual clarity.

My first foray into research – more than 50 years ago – was of print awareness. It wasn’t a great study (maybe not even a good one), but I did come to understand that not all those skills are essential to learning to read. Some of them are probably more like side effects or trivial outcomes of learning to read. Honestly, I don’t think distinguishing book covers or recognizing that words don’t include numbers play an important role in reading development.

RELATED: My Problem with Teaching Text Organization

Those kinds of items can be safely neglected – even if your school tests them. Those especially trivial items are likely tested so often because they are so easy to evaluate. That something is easy to assess is a poor reason for assessing it.

Nevertheless, some items in that list are essential to learning to read – such as recognizing that we read print and that print represents words. Other items play a functional role in reading and do have some value (directionality).

Another confusing thing about print awareness has to do with where it fits. Think of the “simple view of reading” or “Scarborough’s rope.” In those frameworks, print awareness would most likely be categorized as a decoding element. That’s interesting because analyses of actual data show it to be more implicated in reading comprehension and language than in decoding (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008). I don’t understand that either. Don’t ask, I can’t explain it.

Accordingly, researchers have paid much less attention to print awareness than to other aspects of reading. A quick keyword check (PsycInfo) revealed that print awareness or concepts of print show up 11% as often as phonics/decoding and 4% as reading comprehension. There is some print awareness science, but – relatively – not much.

Above I noted two types of print awareness that play a role in reading development.

One category includes skills implicated in the mechanics of reading, including directionality or knowing what to do at the end of a line of print. These skills aren’t difficult to learn, but they are learned behaviors. Directionality is an arbitrary convention of print. In English we read left-to-right. Other scripts do it differently: Hebrew is read right-to-left, and the vertical scripts of Chinese and Japanese are read top-to-bottom.

The truly essential parts of print awareness are more conceptual. They are fundamental understandings or insights (awareness), more than skills to be implemented. An important example of this is the recognition that reading involves print not pictures.

I remember when I first became aware of this. I was reading Ferreiro and Teberosky’s (1982) magnificent study of early reading development. Their interviews and observations of preschoolers in Argentina revealed that young children often have no idea why print is on the page.

My oldest daughter was 3. I’d been reading to her almost daily since her debut. I was certain that any child read to that much would easily have gained that necessary insight. I couldn’t wait to get home to check that out.

When being read to, my daughter looked at the book and often touched the pictures. When she blocked the words I’d simply move her hand or read through the interference. But not this day. No, now when she inadvertently covered the print… I stopped. Dead in my reading tracks. I didn’t even try to finish the sentence.

“Why did you stop? What’s the matter, Daddy?”

I explained that I had to stop because she was covering the words. I couldn’t read because I couldn’t see the words.

She looked at the pages, puzzled. “You read this?” she asked pointing at the print.

“Yes, those are the words that I read.”

We didn’t talk about the different roles the print and pictures play, and I didn’t elucidate on how print does its work. But for the next several reads, she conducted numerous “experiments.” She’d look at my eyes when I was reading and then would try to plop her fingers down where she thought she might bring things to a halt. If I stopped reading, she laughed uproariously. If I didn’t she’d try again.

To tell the truth, I was as surprised as she was.  She was astonished that those black squiggles were what was read, and I was flabbergasted that this brilliant product of my genes who I’d read to hundreds of times had no idea that print told the story.

Research helps explain why this is (Justice, et al., 2012). Children being read to rarely look at the print. Only about 6% of the time. Looking at the print doesn’t reveal how print references language, but it is a necessary step in the process.

The awareness that print is what is being read raises some interesting questions. “Where does it say ‘dragons’”? for instance. If the print shows what to say, how does what we say match with what’s on the page?

Research, including mine, shows that kids formulate all kinds of hypotheses to answer such questions. Sometimes they assume that each letter must stand for a word or syllable. The idea that multiple letters are needed to represent most words is not immediately obvious. The purpose of blank spaces isn’t immediately apparent either. I’m referring to the “concept of word.”

Let’s say the children have memorized Mary Had a Little Lamb. They can recite it from memory. Now we show them text and want them to match their recitation to the print, pointing to the words as they say them (“fingerpoint reading”).

That requires the recognition that words are separated by blanks, that “Mary” and “little” are words (“Mare,” “ree,” “lit,” and “tle” are not words), that “had” and “a” are two separate words and not one (“hada” is very popular with the young’uns), and so on.

Darrell Morris has published provocative data suggesting that concept of word is an understanding that expedites growth in phonemic awareness – and that knowing the consonant sounds facilitates development of the concept (e.g., Morris, 1993).

I’m sure that sequence may upset those who think learning to read proceeds in a straightforward order… with kids mastering phonemic awareness, then taking on letters, sounds, and decoding, eventually confronting words in text.

Nevertheless, most data analyses of early literacy describe this seemingly haphazard developmental pattern. For instance, Linnea Ehri has long explained how learning phonemic awareness and phonics are intertwined. Her data would argue against delaying phonics instruction until kids have accomplished the necessary levels of phonemic awareness. Seeing the relationship between letters and phonemes helps kids to perceive the phonemes within words, just as phonemic awareness contributes to decoding. Likewise, there is no reason to delay exposing beginning readers to print – including engaging them in reading decodable texts and texts with lots of word repetition.

Laura Justice and her crew (2008) have convincingly demonstrated the benefits of pointing at the print when reading to children. Parents can easily do this with a child in their lap or close at their side, while teachers can do it with big books and the like. Dr. Justice reports that such reader behavior contributes to print awareness. She also has shown that talking about text during those read-alouds can be beneficial, too. The readers in their study might point to a word and tell the child, “This says danger.” (I bet Laura’d approve of my refusal to read when the kids’ fingers cover the text.)

When I taught first grade, I used a lot of language experience. The children would dictate, and I would transcribe. Then I’d read it back to them multiple times, and they’d try to join in with me. I not only pointed to the words as we read, but they got to see that the transcription – the writing – went in the same direction as the reading. (That first study mentioned earlier found that my kids were more aware of these aspects of print than was true of the kids in the studies that had already been published on that topic.)

The short answer to your question is:

• Yes, teach print awareness.
• Let kids see the text you are reading (or writing) and bring their attention to it.
• Talk about those spaces between words, and don’t hesitate to point to the words that you are reading.
• But don’t spend a lot of time on fronts and backs of books or how to turn pages or whether numbers and letters are different, those are more likely to be side effects than facilitators in learning to read.
  
  

READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Chung, S. C., Geva, E., Chen, X., & Deacon, S. H. (2021). Do we ‘laugh’ or ‘La8gh’? Early print knowledge and its relation to learning to read in English and French. Scientific Studies of Reading, 25(6), 519–533. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2020.1863970

Ferreiro, E. & Teberosky, A. (1982). Literacy before schooling. Portsmouth, NMH: Heinemann.

Hiebert, E. H., Cioffi, G., & Antonak, R. F. (1984). A developmental sequence in preschool children's acquisition of reading readiness skills and print awareness concepts. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 5(2), 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/0193-3973(84)90012-1

Justice, L. M., Pullen, P. C., & Pence, K. (2008). Influence of verbal and nonverbal references to print on preschoolers' visual attention to print during storybook reading. Developmental Psychology, 44(3), 855–866. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.3.855

McGinty, A. S., Justice, L. M., Piasta, S. B., Kaderavek, J., & Fan, X. (2012). Does context matter? Explicit print instruction during reading varies in its influence by child and classroom factors. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(1), 77–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2011.05.002

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. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710902754341

Morris D. (1993). The relationship between children’s concept of word in text and phoneme awareness in learning to read: A longitudinal study. Research in the Teaching of English, 27(no. 2), 133-154.

Morris, D., Bloodgood, J., & Perney, J. (2003). Kindergarten Predictors of First- and Second-Grade Reading Achievement. The Elementary School Journal, 104(2), 93–109.

https://doi.org/10.1086/499744

Nevo, E., & Vaknin-Nusbaum, V. (2018). Enhancing language and print-concept skills by using interactive storybook reading in kindergarten. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 18(4), 545–569. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798417694482

Storch, S. A., & Whitehurst, G. J. (2002). Oral language and code-related precursors to reading: Evidence from a longitudinal structural model. Developmental Psychology, 38(6), 934–947. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.38.6.934

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. https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532799XSSR0604_02

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Teacher Question: 

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

Shanahan response:

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

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

What turned things around?

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

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

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

It’s kind of like that old joke:

How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

That may seem sensible, but where do you bite?

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

Syllables matter in English. The consistency of spelling patterns and their relationship to phonemes and pronunciations is determined, in part, by where particular letters appear in syllables rather than where they appear in words (Venezky, 1967), and the perception of vowel sounds (the central element of the syllable) is key to successful early phonemic awareness development.

If you doubt this think of a word like tiger. If you break the word in two before the letter g, then you are most likely to come up with the proper pronunciation. If you divide it after the g, you end up with Tigger, which may make Winnie the Pooh happy, but doesn’t get you to the right word. Of course, you could teach kids to divide all such words before the consonant, but then you end up reading camel as came-el. Where you break such words into syllables determines whether the word follows the most widely used pronunciation patterns or is an exception.  

Linnea Ehri has described the perception of the syllable as paving “the way for entry into benefiting from phonics instruction”. The syllable has been found to be an essential unit in phonological processing (Ecalle & Magnan, 2007). In other words, syllables are basic.

I, too, read the Kearns study (Kearns, 2020). You seem to think it says something about whether to teach syllables. I don’t see it that way. A close reading suggests Kearns doesn’t either – and his other work confirms that (Kearns & Whaley, 2019). Remember Kearns only examined a single category of syllabication patterns (a group governing the pronunciation of single vowels). He found a high degree of reliability in VCCV words (such as rab-bit) and a reasonable degree of consistency in VCV words of two syllables (though that division rule didn’t do so well with longer words). He also reported that there were spellings within that universe with highly reliable pronunciations (such as “ic” and “wa”). That still leaves us with all the other kinds of syllables such as sion, tion, ble, or a raft of common morphological units that operate consistently as syllables in our language (e.g., un, pre, trans, pro, ing, ed). Kerns didn’t examine any of these.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given this, I’d teach syllabication. It has value. The amount of such teaching should be limited. Decoding instruction is not primarily or mainly about teaching students to sound out words. Such teaching, if successful, must instigate readers to perceive patterns and conditionalities within words (that’s what orthographic mapping and statistical learning are all about).

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

Please pass the elephant.

References

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

Colenbrander, D., von Hagen, A., Kohnen, S., Wegener, S., Ko, K., Beyersmann, E., . . . Castles, A. (2024). The effects of morphological instruction on literacy outcomes for children in english-speaking countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36(4), 119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09953-3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier Comments

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Parent question: My son is 11 years old, and he suffers from dyslexia. I’ve been told you oppose accommodations for dyslexic children. That is irresponsible. I don’t think you understand how these children suffer.

RELATED: Eight Ways to Help Kids Read Complex Text

Shanahan responds:

I do oppose some – though not all — accommodations for students with dyslexia.

The purpose of accommodations is to enable people with disabilities to access and participate in activities, jobs, and learning. An accommodation is an alteration to an environment that increases individual access.

Examples of accommodations that I fully support are modifications to curbs to allow those who depend upon wheelchairs to get where they want to go. Or the provision of large print texts to those with vision problems that can be overcome or minimized by such text. Basically, if access or learning can be enhanced through some alteration of the environment I’m all for it.

But as your letter suggests, there are “accommodations” that I do consider problematic. I often hear from teachers (and sometimes parents) who hope I will endorse replacing reading with listening for kids who struggle with decoding.

I get their thinking: Why should we hurt kids’ feelings by asking them to try to read a science or social studies text when we know they find reading itself to be hard?

Obviously, our purpose is not to make these kids feel bad. But it is – or at least should be – to teach students to read. Accommodations that prevent or limit learning are a bad idea.

There is no question that providing audio versions of text will make those texts more accessible to many students with reading disabilities. 

What such an accommodation cannot do is help these students read any better.  Comprehending while reading is a different game than comprehending while listening. They both have value, but they are not the same thing. One should not be allowed to take the place of the other.

Accommodations are protections. They protect kids from being excluded or penalized due to disabilities. As such, accommodations have a role to play in schools and in society generally.

But reducing reading instruction is not an accommodation. Just the opposite. It is an act of exclusion. Replacing reading with listening may seem protective, but it is protecting kids against learning. 

These days I hear from teachers who love the idea of replacing reading instruction or reading assignments with products like Audible. They usually aren’t focused on kids with disabilities, just garden variety struggling and reluctant readers.

These teachers often seem to assume that reading and listening are interchangeable, that gains in one generalize to the other.

These beliefs are not supported by research, however.

First, there are a slew of studies that find big differences between reading and listening. These studies suggest that these abilities have only about 40% shared variance (e.g., Silinkas, et al., 2024; Wolf, et al, 2019). That’s not nothing, but it suggests the unlikelihood that the teaching of one will automatically transfer to the other.

(I’m not satisfied with this 40% figure. To my way of thinking, the major outcome of such studies has been an increased appreciation of the complexity inherent in trying to measure oral and written comprehension in analogous ways. It has turned out to be a very complicated problem).

Even if we accept that figure, it is important to remember that is a correlational estimate (a squared correlation in fact). The way to think about that 40% is: “IF there is a causal relationship between these variables, then 40% is an estimate of how much effect one of these may have on the other.” In other words, knowing that two variables are related does not prove that teaching one will have an impact on the other.

For that, we turn to experimental studies – studies in which listening comprehension is taught, with the impact being measured through reading comprehension. It turns out that there are few such studies and even fewer that report any cross over benefits (e.g., van den Bos, et al., 1998; van Zeijts, et al., 2023).

Teaching listening comprehension should have a place in our schools. Replacing reading instruction and practice with listening comprehension is a bad idea, however.

I appreciate that many folks who seek reading accommodations for their kids are thinking more about testing situations than instructional ones.

Is it okay to replace reading with listening when we are evaluating reading comprehension, such as on state tests?

Given the important differences between reading and listening noted above, that elementary students usually have better listening than reading comprehension (that eventually shifts for most of us), and that those tests are meant to identify how well our kids can read with comprehension, I would argue against that testing modification.

However, replacing reading with listening is not the only possible accommodation in such testing situations.

Research has found that allowing – or encouraging – these students to read test texts aloud rather than silently improves their performance significantly (Giuisto & Ehri, 2019).

One thing that I like about that approach is that it is an accommodation that is under the control of the student rather than the adults. That means that it does more than take away an impediment to performance. It empowers students to minimize or solve the problem.

Another thing I like about it that it is something that any reader could do in any real reading situation – reading a textbook in a dorm room or doing a work task in one’s cubicle.

Let’s not replace reading comprehension instruction with listening comprehension, and let’s use reading centered accommodations when we are testing reading comprehension.


READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Giusto, M., & Ehri, L. C. (2019). Effectiveness of a partial read-aloud test accommodation to assess reading comprehension in students with a reading disability. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 52(3), 259-270. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219418789377

Silinskas, G., Gedutiene, R., Torppa, M., & Raiziene, S. (2024). Simple view of reading across the transition from kindergarten to grade 1 in a transparent orthography. Scientific Studies of Reading, 28(1), 60-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2023.2220848

Wolf, M. C., Muijselaar, M. M. L., Boonstra, A. M., & de Bree, E. H. (2019). The relationship between reading and listening comprehension: Shared and modality-specific components. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 32(7), 1747-1767. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9924-8

van den Bos, Kees P., Brand-Gruwel, S., & Aarnoutse, C. A. J. (1998). Text comprehension strategy instruction with poor readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 10(6), 471-498. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007976225000

van Zeijts, Brechtje E. J., Ganushchak, L. Y., de Koning, B. B., & Tabbers, H. K. (2023). Stimulating inference-making in second grade children when reading and listening to narrative texts. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10463-x

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

In the 1970s, Dolores Durkin shocked the reading world when she reported the results of her landmark observational study. She revealed an appalling paucity of comprehension teaching. Her team observed almost 75 hours of reading instruction in upper elementary classrooms but only found about 20 minutes of comprehension teaching.

Some of this scarcity may be attributed to narrow definitions – or more accurately to differing conceptions as to what it means to teach comprehension. This is an issue that persists with the new study, even though it is open to a more extensive buffet of teaching moves.

Prior to the 1970s, research on the teaching of reading comprehension was almost non-existent. The few existing comprehension studies focused on reading drills aimed at teaching words or increasing reading speed. It, seemingly, never occurred to the research community that it may be possible to directly teach reading comprehension.

Of course, reading programs did not ignore the issue. Basal readers usually offered “guided reading” or “directed reading” lessons which engaged groups of students in practicing their comprehension. Students read short selections – almost always stories – that were written specifically for the purpose of teaching. Each story repeated words that had appeared earlier and introduced a few additional words, too. Teachers would teach these new words prior to the reading to ensure high comprehension. 

RELATED: Accommodating Reading Comprehension with Listening: Good Idea?

Additionally, relevant background information was usually presented, and teachers asked certain types of questions after portions of the texts were read. These questions allowed teachers to evaluate comprehension and were thought to provide students with valuable practice in engaging in certain kinds of productive thinking (e.g., main idea questions, drawing conclusions questions).

Durkin’s study sought something more explicit than practice, however. In her study, comprehension lessons were those in which teachers did or said “something to help children understand or work out the meaning of more than a single, isolated word” (p. 488). It also segregated instruction from assessment: if teachers did or said something “in order to learn if what was read was comprehended,” that was testing not teaching. (p. 11)

At the time of Durkin’s study, the “cognitive revolution” in psychology was in full flower. Psychologists were throwing off the shackles of behaviorism and exploring how people think. Comprehension – and attention, language processing, learning, problem-solving, and so on – came to be seen as more active processes, involving knowledge, intentionality, organization, and self-awareness. 

In that context Durkin’s definitions made some sense. Intentionality was not emphasized in any of those reading lessons. Kids would practice their reading comprehension, without any awareness of what they might be learning.

Not everyone accepted Durkin’s results. For instance, Carol Hodges (1980) thought her definition of comprehension instruction was too narrow because it did not include those question-and-answer sessions.

Capin also seems to reject the possible instructional value of quizzing kids about what they have read.  Though it does identify several specific teaching behaviors that Durkin (and Hodges) neglected: teaching word meaning knowledge, developing background/general knowledge, selecting texts to match lesson goals, establishing engaging and motivational contexts for reading, engaging students in collaborative learning, comprehension strategies, text structure, and high-quality discussions of the text content.

That’s progress, but I don’t agree with all those choices, at least as described in the study.

Some of those actions seem to be aimed more at ensuring successful comprehension practice, than in teaching students how to comprehend or how to comprehend better.

Durkin distinguished between activities that taught comprehension and those that would only allow a teacher to evaluate it.

I’m distinguishing between lessons that ensure students comprehend a specific text that is being used in the lesson, and those aimed at enabling students to comprehend other texts better in the future.

It’s not that I don’t care whether kids understand what they’re reading in their lessons. It’s just that that outcome is insufficient.

Perhaps an example would help. Students read a 2-page segment, and the teacher then asks them questions about what they read. “Why does the author say that “the Grand Canyon is an example of erosion?” Bobby responds incorrectly that it is “because there are a lot of rocks in the Grand Canyon.”

The teacher has a couple of choices here. She could ensure that Bobby and the others comprehend these sentences by asking another child for the answer or by explaining it herself. “No, Bobby, it is because the Colorado River carved the canyon, wearing down and carrying away rock.”

Instead of telling the answer, another possibility would be to take Bobby back into the text to guide him to see the connection between two key sentences – one that revealed the causes of erosion and another that explained how the Grand Canyon was formed. The sentences do not explicitly say that the Grand Canyon was caused by erosion. No, to get there a reader must recognize the connection between this explanation and the later description of the formation of the Grand Canyon. One sentence defines erosion and the other provides an example. It would help Bobby to know that authors will often define a concept and then provide an example – even if they don’t label it as an example. Readers need to learn to watch for those pairings of definitions and examples.

A good follow up might be to find more examples of this in other science articles.

Showing a student how to notice those pairings when reading can both increase comprehension of the text under study and can increase their future comprehension with other texts.  

Some of the items in the Capin list could help kids to comprehend better. Teaching vocabulary is a good example of that. Words get used again and again. The more words that readers know the meaning of, the more likely their comprehension.

Some other items in that list seem sure to improve comprehension with the lesson text, but their generalization is dubious.  Providing a motivational context for a lesson seems like an example of that.

For me, teaching reading comprehension means improving students’ abilities to read other texts – on their own – with greater understanding. That puts me at odds a bit with both these useful studies.

If the teacher’s action won’t contribute to making kids better comprehenders, then it isn’t comprehension instruction. 

What should comprehension instruction look like? I gave one simple example about erosion and the Grand Canyon earlier, and in my next blog, we’ll look at comprehension teaching with a broader lens.


READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Capin, P., Dahl-Leonard, K., Hall, C., Yoon, N. Y., Cho, E., Chatzoglou, E., Reiley, S., Walker, M., Shanahan, E., Andress, T., & Vaughn, S. (2025). Reading comprehension instruction: Evaluating our progress since Durkin’s seminal study. Scientific Studies of Reading, 29(1), 85–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2024.2418582

Durkin, D. (1978). What Classroom Observations Reveal about Reading Comprehension Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 14(4), 481–533. http://www.jstor.org/stable/747260

Hodges, C. A. (1980). Commentary: Toward a Broader Definition of Comprehension Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 15(2), 299–306. https://doi.org/10.2307/747330

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

According to the older study conducted by Dolores Durkin (1978), comprehension instruction included any action teachers took to help children “understand or work out the meaning of more than a single, isolated word.” The newer study, this one by Philip Capin and colleagues (2024), didn’t provide a definition as much as a list of acceptable actions: teaching word meaning knowledge, developing background knowledge, selecting texts to match lesson goals, establishing engaging and motivational contexts for reading, engaging students in collaborative learning, teaching comprehension strategies, teaching text structure, and high-quality discussions of text content.

Durkin explicitly rejected the post-reading question-and-answer sessions so common in schools. To her, that was assessment only, not instruction. Capin accepted the value of high-quality discussion but distinguished that from the more typical quiz show routines that accompany reading.

RELATED: Are We Teaching Reading Comprehension? Part I

Neither study homed in on the most essential feature of comprehension teaching. It is insufficient to enable students to understand a story or article. If the aim isn’t to alter reading behaviors for future texts, then it isn’t comprehension instruction. Reading practice is not enough.

Here are 6 important things that everyone should know about comprehension teaching.

1.        Amount of comprehension instruction

Both studies claimed there was not enough comprehension instruction. By Durkin’s definition, there was almost zero such teaching, though it increased considerably when those Q&A sessions were counted (Hodges, 1980). Capin found that 23% of reading instruction focused on comprehension.

I’ve long argued for at least 2 hours per day for reading/writing/spelling/language instruction, with a quarter of that devoted to comprehension.

Given that, I don’t think our problem is too little comprehension time. No, it’s that almost any kind of reading practice is claimed to build comprehension. Teachers have kids read texts. They ask questions to be sure the kids understood those texts. They might even do some other things – teaching the meanings of some of the words, providing relevant background information, and so on. Those actions are almost certain to ensure comprehension of the instructional text, but let’s be honest. They have little likelihood of any generalizable impact.  

2.        The centrality of text

The Capin study credited the value of using texts relevant to the purposes of instruction. That inclusion deserves a hug!

A good deal of reading comprehension instruction should take the form of directed reading – with a teacher guiding a group of students through a shared text. These communally read texts determine what can be taught. Given the wide range of things that readers need to learn, these texts must do double and triple duty. Too often they are chosen to support narrow aspects of the curriculum.

For instance, publishers are scrambling to ensure that reading texts expose kids to lots of information. Knowledge is in right now.

But there is more to it than that.

I’m happy to see science and history selections in the reading books. These subjects have been too long ignored. Unfortunately, these programs seem to espouse the idea that social studies and science provide “knowledge,” but literature does not. That’s a big mistake.

However, even if stories and poetry are in, knowledge should not be the only concern when selecting texts for comprehension instruction.

Students should learn to read narratives, expositions, and arguments, and to surmount the varied demands of different genres, rhetorical structures, and text conventions. Children need to be reading books that expose them to those kinds of text features and formats, and they should receive instructional guidance on how to read them.

Another important consideration is the challenge level of these instructional texts. Teachers have been told to teach with books at the students’ instructional levels, texts that could be read with 75-89% comprehension with no teacher support. The idea of that has been to ensure comprehension, but it is comprehension of texts the students can already read reasonably well.  

That’s just the opposite of what is needed (Shanahan, 2025). Kids should be grappling with books they cannot read well, and instruction should help transform those into something comprehensible, without the teacher reading the books to the kids or telling them what they say.

3.        Language comprehension

You can’t tell from either the Durkin or Capin studies – or from lots of other work on reading comprehension – that language matters. Durkin specifically rejects vocabulary instruction as comprehension pedagogy, while Capin et al. includes both vocabulary and text structure.

Much vocabulary instruction focuses on teaching students the meanings of words from the instructional texts, efforts mainly aimed at ensuring success with those texts. That would seem too narrow to count as comprehension instruction by my definition. However, it doesn’t matter why students are learning word meanings, since any word could come up in a future text.

I would count such vocabulary teaching as part of comprehension, though to be fair these lessons are often conceived and delivered so poorly that perhaps it shouldn’t count as teaching at all. For one thing, introducing those words is not likely to lead to long term learning. Any vocabulary that is introduced, needs to be reviewed frequently and kids need to be induced to use these words in their talking and writing.

Another problem with this pre-teaching is that much of it is useless. The words selected for teaching may be defined explicitly in the text. Instead of guiding kids to recognize and make sense of the definitions in the text (reading comprehension), the preteaching encourages kids to ignore the text.

The same can be said for words that may not be defined explicitly but that could be figured out from context, morphology, or the use of a dictionary. Telling those word meanings may discourage the use of those essential tools and won’t teach students how to use them.  

Of course, language depends on more than words. Words are organized into sentences and there are rules or conventions that dictate relationships among words. Formal grammar instruction may not improve reading comprehension, but there is extensive research showing that kids struggle to understand complex sentences and that applied grammar instruction (e.g., guiding students to figure out the meaning of sentences) can improve it.

The same can be said about cohesion. To comprehend text, readers must track the relationships of ideas across text (e.g., pronouns, synonyms, conjunctions). Cohesion can be an important source of confusion, and it can be taught profitably. Text organization is another way that ideas connect across text, and Capin and company wisely included this as a component of comprehension instruction.

I don’t know if any of these observational studies saw such teaching of language, but it is clear from scads research that they should have beent.

4.        The Development of Knowledge

Research shows that reading comprehension depends on knowledge. Readers use knowledge to make sense of the information in texts. The knowledge a reader brings to a text can reduce the cognitive load required to comprehend, it can be the source of inferences, and it can help with long term recall of the information gained from the text.

Research shows that getting kids to think about what they already know about the text topic before they read, or increasing what the students know about the topic, can improve comprehension of that text.

But does it have a general impact on reading comprehension? That is less clear.

Unfortunately, research studies do not yet show wide transferability, though some recent research (Kim, 2024) suggests that it may be possible – but that takes more than just accumulating bits of information.

“Knowledge oriented” reading programs so far do not appear to be especially effective. This may be like vocabulary, however. Vocabulary teaching can have a positive impact on the comprehension of any texts that use those particular words. Building knowledge on certain topics within reading lessons may improve future comprehension with texts on those topics, but without a more general payoff.

I think reading lessons should aim to ensure that the students gain content from the texts used for reading comprehension. That means both ensuring that the texts used for this teaching are rich and informative, and that there is sufficient reading, discussion, and writing about those ideas to ensure learning. Nevertheless, at this point, building knowledge, per se, should not count as reading comprehension instruction. 

5.        Executive Function

Executive function refers to processes used to manage or direct our cognition. Executive function allows you to focus your attention on one thing and not another or to remember something and ignore something else. Reading comprehension like any cognitive activity falls under the control of this executive function.

There are many ways that instruction can address this: teaching students to try to comprehend (increasing intentionality) and how to comprehend (how to intentionally take comprehension supportive actions), and how to monitor success (recognizing when they’re comprehending and when they’re not, and how to fix that).

There is an extensive body of research that shows that a small amount of this kind of teaching and guidance can have powerful impacts on comprehension and learning from text. Students should be taught strategies for making sense of text, and this kind of teaching should count as comprehension instruction.

The Capin study found that such teaching was not uncommon, but that its quality was questionable. Too often this teaching is aimed only at the instructional text. Teachers are not guiding kids to use these strategies independently. The teaching too often fails to provide the conditional knowledge needed for students to be able to use it on their own. (Unfortunately, the arguments between knowledge and strategy advocates have drawn a line in the sand. Schools, instead of trying to ensure the quality of their strategy teaching are trying to replace it with an emphasis on information alone.)

Executive function instruction to be effective must be delivered with texts hard enough to require strategic effort. The teaching then should both help students to surmount the problems in the instructional texts and should offer counsel as to how to recognize these same barriers in the future and how to take those on independently.

6.        Questioning and answering

These observational studies spurned the questioning routines so common to classroom comprehension lessons.

That doesn’t mean teachers shouldn’t ask questions, only that the questions need to be framed differently, and they need to lead to… teaching and learning.

Monitoring student comprehension should be more purposeful than it usually is. Think of the language teaching noted above. Asking questions aimed at revealing whether students figured out the meaning of an undefined word, or of a complicated sentence, or of a subtle cohesive relationship may uncover the need for comprehension guidance.

Too many teachers and principals have supposed that asking questions like the ones on their state tests will lead to higher reading comprehension scores, and despite the research they don’t want to be convinced otherwise.

The problem with this approach is that practice with question formats doesn’t generalize. This teaching might inform me that future tests might ask main idea questions, but it doesn’t help me to figure out the main idea of a text, since there is neither a widely accepted definition of main idea, nor do authors convey their main idea in any standard manner. Such practice just can’t work.

That doesn’t mean that there are not questioning routines that can steer improved comprehension and learning. For instance, an important thing to watch for when reading stories are clues to the characters’ motivations. Students can learn to identify each character’s goals and the actions that they take to accomplish those goals. Similarly, with history text, students might learn to create timelines for the various events; in other words, paying attention to the years and dates.

The reason why these kinds of questioning routines can be useful is because they cue students to seek information that is identifiable in many texts. If the questions focus on that kind of information, then their impacts can be generalizable. Those kinds of questions tell students what we think is important. Add to this some teacher explanations about the value of seeking that kind of information and how to identify it, and you have some pretty good comprehension teaching.

I agree with the Capin study that there is more comprehension instruction than Durkin reported. But also agree with them that the quality of what is being delivered in the name of comprehension is woefully anemic.

Text and sufficient text challenge need to play much bigger roles in comprehension teaching. Such texts allow for the conveyance of richer content which increases the possibility of knowledge building. Challenging texts also increase both the importance and the possibility of learning when it comes to language acquisition and strategy learning.


READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

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

Al Otaiba, S., Connor, C. M., & Crowe, E. (2018). Promise and feasibility of teaching expository text structure: A primary grade pilot study. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(9), 1997-2015. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9769-6

Anderson, R. C., & Freebody, P. (1981). Vocabulary knowledge. In J. T. Guthrie (Ed.), Comprehension and teaching: Research reviews (pp.  77–117). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Anderson, R. C., Pichert, J. W., & Shirey, L. L. (1983). Effects of the reader's schema at different points in time. Journal of Educational Psychology, 75(2), 271-279. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.75.2.271

Baker, D. L., Alberto, P. C., Macaya, M. M., García, I., & Gutiérrez-Ortega, M. (2022). Relation between the essential components of reading and reading comprehension in monolingual Spanish-speaking children: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 34(4), 2661-2696. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-022-09694-1

Baldwin, R. S., Peleg-Bruckner, Z., & McClintock, A. H. (1985). Effects of topic interest and prior knowledge on reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 20(4), 497-504. https://doi.org/10.2307/747856

Baretta, L., Tomitch, L., MacNair, N., Lim, V. K., & Waldie, K. E. (2009). Inference making while reading narrative and expository texts: An ERP study. Psychology & Neuroscience, 2(2), 137-145. https://doi.org/10.3922/j.psns.2009.2.005

Barth, A. E., & Elleman, A. (2017). Evaluating the impact of a multistrategy inference intervention for middle-grade struggling readers. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 48(1), 31-41. https://doi.org/10.1044/2016_LSHSS-16-0041

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

Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. London: Cambridge University Press.

Baumann, J. F. (1986). Teaching third-grade students to comprehend anaphoric relationships: The application of a direct instruction model. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(1), 70-90. https://doi.org/10.2307/747961

Beck, I.L., Perfetti, C.A., & McKeown, M.G. (1982). Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74(4), 506–521. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.74.4.506

Best, R. M., Rowe, M., Ozuru, Y. & McNamara, D. S. (2005). Deep-Level Comprehension of Science Texts. Topics in Language Disorders, 25 (1), 65-83.

Best, R. M., Floyd, R. G., & McNamara, D. S. (2008). Differential competencies contributing to children's comprehension of narrative and expository texts. Reading Psychology, 29(2), 137-164. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702710801963951

Black, E. L. (1954). The difficulties of training college students in understanding what they read. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 24, 17-31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8279.1954.tb02873.x

Bogaerds-Hazenberg, S., Evers-Vermeul, J., & Bergh, H. (2021). A meta?analysis on the effects of text structure instruction on reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(3), 435-462. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.311

Booth, J. R., Harasaki, Y., & Burman, D. D. (2006). Development of lexical and sentence level context effects for dominant and subordinate word meanings of homonyms. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 35(6), 531-554. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-006-9028-5

Boscolo, P., Gelati, C., & Galvan, N. (2012). Teaching elementary school students to play with meanings and genre. Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 28(1), 29-50. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2012.632730

Bowers, P. N., Kirby, J. R., & Deacon, S. H. (2010). The effects of morphological instruction on literacy skills: A systematic review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 80(2), 144-179. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654309359353

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

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

Bratlie, S. S., Brinchmann, E. I., Melby-Lervåg, M., & Torkildsen, J. v. K. (2022). Morphology—A gateway to advanced language: Meta-analysis of morphological knowledge in language-minority children. Review of Educational Research, 92(4), 614-650. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211073186

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

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

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

Burkart, K. H. (1945). An analysis of reading abilities. The Journal of Educational Research, 38, 430-439. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1945.10881362

Cabell, S. Q., & Hwang, H. (2020). Building content knowledge to boost comprehension in the primary grades. Reading Research Quarterly, 55, S99-S107. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.338

Cabell, S. Q., Kim, J. S., White, T. G., Gale, C. J., Edwards, A. A., Hwang, H., . . . Raines, R. M. (2025). Impact of a content-rich literacy curriculum on kindergarteners’ vocabulary, listening comprehension, and content knowledge. Journal of Educational Psychology, 117(2), 153. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000916

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

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

Capin, P., Dahl-Leonard, K., Hall, C., Yoon, N. Y., Cho, E., Chatzoglou, E., Reiley, S., Walker, M., Shanahan, E., Andress, T., & Vaughn, S. (2025). Reading comprehension instruction: Evaluating our progress since Durkin’s seminal study. Scientific Studies of Reading, 29(1), 85–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2024.2418582

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

Chandy, R., Serrano, R., & Pellicer-Sánchez, A. (2025). The effect of context on the processing and learning of novel l2 vocabulary while reading. Applied Psycholinguistics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716424000407

Chilton, M. W., & Ehri, L. C. (2015). Vocabulary learning: Sentence contexts linked by events in scenarios facilitate third graders’ memory for verb meanings. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(4), 439-458.

Choi, W., Tong, X., & Cain, K. (2016). Lexical prosody beyond first-language boundary: Chinese lexical tone sensitivity predicts English reading comprehension. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 148, 70-86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2016.04.002

Clark, M. K., & Kamhi, A. G. (2014). Influence of prior knowledge and interest on fourth- and fifth-grade passage comprehension on the qualitative reading Inventory—4. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 45(4), 291. https://doi.org/10.1044/2014_LSHSS-13-0074

Clinton, V., Taylor, T., Bajpayee, S., Davison, M. L., Carlson, S. E., & Seipel, B. (2020). Inferential comprehension differences between narrative and expository texts: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 33(9), 2223-2248. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10044-2

Colenbrander, D., von Hagen, A., Kohnen, S., Wegener, S., Ko, K., Beyersmann, E., . . . Castles, A. (2024). The effects of morphological instruction on literacy outcomes for children in English-speaking countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36(4), 119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09953-3

Cruz Neri, N., Bernholt, S., Härtig, H., Schmitz, A., & Retelsdorf, J. (2024). Cognitive and motivational characteristics as predictors of students’ expository versus narrative text comprehension. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 39(2), 885-905. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-023-00717-1

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

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

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

De Corte, E., Verschaffel, L., & Van De Ven, A. (2001). Improving text comprehension strategies in upper primary school children: A design experiment. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 71(4), 531-559. https://doi.org/10.1348/000709901158668

Dearborn, W. F., Johnston, P. W., & Carmichael, L. (1952). Psychological writing, easy and hard for whom? American Psychologist, 7(6), 195-196. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0061566

Duran, N. D., McCarthy, P. M., Graesser, A. C., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Using temporal cohesion to predict temporal coherence in narrative and expository texts. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 212-223. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193150

Durkin, D. (1978). What Classroom Observations Reveal about Reading Comprehension Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 14(4), 481–533. http://www.jstor.org/stable/747260

Elleman, A.M. (2017). Examining the impact of inference instruction on the literal and inferential comprehension of skilled and less skilled readers: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(6), 761–781. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu00 00180

Elleman, A.M., Lindo, E.J., Morphy, P., & Compton, D.L. (2009). The impact of vocabulary instruction on passage-level comprehension of school-age children: A meta-analysis. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2(1), 1–44. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/19345740802539200

Elleman, A. M., Olinghouse, N. G., Gilbert, J. K., Spencer, J. L., & Compton, D. L. (2017). Developing content knowledge in struggling readers: Differential effects of strategy instruction for younger and older elementary students. The Elementary School Journal, 118(2), 232-256. https://doi.org/10.1086/694322

Elleman, A. M., Oslund, E. L., Griffin, N. M., & Myers, K. E. (2019). A review of middle school vocabulary interventions: Five research-based recommendations for practice. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 50(4), 477-492. https://doi.org/10.1044/2019_LSHSS-VOIA-18-0145

Escobar, J., & Espinoza, V. (2024). Direct and indirect effects of inhibition, working memory and cognitive flexibility on reading comprehension of narrative and expository texts: Same or different effects? Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573569.2024.2400993

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

Freebody, P., & Anderson, R. C. (1983). Effects of vocabulary difficulty, text cohesion, and schema availability on reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 18(3), 277-294. https://doi.org/10.2307/747389

Fukkink, R.G., & de Glopper, K. (1998). Effects of instruction in deriving word meaning from context: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 68(4), 450–469.

Gallini, J. K., Spires, H. A., Terry, S., & Gleaton, J. (1993). The influence o macro and micro-level cognitive strategies training on text learning. Journal of Research & Development in Education, 26(3), 164-178.

Gallini, J. K., Spires, H. A., Terry, S., & Gleaton, J. (1993). The influence of macro and micro-level cognitive strategies training on text learning. Journal of Research & Development in Education, 26(3), 164-178.

García-Madruga, J. A., Elosúa, M. R., Gil, L., Gómez-Veiga, I., Vila, J. Ó., Orjales, I., . . . Duque, G. (2013). Reading comprehension and working memory's executive processes: An intervention study in primary school students. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(2), 155-174. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.44

García-Sánchez, J., & García-Martín, J. (2021). Cognitive strategies and textual genres in the teaching and evaluation of advanced reading comprehension (ARC). Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.723281

Gasparinatou, A., & Grigoriadou, M. (2013). Exploring the effect of background knowledge and text cohesion on learning from texts in computer science. Educational Psychology, 33(6), 645-670. https://doi.org/10.1080/01443410.2013.790309

Gernsbacher, M. A., Hallada, B. M., & Robertson, R. R. W. (1998). How automatically do readers infer fictional characters' emotional states? Scientific Studies of Reading, 2(3), 271-300. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr0203_5

Gillam, S. L., Vaughn, S., Roberts, G., Capin, P., Fall, A., Israelsen-Augenstein, M., . . . Gillam, R. B. (2023). Improving oral and written narration and reading comprehension of children at-risk for language and literacy difficulties: Results of a randomized clinical trial. Journal of Educational Psychology, 115(1), 99-117. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000766

Goodwin, A. P., & Ahn, S. (2010). A meta-analysis of morphological interventions: Effects on literacy achievement of children with literacy difficulties. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 60(2), 183-208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-010-0041-x

Goodwin, A. P., & Ahn, S. (2013). A meta-analysis of morphological interventions in english: Effects on literacy outcomes for school-age children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 17(4), 257-285. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2012.689791

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

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

Graesser, A. C., McNamara, D. S., Cai, Z., Conley, M., Li, H., & Pennebaker, J. (2014). Coh-metrix measures text characteristics at multiple levels of language and discourse. Elementary School Journal, 115(2), 210-229. https://doi.org/10.1086/678293

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

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2011). Writing to read: A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 710-744. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.81.4.t2k0m13756113566

Guerrero, T. A., & Wiley, J. (2021). Expecting to teach affects learning during study of expository texts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(7), 1281-1303. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000657

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

Hall, C., Capin, P., Vaughn, S., Gillam, S. L., Wada, R., Fall, A., . . . Gillam, R. B. (2021). Narrative instruction in elementary classrooms: An observation study. The Elementary School Journal, 121(3), 454-483. https://doi.org/10.1086/712416

Hall, S. S., Kowalski, R., Paterson, K. B., Basran, J., Filik, R., & Maltby, J. (2015). Local text cohesion, reading ability and individual science aspirations: Key factors influencing comprehension in science classes. British Educational Research Journal, 41(1), 122-142. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3134

Halliday, M. A., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Routledge.

Hattan, C., Alexander, P. A., & Lupo, S. M. (2024). Leveraging what students know to make sense of texts: What the research says about prior knowledge activation. Review of Educational Research, 94(1), 73-111. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543221148478

Hebert, M., Bohaty, J. J., Nelson, J. R., & Brown, J. (2016). The effects of text structure instruction on expository reading comprehension: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(5), 609-629. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000082

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

Hodges, C. A. (1980). Commentary: Toward a Broader Definition of Comprehension Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 15(2), 299–306. https://doi.org/10.2307/747330

Hunt, J. T. (1953). The relation among vocabulary, structural analysis, and reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 44(4), 193-202. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056328

Hunt, L. C., Jr. (1957). Can we measure specific factors associated with reading comprehension? The Journal of Educational Research, 51, 161-172. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1957.10882453

James, W. (1890). Psychology. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

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

Jiang, H., & Logan, J. (2019). Improving reading comprehension in the primary grades: Mediated effects of a language-focused classroom intervention. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62(8), 2812-2828.

Kesler, T., Gibson, L., Jr., & Turansky, C. (2016). Bringing the book to life: Responding to historical fiction using digital storytelling. Journal of Literacy Research, 48(1), 39-79. https://doi.org/10.1177/1086296X16654649

Kiili, C., Strømsø, H. I., Bråten, I., Ruotsalainen, J., & Räikkönen, E. (2024). Reading comprehension skills and prior topic knowledge serve as resources when adolescents justify the credibility of multiple online texts. Reading Psychology, 45(7), 662. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2024.2351485

Kim, J. S., Burkhauser, M. A., Mesite, L. M., Asher, C. A., Relyea, J. E., Fitzgerald, J., & Elmore, J. (2021). Improving reading comprehension, science domain knowledge, and reading engagement through a first-grade content literacy intervention. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(1), 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000465

Kim, J. S., Burkhauser, M. A., Relyea, J. E., Gilbert, J. B., Scherer, E., Fitzgerald, J., . . . 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, 115(1), 73-98. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000751

Kim, J. S., Gilbert, J. B., Relyea, J. E., Rich, P., Scherer, E., Burkhauser, M. A., & Tvedt, J. N. (2024). Time to transfer: Long-term effects of a sustained and spiraled content literacy intervention in the elementary grades. Developmental Psychology, 60(7), 1279-1297. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001710

Kim, J. S., Relyea, J. E., Burkhauser, M. A., Scherer, E., & Rich, P. (2021). Improving elementary grade students’ science and social studies vocabulary knowledge depth, reading comprehension, and argumentative writing: A conceptual replication. Educational Psychology Review, 33(4), 1935-1964. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09609-6

Kirby, J. R., Deacon, S. H., Bowers, P. N., Izenberg, L., Wade-Woolley, L., & Parrila, R. (2012). Children's morphological awareness and reading ability. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 25(2), 389-410. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-010-9276-5

Kostons, D., & van der WerfWerf, G. (2015). The effects of activating prior topic and metacognitive knowledge on text comprehension scores. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 85(3), 264-275. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12069

Kraal, A., van den Broek, Paul W., Koornneef, A. W., Ganushchak, L. Y., & Saab, N. (2019). Differences in text processing by low- and high-comprehending beginning readers of expository and narrative texts: Evidence from eye movements. Learning and Individual Differences, 74, 14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2019.101752

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

Lawrence, J. F., Hagen, A. M., Hwang, J. K., Lin, G., & Lervåg, A. (2019). Academic vocabulary and reading comprehension: Exploring the relationships across measures of vocabulary knowledge. Reading and Writing, 32(2), 285–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9865-2

Lawrence, J. F., Knoph, R., McIlraith, A., Kulesz, P. A., & Francis, D. J. (2022). Reading comprehension and academic vocabulary: Exploring relations of item features and reading proficiency. Reading Research Quarterly, 57(2), 669–690. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.434

Lever, R., & Sénéchal, M. (2010). Discussing stories: On how a dialogic reading intervention improves kindergartners’ oral narrative construction. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 108(1), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.07.002

Lever, R., & Sénéchal, M. (2010). Discussing stories: On how a dialogic reading intervention improves kindergartners’ oral narrative construction. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 108(1), 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2010.07.002

List, A. (2021). Investigating the cognitive affective engagement model of learning from multiple texts: A structural equation modeling approach. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(4), 781-817. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.361

List, A., & Sun, Y. (2023). To clarity and beyond: Situating higher-order, critical, and critical-analytic thinking in the literature on learning from multiple texts. Educational Psychology Review, 35(2), 63. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09756-y

Liu, H. (2021). Does questioning strategy facilitate second language (L2) reading comprehension? the effects of comprehension measures and insights from reader perception. Journal of Research in Reading, 44(2), 339-359. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12339

Liu, H., Hu, Z., & Peng, D. (2013). Evaluating word in phrase: The modulation effect of emotional context on word comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 42(4), 379-391. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-012-9221-7

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

MacLean, M., & Chapman, L. J. (1989). The processing of cohesion in fiction and non-fiction by good and poor readers. Journal of Research in Reading, 12(1), 13-28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.1989.tb00300.x

Maguet, M. L., Morrison, T. G., Wilcox, B., & Billen, M. T. (2021). Improving children’s reading comprehension by teaching inferences. Reading Psychology, 42(3), 264-280. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2021.1888351

McCormick, S., & Hill, D. S. (1984). An analysis of the effects of two procedures for increasing disabled readers' inferencing skills. The Journal of Educational Research, 77(4), 219-226. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1984.10885527

McCrudden, M. T., Kulikowich, J. M., Lyu, B., & Huynh, L. (2022). Promoting integration and learning from multiple complementary texts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(8), 1832-1843. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000746

McKeown, M.G., Beck, I.L., Omanson, R.C., & Perfetti, C.A. (1983). The effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on reading comprehension: A replication. Journal of Reading Behavior,  15(1),  3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10862968309547474

McNamara, D. S. (2010). Strategies to read and learn: Overcoming learning by consumption. Medical Education, 44(4), 340-346. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2923.2009.03550.x

McNamara, D. S., Crossley, S. A., & McCarthy, P. M. (2010). Linguistic features of writing quality. Written Communication, 27(1), 57-86. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088309351547

Meyer, B. J. F., Wijekumar, K., & Lei, P. (2018). Comparative signaling generated for expository texts by 4th–8th graders: Variations by text structure strategy instruction, comprehension skill, and signal word. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(9), 1937-1968. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9871-4

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

Morris, R.D., Lovett, M.W., Wolf, M., Sevcik, R.A., Steinbach, K.A., Frijters, J.C., & Shapiro, M.B. (2012). Multiple component remediation for developmental reading disabilities: IQ, socioeconomic status, and race as factors in remedial outcome. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 45(2), 99–127.

Mosher, D. M., Burkhauser, M. A., & Kim, J. S. (2024). Improving second-grade reading comprehension through a sustained content literacy intervention: A mixed-methods study examining the mediating role of domain-specific vocabulary. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(4), 550-568. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000868

Mosher, D. M., & Kim, J. S. (2025). Building a science of teaching reading and vocabulary: Experimental effects of structured supplements for a read aloud lesson on third graders’ domain-specific reading comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 29(1), 7. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2024.2368145

Nagy, W.E., Anderson, R.C., & Herman, P.A. (1987). Learning word meanings from context during normal reading. American Educational Research Journal, 24(2), 237–270. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312024002237

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

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

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

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

Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Prior knowledge, reading skill, and text cohesion in the comprehension of science texts. Learning and Instruction, 19(3), 228-242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2008.04.003

Pany, D., Jenkins, J.R., & Schreck, J. (1982). Vocabulary instruction: Effects on word knowledge and reading comprehension. Learning Disability Quarterly, 5(3), 202–215. https://doi.org/10.2307/1510288

Pichert, J. W., & Anderson, R. C. (1977). Taking different perspectives on a story. Journal of Educational Psychology, 69(4), 309-315. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.69.4.309

Pickren, S. E., Stacy, M., Del Tufo, S. N., Spencer, M., & Cutting, L. E. (2022). The contribution of text characteristics to reading comprehension: Investigating the influence of text emotionality. Reading Research Quarterly, 57(2), 649-667. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.431

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

Priebe, S. J., Keenan, J. M., & Miller, A. C. (2012). How prior knowledge affects word identification and comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 25(1), 131-149. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-010-9260-0

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

Pyle, N., Vasquez, A. C., Lignugaris/Kraft, B., Gillam, S. L., Reutzel, D. R., Olszewski, A., . . . Pyle, D. (2017). Effects of expository text structure interventions on comprehension: A meta?analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(4), 469-501. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.179

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

Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers' memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16-20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16

Relyea, J. E., Kim, J. S., Rich, P., & Fitzgerald, J. (2024). Effects of tier 1 content literacy intervention on early-grade English learners’ reading and writing: Exploring the mediating roles of domain-specific vocabulary and oral language proficiency. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(7), 1172. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000882

Rice, M., & Wijekumar, K. (. (2024). Inference skills for reading: A meta-analysis of instructional practices. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(4), 569-589. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000855

Rice, M., Wijekumar, K., Lambright, K., & Bristow, A. (2024). Inferencing in reading comprehension: Examining variations in definition, instruction, and assessment.Technology, Knowledge and Learning: Learning Mathematics, Science and the Arts in the Context of Digital Technologies, 29(3), 1169. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-023-09660-y

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

Sabag-Shushan, T., Katzir, T., & Kanat-Maymon, Y. (2024). The contribution of emotion vocabulary to the reading comprehension of the text and the task. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-024-10609-5

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

Schmitt, N., Jiang, X., & Grabe, W. (2011). The percentage of words known in a text and reading comprehension. Modern Language Journal, 95(1), 26–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01146.x 

Schmitz, A., Gräsel, C., & Rothstein, B. (2017). Students’ genre expectations and the effects of text cohesion on reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30(5), 1115-1135. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-016-9714-0

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

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

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Sheehan, K. M. (2013). Measuring cohesion: An approach that accounts for differences in the degree of integration challenge presented by different types of sentences. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 32(4), 28-37. https://doi.org/10.1111/emip.12017

Shiotsu, T., & Weir, C. J. (2007). The relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary breadth in the prediction of reading comprehension test performance. Language Testing, 24 Uncategorized http://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/are-we-teaching-reading-comprehension-part-ii-6-things-every-teacher-should-know Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 http://shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/blast-from-the-past-is-morphology-training-better-than-phonics-instruction Blast from the Past: This entry first posted on September 10, 2017, and reposted April 12, 2025. Blasts from the Past make blogs available to new audiences and afford me the opportunity to reiterate points or to reconsider my earlier claims. This site is dedicated to improving reading instruction through a close consideration of research. But research is an ongoing enterprise. Anyone who takes a principled stand based on science had better be prepared to dine on crow occasionally. This is one of those times. Accordingly, I have not rewritten this entry but hope to correct it with new prefatory and end notes. Perhaps comparing my current views with those originally expressed will illustrate what the impact of science should be.

Think of any of the models of reading – the Simple View, Scarborough’s Rope, the Active View, and so on. Every one of those models highlights the importance of decoding or word recognition. Unless you can translate the marks on the page into language you can’t read.

The whole point of learning to decode or to recognize words is to develop an extensive sight vocabulary. As Linnea Ehri (1995) has written:

One of the great mysteries confronting literacy researchers is how mature readers are able to read written materials so rapidly and fluently yet with full comprehension (Adams, 1990; Barron, 1986; Chall, 1983; Perfetti, 1985; Rayner and' Pollatsek, 1989). A capability that has proven central in explaining this feat is the ability to read single words rapidly and automatically by sight (LaBerge and Samuels, 1974). Readers are able to look at a word and immediately recognize its meaning without expending any effort decoding the word. [italics added]

Word recognition comprises phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, decoding skills, phonics knowledge, and recognition of familiar words at sight. The major reason for gaining that collection of skills is to enable readers to do what Ehri describes – to read texts rapidly and fluently and to recognize large numbers of words immediately and without any obvious mediation (e.g., sounding out words, breaking words up by syllables, relying on context). Readers must get to the point at which they can recognize entire words as quickly as single letters (Ehri, 1992; Morris, et al., 2018).

Maybe I’m not understanding what a sight word is?

A sight word is any word that a reader can recognize immediately and without obvious mediation. I’ve long thought of it as being like your “best friend’s name.” You know, a word that you would never hesitate on. (I know if I were to hesitate on Cyndie’s name, I’d have serious problems!)

For most children, their first sight word is their own name.

Some authorities operationally define sight words based on time (Aaron, et al., 1999; Anderson & Scanlon, 2020). They present an isolated word (that is without other words or pictures), and if a reader can identify it in 2 seconds or less, it’s a sight word.

The key features are immediacy, ease of recognition, and as if being pulled back from memory rather than being sounded out or analyzed (and as if in the context means that it seems that way even if that is not the truth).

But I thought the words on the Dolch list were sight words?  

In 1936, Edward Dolch, a professor of reading at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, published a list of words that he thought would be useful for teaching reading. By design it focused on “function words;” high frequency pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives – words that tend to express grammatical relationships. No nouns need apply.

He started with three existing word lists – one of which provided the frequencies of words in beginning reading textbooks of the 1920s. His methods for selecting words from these lists were a bit shaky, too – he didn’t always follow his own selection rules (Johns, et al., 1977), adding or omitting words without explanation. Nevertheless, even as late as the 1970s, 55% of the Dolch words were showing up in textbooks with great frequency.

Dolch’s notion was that there were words so common in English that students should learn them as sight words. He wasn’t claiming these were sight words. He was proposing them as candidates for this role in a reading curriculum. Essentially he was saying, “teach the words on this list to the point that they are sight words for all children.”

RELATED: The Whats, Hows, and Whys of Teaching Sight Vocabulary

It doesn’t sound like you think teaching the Dolch list is such a good idea. Am I right?

I can give you a definite “yes” and “no” on that. I agree with Dolch’s reasoning. It makes sense early on to ensure that children can easily recognize the highest frequency words in the language. Being able to recognize such words on sight, should provide a marked boost to children’s early reading success.

While many words on Dolch’s list may no longer be the most frequent words, almost all of them are still used a lot. The distinction isn’t between good and bad but between highly frequent and a bit less frequent. Drop the word “shall” and the list isn’t terrible.

Nevertheless, there are more recent lists than Dolch’s. It surprises me a bit that we’re still focused on preparing kids to read the 1920s textbooks. In the age of computers, the internet, and AI, we might want to update our game a bit.

What other lists are you talking about? 

The Fry Instant Word List is one. Edward Fry put this together from a corpus of 5 million words drawn from the textbooks of the 1960s and 1970s. It provides the 300 most common words from that source – and the Fry and Dolch lists only share 70 words. I’ve long told teachers that they should make sure kids can recognize on sight the first 100 of Fry’s words by the end of grade 1, and the whole list by the end of grade 2. Those are arbitrary goals, but reachable and useful.

The 100 most frequent words constitute approximately 50% of the words that kids will see in any text and the 300 increases this to about 75%. Knowing such large proportions of the words in texts should greatly reduce the cognitive load of reading, allowing for greater fluency and better comprehension.

I’m getting confused about the differences between sight words, high frequency words, and words with irregular spelling patterns?

Remember that sight words are any words that readers can recognize immediately. It doesn’t matter how those words are learned or where they come from. The only way to determine if a word is known by sight is to check to see how quickly students can read it in isolation. That means that different students are likely to possess different sight words.

High frequency words are words that show up in text, well, with high frequency. We determine frequency by tabulating the number of times that they show up in text. Frequency counts have nothing to do with readers. They are figured out by looking at texts not kids and the point is to identify words that would be worth mastering early on.

Words with irregular spellings (e.g., the, of, where) are also identified by looking at texts rather than students. For example, there are many words in English that have a CVCe spelling pattern (consonant-long vowel-consonant-silent e): cane, dine, here, mope, cute. Teaching this pattern in phonics can allow students to decode many English words. However, there are exceptions to this pattern (e.g., there, where, done). It is those exceptions that we are talking about when we refer to irregular spelling patterns. Often these words are suggested as good candidates for sight word instruction – as it is assumed (incorrectly) that phonics could play no role in the learning of these words.  

So sight words are the words that kids can recognize immediately, and high frequency words and words with irregular spelling patterns are often recommended to be taught.

Does that mean that sight words are learned through memorization and other words through decoding?

Nope, a word’s status as a sight word has nothing to do with how it was learned (Miles & Ehri, 2019). Kids can acquire words through memorization with lots of repetition or through partial or full decoding.

Nevertheless, our methods for teaching should encourage students to recognize and understand the ortho-phonetic structure of the words. Initially, kids are likely to rely on any cue they can find (e.g., a bend in the corner of flash card, a fingerprint, the first letter) to help them to remember the words (Ehri & Saltmarsh, 1995; Gough, 1993), but this changes as they start to master the spelling system.

Is it better to learn sight words one way or the other?

I prefer to think of sight vocabulary instruction as being less about memorizing a list of words, and more about learning how to recognize and remember words (Ehri, 1995; Ehri, 2009; Ehri, 2020; Wright & Ehri, 2007).

Research shows that as students get better with decoding, remembering sight words becomes less burdensome (Levy & Lysynchuk, 1997). It requires less memorization. The students are clearly learning more than a collection of words. Either through their own pattern recognition abilities or with the support of decoding instruction, students start to recognize and remember these patterns more proficiently.  

Accordingly, many experts recommend introducing words through analysis (Rawlins & Invernizzi, 2018), and I agree with that. What makes words distinctive is their combination or sequence of letters and the relationship of these letters with the language sounds (the phonemes). Instead of just showing the word and saying its name and then having the children repeat the name, we should draw attention to the spelling and sounds.

Here is an example. In this case, the children have already learned the d sound, but not the sound of the short i. This kind of partial knowledge is common in Grades K and 1, depending on the specific words, the time of year, and the curriculum the students are being taught. If the students knew the i sound, then we’d work on sounding that letter, too.

[Show the word.]

“This is the word did, D-I-D” [pointing to the letters one at a time].

“I’m going to use the word did in a sentence.  You did a great job.”

Look at the word did.

Say “did.”

“What letter does did begin with?”

“What sound does the letter d make?”

“What sound do you hear at the beginning of did. Did” [emphasize the beginning sound].

“What sound do you hear at the end of did. Did” [emphasize the ending sound]. 

“Look at the word did. Take a picture with your eyes. Now close your eyes. Can you see the word did with your mind? Can you see its letters? Can you spell did with your eyes closed? If you can’t, open your eyes and look at the word again. Say its letters one after the other. Make the letter sounds to say the word.”

What about those irregularly spelled words?

Even those words can benefit from an analytical introduction. Most of these words are not entirely irregular. That is there tends to be only one odd or discrepant spelling. For instance, the e in the is peculiar but the th is standard. 

One of my favorite oddballs is the word of. That, to me, is fascinating because it is the only word in English in which the f represents the /v/ sound. With a word like that, I would explain that it’s a one-off and show them how odd it is by comparing it to some other words like if or fan. That’s not a word with a generalizable pattern, so it should be especially obvious have valuable memorization would be. Nevertheless, I would guide the students’ analysis of the consistencies and inconsistencies in such and then we would turn to making sure that word ended up in memory (Murray, et al., 2018).

Are you saying that there is no place for memorization?

That’s too strong. Memorization plays an important role in the development of sight vocabulary (Baraneck, et al., 2011; Wordsdell, 2005). Introducing new words through analysis as in the example above can help students to develop a mindset of looking for spelling and pronunciation patterns. But that, especially early on, is unlikely to be sufficient to transform those words into sight words.

That’s why some experts champion the idea of having students then drill these words with flashcards, word ladders, racetracks, or games (Barwasser, et al., 2022; Eichstaedt, 2023; Kupzyk, et al., 2011; Sullivan, et al., 2013; Volpe, et al., 2011), and pretty much everyone encourages lots of exposure to those word in text (e.g., controlled vocabulary readers, decodable texts, language experience stories).

Teaching should ensure that kids end up with large numbers of words in their sight vocabularies, and that will require some memorization. It’s a good idea to offer helpful guidance about how to look at, think about, and remember these words along the way, and then to turn to repetition and memorization strategies to ensure they are known automatically.

At our phonics workshop, we were told that memorizing words will undermine our students’ decoding abilities. Is that true?

There is absolutely no credible evidence that memorizing words interferes with or interrupts decoding development – and there is much evidence to suggest that to be unlikely. Some studies even show that some students can develop appropriate decoding skills from word memorization alone (Barr, 1974-1975; Biemiller, 1974; MacArthur, et al., 2015; MacKay, et al., 2022). That makes sense because our spelling system is a system. It is, admittedly a complex system, but it is systematic, nevertheless. (This is not an argument against phonics: research is clear that kids make faster progress when phonics is included in reading instruction).

How much time should be spent on decoding instruction and how much on sight vocabulary?

That isn’t easy to divide up, since the purpose of decoding instruction is to increase sight vocabulary. Let’s distinguish between decoding instruction and efforts to directly memorize individual words. I’d suggest 25-30 minute per day on decoding and perhaps no more than 4-5 minutes on trying to stick words in memory.

Do you have any other advice for analytically teaching words to the point that they are sight words?

One recommendation is to teach students to do more than recognize these words. They should learn to write and spell them, too (Leal, 2005; Perry, 1987). Add that step to the kind of lesson described above and check students’ ability to spell those words from time to time. Techniques like “copy-cover-compare,” in which students try to write the words from memory can be quite effective (Conley, et al., 2004).

Another idea is to teach students how to expand their sight vocabularies by showing them how to add inflectional endings (e.g., ing, ed, s) and such (Floriani, 1979). Through that kind of exercise, a word like use multiplies by generating uses, using, and used. As progress is made, other morphemes can be used in the same way. A word like wash can become washed, washing, washes, but also unwashed, prewashed, rewashed, and washable. This kind of work will increase the numbers of sight words and can simultaneously expand word meaning knowledge and increase understanding of how words work. [Note: Those word frequency estimates provided above were based not on those individual words alone, but on those words along with the inflected forms of those words. That is true of both the Dolch and Fry lists.]

Other experts do similar work focused on word families or rimes (Johnston, 1999; Sanacore, 2010; Stuart, et al., 1999). Students might know the word cold and from this they can expand their vocabularies by transforming it into old, bold, fold, gold, hold, mold, sold, and told. Again, this provides a great opportunity for helping kids to understand how words work – just think about how you will respond when kids try to add kold or rold. One successful possibility is to engage kids in word sorts with their sight words – organizing words by different spelling patterns, morphemes, or phoneme-grapheme relations. In this case, the students would work on becoming adept with that old pattern, separating those old words from “sound alikes that are spelled differently” like bowled and rolled (Bear, et al., 2011).

Do you have any advice for memorization?

Memorization of words is an issue of drill and practice. You want memorization sessions to be brief, spirited, and fun. It’s popular to insult or belittle flash cards, but research shows they can work (Nicholson, 1998). I’m a believer in using time trials in memory exercises. Have the kids try to read 10 words in 10 seconds; speed matters (Griffin & Murtagh, 2015). If they miss, shuffle the cards and try again. Other folks recommend having kids work their way around a racetrack of words or climbing word ladders, and those can work, too.

Drill and practice is best in short doses, that’s why interval training is better than massed training for this kind of thing. You would be better off having kids practice in intervals, spending 1-2 minutes a couple times a day on this kind of rehearsal.

No matter how you organize this kind of repetitive practice, research say kids make greater progress when they work with words that are a mix of items that are already known along with items they are still uncertain about (Peterson-Brown & et al., 2019; Phipps, 2022).

Another bit of advice: DON’T have students doing memorization work with words that are highly similar (e.g., where-were). Teach one of those words well before introducing the other, and when you do introduce the second, be sure to explain the differences (Chotto, 2021).

Moms and dads can help with this kind of work, too. I’ve long recommended that they watch a 30-minute television program with their kids, muting the set during the commercials for word practice. That provides 6-minutes of interval practice – and can reduce the need for this kind of effort in the classroom!

When I’m teaching words, should I use pictures?

There is nothing wrong with introducing a word with a picture if it helps kids to learn a word meaning. However, studies suggest that pictures serve as a distraction when it comes to learning to read the words (Fossett & Mirenda, 2006; Meadan, et al., 2008; Richardson, et al., 2017). We want the kids to look at the words, not the pictures. Feel free to start with a picture but put it away quickly and focus children’s attention on the printed word!

Any final thoughts about sight words?

Yes. Remember that it isn’t enough that kids memorize isolated words. Make sure there is an initial emphasis on analysis and that a good deal of the later repetition takes place in text (Alberto, et al., 2013; Ehri, et al., 2007; Hood, 1974; Torgensen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1997). Getting kids to respond to isolated words deserves a place in instruction, but it’s a small place (Ceprano, 1981). It is even more important that kids see these words in text. 

READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Aaron, P. G., Joshi, R. M., Ayotollah, M., Ellsberry, A., Henderson, J., & Lindsey, K. (1999). Decoding and sight-word naming: Are they independent components of word recognition skill? Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11(2), 89-127.  https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008088618970

Alberto, P. A., Waugh, R. E., Fredrick, L. D., & Davis, D. H. (2013). Sight word literacy: A Functional-based approach for identification and comprehension of individual words and connected text. Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities, 48(3), 332–350. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23880991

Anderson, K., and Scanlon, D. The development of sight vocabulary. The Reading Teacher, 74(3), 346-352. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1953

Baker, E. (B.) A., & Bradley, C. (2021). Closing the gap between oral lexicons and sight vocabulary: Examining speech recognition technologies. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 21(3), 436–461. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798419851851

Baranek, A., Fienup, D. M., & Pace, G. (2010). Brief Experimental Analysis of Sight Word Interventions: A Comparison of Acquisition and Maintenance of Detected Interventions. Behavior Modification, 35(1), 78-94.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0145445510391242

Barr, R. (1974-1975). The effect of instruction on pupil reading strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 10(4), 555–582. https://doi.org/10.2307/747502 

Barwasser, A., Urton, K., Grünke, M., Sperling, M., & Coker, D. L. (2022). Fostering word fluency of struggling third graders from Germany through motivational peer-tutorial reading racetracks. Reading & Writing, 35(1), 29-53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-021-10172-3

Bear, Donald R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2011). Words their way, 5^th ed. New York: Pearson. 

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. https://doi.org/10.2307/747049

Ceprano, M. A. (1981). A review of selected research on methods of teaching sight words. The Reading Teacher, 35(3), 314-322.

Chard, D. J., Vaughn, S., & Tyler, B.-J. (2002). A Synthesis of Research on Effective Interventions for Building Reading Fluency with Elementary Students with Learning Disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35(5), 386-406. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222194020350050101

Chotto, J. (2021). Efficiency of teaching sight words in similar vs dissimilar sets. Unpublished master’s thesis, Louisiana State University. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_/thesis/5445

Conley, C. M., Derby, K. M., Roberts-Gwinn, M., Weber, K. P., & McLaughlin, T. F. (2004). An analysis of initial acquisition and maintenance of sight words following picture matching and copy, cover, and compare teaching methods. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 37(3), 339–350. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2004.37-339

Dolch, E. W. (1936). A basic sight vocabulary. Elementary School Journal, 36(6), 456-460.

Ehri, L. C. (1995). Phases of development in learning to read words by sight. Journal of Research in Reading, 18(2), 116–125. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.

Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167-188. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532799xssr0902_4

Ehri, L. C. (2014). Orthographic mapping in the acquisition of sight word reading, spelling memory, and vocabulary learning. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Ehri, L. C. (2020). The science of learning to read words: A case for systematic phonics instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S45-S60. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.334

Ehri, L. C., Dreyer, L. G., Flugman, B., & Gross, A. (2007). Reading rescue: An effective tutoring intervention model for language-minority students who are struggling readers in first grade. American Educational Research Journal, 44(2), 414–448. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831207302175

 Ehri, L. C., & Saltmarsh, J. (1995). Beginning readers outperform older disabled readers in learning to read words by sight. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 7(3), 295–326. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03162082

Eichstaedt, M. (2023). Comparing the efficacy of print and digital flashcards for vocabulary acquisition in an elementary education setting. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of St. Francis.????????????????????????????????????????

Floriani, B. P. (1979). Word expansions for multiplying sight vocabulary. The Reading Teacher, 33(2), 155-157. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20194972

Fossett, B., & Mirenda, P. (2006). Sight word reading in children with developmental disabilities: a comparison of paired associate and picture-to-text matching instruction. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 27(4), 411–429. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ridd.2005.05.006

Gold, P. H. (1981). Two strategies for reinforcing sight vocabulary of language experience stories. The Reading Teacher, 35(2), 141-143.https://www.jstor.org/stable/20195421

Gough, P. B. (1993). The beginning of decoding. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5(2), 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01027483

Green, C., Keogh, K., & Prout, J. (2024). The CPB sight words: A new research-based high frequency wordlist for early reading instruction. The Reading Teacher, 78(1), 56-64. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2309

Griffin, C. P., & Murtagh, L. (2015). Increasing the sight vocabulary and reading fluency of children requiring reading support: The use of Precision Teaching approach. Educational Psychology in Practice, 31(2), 186-209. https://doi.org/10.1080/02667363.2015.1022818

Helman, L. A., & Burns, M. K. (2008). What does oral language have to do with it? Helping young English-Language Learners acquire a sight word vocabulary. The Reading Teacher, 62(1), 14–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20204655

Hood, J. (1974). Why we burned our basic sight vocabulary cards. The Reading Teacher, 27(6), 579–582. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20193558

Johns, J. L., Edmond, R. M., & Mavrogenes, N. A. (1977). The Dolch basic sight vocabulary: A replication and validation study. Elementary School Journal, 78(1), 31–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1001115

Johnston, F. R. (1999). The timing and teaching of word families. The Reading Teacher, 53(1), 64-75.

Kupzyk, S., Daly, E. J. III, & Andersen, M. L. (2013). A comparison of two flash-card methods for improving sight-word reading. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 44(4), 781-792. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2011.44-781

Leal, D. J. (2005). The Word Writing CAFÉ: Assessing Student Writing for Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency. The Reading Teacher, 59(4), 340–350. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20204358

MacKay, E. J., MacKay, N., Conrad, & Hélène Deacon, S. (2022). How does lexical access fit into models of word reading? Scientific Studies of Reading, 26(4), 327-336. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2021.1993230

Mano, Q. R., & Guerin, J. M. (2018). Direct and indirect effects of print exposure on silent reading fluency. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(2), 483–502. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9794-5

McArthur, G., Sheehan, Y., Badcock, N. A., Francis, D. A., Wang, H. C., Kohnen, S., Banales, E., Anandakumar, T., Marinus, E., & Castles, A. (2018). Phonics training for English-speaking poor readers. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews, 11(11), CD009115. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD009115.pub3

Meadan, H., Stoner, J. B., & Parette, H. P. (2008). Sight word recognition among young children at risk: Picture-supported vs. word-only. Assistive Technology Outcomes and Benefits, 5(1), 45-58.

Miles, K. P., & Ehri, L. C. (2019). Orthographic mapping facilitates sight word memory and vocabulary learning. In D. A. Kilpatrick, R. M. Joshi, & R. K. Wagner (Eds.), Reading development and difficulties: Bridging the gap between research and practice. Princeton, NJ: Springer Publishing.

Miles, K. P., McFadden, K. E., & Ehri, L. C. (2019). Associations between language and literacy skills and sight word learning for native and nonnative English-speaking kindergarteners. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 32(7), 1681-1704. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9919-5

Miles, K. P., Rubin, G. B., & Gonzalez-Frey, S. (2017). Rethinking sight words. The Reading Teacher, 71(6), 715-726.

Morris, D., Trathen, W., Perney, J., Gill, T., Schlagal, R., Ward, D., & Frye, E. (2018). Tracking children’s print-processing skill across grades 1–3: Implications for reading assessment and instruction. Reading Psychology, 39(8), 820-854. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2018.1547805

Murray, B. A., McIlwain, M. J., Wang, C., Murray, G., & Finley, S. (2019). How do beginners learn to read irregular words as sight words? Journal of Research in Reading, 42(1), 123-136. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12250

Nicholson, T. (1998). The flashcard strikes back. The Reading Teacher, 52(2), 188-192.

Perry, L. A. (1987). Write sight vocabularies. The Reading Teacher, 41(3), 374-375.

Petersen-Brown, S., & Burns, M. K. (2019). Enhancing maintenance and generalization of sight words taught with incremental rehearsal: Applying the depth of processing and generalization frameworks. School Psychology, 34(3), 307-317. https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000294

Phipps, L., Robinson, E. L., & Grebe, S. (2022). An evaluation of strategic incremental rehearsal on sight word acquisition among students with specific learning disabilities in reading. Journal of Behavioral Education, 31(2), 281-297. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-020-09398-y

Rawlins, A., & Invernizzi, M. (2018). Reconceptualizing sight words: Building an early reading vocabulary. The Reading Teacher, 72(6), 711-719.

Reich, C. M., & Reich, P. A. (1979). The construction of an orally based sight-word vocabulary list and its relationship to the vocabularies of beginning readers. The Journal of Educational Research, 72(4), 198–204. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27537221

Richardson, A. R., Lerman, D. C., Nissen, M. A., Luck, K. M., Neal, A. E., Bao, S., & Tsami, L. (2017). Can pictures promote the acquisition of sight?word reading? an evaluation of two potential instructional strategies. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 50(1), 67-86. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.354

Sanacore, J. (2010). Connecting Rimes to Meaningful Contexts. Childhood Education, 86(4), 241–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/00094056.2010.10523155

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. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11881-020-00198-7

Steacy, L. M., Petscher, Y., Elliott, J. D., Smith, K., Rigobon, V. M., Abes, D. R., . . . Compton, D. L. (2021). The effect of facilitative versus inhibitory word training corpora on word reading accuracy growth in children with dyslexia. Learning Disability Quarterly, 44(3), 158-169. https://doi.org/10.1177/0731948720938684

Stuart, M., Masterson, J., Dixon, M., & Quinlan, P. (1999). Inferring sublexical correspondences from sight vocabulary: Evidence from 6- and 7-year-olds. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A: Human Experimental Psychology, 52(2), 353-366. https://doi.org/10.1080/027249899391106

Sullivan, M., Konrad, M., Joseph, L. M., & Luu, K. C. T. (2013). A comparison of two sight word reading fluency drill formats. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 57(2), 102-110. https://doi.org/10.1080/1045988X.2012.674575

Uhry, J. K., & Shepherd, M. J. (1997). Teaching phonological recoding to young children with phonological processing deficits: The effect on sight-vocabulary acquisition. Learning Disability Quarterly, 20(2), 104-125. https://doi.org/10.2307/1511218

Volpe, R. J., Mulé, C. M., Briesch, A. M., Joseph, L. M., & Burns, M. K. (2011). A comparison of two flashcard drill methods targeting word recognition. Journal of Behavioral Education, 20(2), 117-137. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-011-9124-y

Worsdell, A. S., Iwata, B. A., Dozier, C. L., Johnson, A., Neidert, P. L., & Thomason, J. L. (2005). Analysis of response repetition as an error-correction strategy during sight-word reading. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 38(4), 511-527.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Teacher question: What can you tell me about writing fluency in grades K-5? Our district is making a major effort to improve writing which is great, but our kids don’t write much. I don’t mean that the teachers don’t give writing assignments (they do), but the writing that the kids produce is very limited and it takes them a long time. I can’t see how we can improve their writing if they can’t write more.

Shanahan response:

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

I’m with you about the importance of the amount of writing, though research is not very supportive of the idea that increasing amount of writing improves fluency (Skar, et al., 2024). Basically, the research suggests there are other more important impediments to success in this area. My advice: get kids writing more often but don’t just increase the dosage.)

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

National and state assessments don’t consider fluency issues directly either. They might get at it incidentally by marking a paper down if its ideas aren’t sufficiently developed. However, lack of development can be as evident in papers with lots of words as in those with few. Although the tests don’t directly measure fluency, I suspect that most readers have trouble crediting a paper that isn’t “sufficiently” long – whatever that may mean to the evaluators.

I’ve long believed that writing fluency – as much as writing quality – should be a major goal in the early grades (my first publication in the field was about how I had successfully facilitated writing fluency in my classrooms – Shanahan, 1977).

Over the past couple of decades there has been a growing body of research revealing the pivotal role that handwriting and spelling play in writing fluency, and the newer studies are reinforcing these conclusions. Experience tells me that instruction in handwriting and spelling can facilitate automaticity, but so can an emphasis on invented or developmental spelling – reducing student anxiety about potential errors, while providing valuable practice with phonemic awareness and phonics at the same time. And newer research supports the idea that encouraging kids during drafting to spell words the way they think they are spelled and let the rough side drag (Schrodt, 2024).

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

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

In that regard, writing fluency is a lot like reading fluency. For the youngest students and the poorest readers, reading fluency is largely the result of automatic decoding ability – but with development, some aspects of reading comprehension are implicated too (through prosody). Writing has a similar pattern of progression apparently, with printing and spelling sucking up much of the variance early on, but with executive function and oral language increasingly insinuating themselves into the equation as writers progress (Kim, 2024).

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

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

Another enemy of writing fluency is perfectionism. “If I can’t produce something perfect – that won’t embarrass me – I can’t possibly write.” Concerns about handwriting and spelling may limit fluency. Many kids hesitate when they come to a word that they think they can’t spell, or they engage in wasteful mental gymnastics trying to avoid expressing ideas that would require those words. That’s why both improving handwriting and spelling and reducing the emphasis on these during drafting can support fluency. Handwriting issues tend to play an important role in writing fluency early on, but its importance diminishes soon (Juel, 1988). It is sometimes recommended that keyboarding will improve fluency, but the results of this have been mixed at best (Goldberg, Russell, & Cook, 2003; Spilling, et al, 2021).

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

What can you do to improve writing fluency?

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

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

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

I know that some teachers and parents worry that if a child misspells a word that it will, from then on, always be spelled. However, both research and personal experience reveal this not to the case. These early spellings tend to be pretty plastic, they change with experience. (In fact, this admonition is reminiscent of the oft repeated, “Your face is going to freeze like that” which told to children making goofy faces. Mine never did.) Young kids benefit from spelling words the way they think they are spelled because it requires them to analyze the phonemic structure of those words. These “spelling inventions” change as students learn more about words – and that will come from spelling, phonics, and morphology instruction.

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

4.     Require a lot of writing. New research indicates that issues like handwriting and spelling are more important than amount of writing when it comes to fluency (Skar, et al., 2024). I think that is right – if the question is about a hierarchy of importance. Nevertheless, I can’t see how anyone can gain proficiency in getting words out of their heads and onto paper without practice.

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

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

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

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

Writing fluency has been neglected for too long. It may not seem important, but it is a key ingredient in writing quality.  

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim, Y. G. (2024). Writing fluency: Its relations with language, cognitive, and transcription skills, and writing quality using longitudinal data from kindergarten to grade 2. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(4), 590-607. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000841

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

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

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

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

Schrodt, K., FitzPatrick, E., Lee, S., McKeown, D., McColloch, A., & Evert, K. (2024). The effects of invented spelling instruction on literacy achievement and writing motivation. Education Sciences, 14(9), 1020. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14091020

Shanahan, T. (1977). Writing marathons and concept development. Language Arts, 54(4), 403-405.

Skar, G. B., Graham, S., Huebner, A., Kvistad, A. H., Johansen, M. B., & Aasen, A. J. (2024). A longitudinal intervention study of the effects of increasing amount of meaningful writing across grades 1 and 2. Reading and Writing, 37(6), 1345-1373. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10460-0

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

Comments on original version

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Other times, I may decide that a query that puzzles me may not be worth the candle. Not that the topic isn’t important to the questioner. Only that even a terrific answer would hold little value for a wider audience.

And then, there are those times when an interrogative has the three I’s. It’s important, it’s interesting, and it’s something about which I’m ignorant.

That sums up this week’s topic.

Usually, I don’t reveal questioner’s identities. This time I sought her permission to do just that. Despite the query, it’s something that she knows more about than me.

According to Google Books, “Emily Iland, M.A., is an award-winning author, advocate, filmmaker, researcher, and leader in the autism field.” She is also the mother of a son on the autism spectrum – so she knows the topic both professionally and personally.

Early in my career I worked with severely autistic preschoolers, my university center operated the autism clearinghouse for the city of Chicago, and I have a family member on the spectrum, also. Nevertheless, my knowledge of the intersection of reading comprehension and autism could best be characterized (if it merits characterization at all) as non-existent.

The reason for Ms. Iland’s question was that she is in the process of revising her book, Drawing A Blank: Improving Comprehension for Readers on the Autism Spectrum (2011).

I gave the literature a quick once over, responded to her with a brief summation of what stood out to me along with a list of studies, and thought that was it. She responded with more than a thank you. She offered a valuable earful that I found fascinating. It made me want to look again at those studies.

She wrote:

“We are still suffering from a dearth of robust research about this topic! I have a 40-year-old son with autism spectrum disorder who astonished us with spontaneous reading and spelling at age 3. The comprehension issue was always there but interfered with learning from about age 10 onwards. Since I’ve piqued your interest, I’d like to share my perspective with you.  

“When kindergarteners sit on the rug for reading time, and the teacher asks, “What’s going to happen next?” all the typically developing children have a pretty good answer. No one taught them how to predict, but they know how to gather up context clues and draw a conclusion at age 5. 

“The child with autism usually doesn’t answer because they don’t know what’s going to happen next and can’t guess. Who notices that they have no answer 100% of the time? No one. If the child does answer, it’s usually way off the mark and perhaps related to their special interest in dinosaurs, etc.

“No one worries about this or has a reason to teach that child to predict, especially if the child was a brilliant decoder since preschool. One way that I know this is from my experience as a professional advocate for 200 families in my early career, observing my little clients at school.

“Asking a child to predict is not the same as teaching a child to predict. I know you agree with this, like when you say that asking a student to answer comprehension questions is not an instructional method! 

“When I was doing my post-master’s certificate in Special Education in the late 2000’s I worked 1:1 with children with autism in the California State Northridge Literacy Lab. I was working with a second grader with autism who could not decode and didn’t understand what he read.

“I used a computer program with pictures and hints to work on predicting. He couldn’t do the second-grade level, first-grade level or Kindergarten level. Zero success in all attempts. 

“This is one example of why ‘tweaking’ typical instructional methods does not work for this population. Features of autism cause a ‘Swiss cheese’ effect of looking good from the outside but having hidden skill gaps. 

“One woman with autism told me that when she reads, it’s like highlighting everything in grey, because all the words and sentences have equal importance and nothing stands out as the main idea….How can you summarize a paragraph, study, or write about a passage if you don’t know what information is important?

“Cognitive issues in the autistic profile such as weak central coherence and Theory of Mind (a form of inference) also impact comprehension and learning. Essential (usually innate) prerequisite skills for using comprehension strategies are NOT intact. As a result, teaching must be tailored to the cognitive profile and learning needs of readers with ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder]. Teachers and parents want to know what to do and how to teach. Research is NOT giving us the answers we need! I’m not comfortable generalizing from a study with 2 participants to this whole population!”

See what I mean. Lots of juicy insight and an honest disappointment in the research – which I assiduously began to read more carefully. Here is what I found out.

First, there’s much variation in the population that is burdened with autism. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “People with autism have a wide range of symptoms, which can include differences in social and communication behaviors, intellectual disabilities, and other physical and mental health conditions. People with autism also have a wide range of health care and service needs.”

That’s true regarding reading (Brown, et al., 2012; Ricketts, 2011; Sotáková & Kucharská, 2017).  There are kids like the ones that Emily describes in her letter, hyperlexic when it comes to decoding and spelling but with lagging comprehension abilities. This results because many people with ASD may tend to super focus on one thing, often to the exclusion of all else. When a kindergartener tries to figure out spelling patterns that level of attention can be helpful. However, some estimates claim hyperlexia affects only 5-10% of the ASD population (Brown, et al., 2012).

Confusingly, studies identify these kids as gifted at decoding, poor at decoding, and typical of the general population when it comes to reading words!

My sense of the studies? Kids with ASD are marginally more likely to struggle with decoding and/or spelling than the general population (Brown, et al., 2012; Henderson, Clarke, & Snowling, 2014; McClain, et al., 2021; Nation & Norbury, 2005; Nicolosi & Dillenburger, 2024). Randi, Newman, & Grigorenko, 2010 ; Sorenson, et al., 2021 ; Sotáková & Kucharská, 2017). These kids tend to have problems with attention, speech, language, and social interactions. Those may interfere with any kind of learning, and some (such as speech difficulties) can be especially problematic for learning phonics. Given that, I would expect the ASD population to struggle a bit with decoding.

However, I doubt that low decoding is a characteristic of ASD. That’s because there is no reason why ASD would be especially disruptive of decoding ability. There isn’t a part of the condition that is necessarily and specifically disruptive of the attainment of decoding abilities.

Most young kids struggle with attention. Some of them have special problems with it, ADHD for instance, without being on the spectrum. But the attention spans of normally developing kids are notoriously limited at the ages when basic decoding is taught. The specific thing about the inattention of ASD kids is that theirs may be the result of intensive attention to something else. But this kind of inattention interferes with learning in the same way that anybody else’s does.

That ability to be super attentive is probably why there is that bubble of kids with hyperlexia – the ability to read words well beyond comprehension ability.

That means you can’t assume that an ASD diagnosis tells you anything about the likelihood of decoding success. It is essential that these students be screened just like anyone else. It really matters little that a higher percentage of kids with ASD are hyperlexic, if the kid in your class isn’t making adequate progress. It also matters that there is no special ASD-reason for those decoding challenges. Garden variety good teaching would be likely to remediate those learning gaps successfully.

The same kind of issue arises with English Learners (EL). That group doesn’t have any special learning problems. They suffer from maladies like dyslexia and autism as often as native English speakers. Their “special” barrier to reading progress is mainly due to a lack of proficiency with the English language. It’s hard to read in a language that you do not know.

Nevertheless, ELs may struggle with English decoding. The assumption that an English Learner’s reading problems will only be due to a lack of English proficiency will be wrong often enough that we should take care to avoid that notion. It’s better to assess and be certain, than to guess and, consequently, fail to meet these kids’ learning needs.

Something similar may be afoot for kids with ASD. More of them are likely to struggle with comprehension than decoding, but that doesn’t mean that many of them don’t have decoding difficulties that need to be addressed. A large-scale observational study in Grades 4-9 (Solis & McKenna, 2023) found that much of the reading instruction for kids with ASD focused on reading comprehension (mainly having them read and answer questions – which, in my opinion, is more about monitoring than teaching). According to the researchers, these kids received little word reading instruction, despite 46% of them testing below average in those skills.

However, as Emily Iland explained in her letter… there are special problems for ASD kids when it comes to reading comprehension. That’s where it gets really interesting.

Interesting both in terms of what it says about teaching kids with ASD – and regarding teaching reading comprehension to everyone.

References

Brown, H. M., Oram-Cardy, J., & Johnson, A. (2012). A meta-analysis of the reading comprehension skills of individuals on the autism spectrum. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 932-955. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10803-012-1638-1

Conner, C., Alor, J. H., Al Otaiba, S., Yovanoff, P., & LeJeune, L. (2024). Early reading outcomes in response to a comprehensive reading curriculum for students with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 39(2), 71-83. https://doi.org/10.1177/10883576221137905

Grimm, R. P., Solari, E. J., McIntyre, N. S., Zajic, M., & Mundy, P. C. (2018). Comparing growth in linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension in school-aged children with autism versus typically developing children. Autism Research: Official Journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 11(4), 624–635. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1914

Nation, K., & Norbury, C. F. (2005). Why reading comprehension fails: Insights from developmental disorders. Topics in Language Disorders, 25(1), 21–32. 

https://doi.org/10.1097/00011363-200501000-00004

Nicolosi, M., & Dillenburger, K. (2024). The effect of phonics skills intervention on early reading comprehension in an adolescent with autism: A longitudinal study. Behavioral Interventions, 39(3), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1002/bin.2007

Randi, J., Newman, T. & Grigorenko, E. L. (2010). Teaching children with autism to read for meaning: Challenges and possibilities. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40, 890–902. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-0938-6

Ricketts, J., Jones, C. R., Happ., F., & Charman, T. (2013). Reading comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: the role of oral language and social functioning. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 807–816. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10803-012-1619-4

Solis, M., & McKenna, J. W. (2023). Reading instruction for students with autism spectrum disorder: Comparing observations of instruction to student reading profiles. Journal of Behavioral Education.

Sorenson Duncan, T., Karkada, M., Deacon, S. H., & Smith, I. M. (2021). Building meaning: Meta?analysis of component skills supporting reading comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 14(5), 840-858. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2483

Sotáková, H., & Kucharská, A. (2017). The level of social relations comprehension and its impact on text comprehension in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder. Health Psychology Report, 5(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.5114/hpr.2017.62725

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

In that earlier piece, I quoted extensively from a letter from Emily Iland, an expert on autism. She, based on her extensive personal experience, described various special reading comprehension problems kids with ASD may face. These problems are common to many kids with ASD but not so prevalent with everyone else.

Nevertheless, if there are certain skills or types of information with which these students struggle, other kids may evidence those problems too – just not as severely or consistently.

One common finding is that kids on the autism spectrum usually comprehend less well than they decode, and this is true whether or not they have decoding difficulties (Brown, et al., 2012; Henderson, Clarke, & Snowling, 2014; McClain, et al., 2021; Nation & Norbury, 2005; Nicolosi & Dillenburger, 2024; Randi, Newman, & Grigorenko, 2010 ; Sorenson, et al., 2021 ; Sotáková & Kucharská, 2017). Admittedly, there are also kids on the spectrum who appear to comprehend well. Though, having read much of the recent literature, I doubt that typical comprehension tests are sufficiently sensitive to identify these kids’ problems.

Most of the reading research on kids with ASD has been of the single subject variety (McClain, et al., 2021). In these studies, researchers intervene usually with 1-3 students to see if an instructional approach works. Typically, these studies have been of short duration and with measures of dubious reliability. Such studies are better used to guide future research than instruction.

It is also worth noting that there are several studies that treat ASD like any other reading disability, simply increasing the dosage or intensity of what appears to work reasonably well with everyone else (Head, 2023; Kim, 2023; Kim, et al., 2024; Marshall & Myers, 2021; O’Neil, 2024; Ricketts, 2011; Turner, Remington, & Hill, 2017). Such studies evaluate whether shared reading, story mapping, direct instruction, intensive review, increased scaffolding, graphic organizers and such can work with ASD, if delivered under positive circumstances (e.g., one-on-one teaching) or with increased dosage. Generally, these studies report positive outcomes. What their success would be like in regular classroom settings is anyone’s guess. In any event, there appear to be learning pay offs from intensified or improved delivery of typical comprehension instruction.  

However, ASD poses some special problems that might require more than improved “business as usual” routines.  

Most prominent among these possibilities is the need for a pedagogical approach that addresses the difficulty these students often have with social interactions. Autism is often characterized in terms of social communication difficulties.

Reading comprehension depends not just on reading skills and language abilities per se, but also upon knowledge relevant to the content of the texts. Prior knowledge – the knowledge that someone brings to a text – is essential for comprehending.

Of course, not all texts depend upon an understanding of social communication. Science texts, for instance, usually require little interpretation of nonverbal communication, human intentions and motivation, or non-literal language like sarcasm, idiomatic expressions, or figurative language. On the other hand, the comprehension of literature depends heavily upon such information and insight, as do history texts and many articles on current affairs.

Emily, in her letter to me, points out the difficulty kids with ASD have in predicting what will happen in stories. Such predictions are often contingent on what actions characters are likely to take. That means the reader must recognize what it is that is motivating the characters – what they want, how badly they want it. But that is the kind of information that children on the spectrum are not likely to have.

Is there any evidence that kids with ASD struggle particularly with those aspects of reading comprehension?

Yes. In fact, there is. Research shows that individuals with ASD have problems understanding the mental states of others (Kimhi, et al., 2025; Lee, Chan, & Tong, 2022; O’Hare, et al., 2009). This is what is meant by “theory of mind.” At least part of the reason for the socialization problems ASD kids face is their difficulties intuiting the feelings and intentions of others. This makes empathy a challenge and undermines their comprehension of social situations and relations.

A very cool study from the Czech Republic tested students’ general reading comprehension along with what the researchers called the “Strange Stories” test (Sotáková, & Kucharská, 2017). These stories were designed to reveal an understanding of the social moves people make. Social moves that are difficult to interpret for people on the autism spectrum, including lies, misunderstandings, sarcasm, attempts to persuade, jokes, and pretending.

For example, here is a sarcasm story and its questions:

“Sarah and Tom are going on a picnic. It is Tom’s idea; he says it is going to be a lovely sunny day for a picnic. But just as they are unpacking the food, it starts to rain and soon they are both soaked to the skin. Sarah is cross. She says: ‘Oh yes, a lovely day for a picnic alright!’.

1. Is it true what Sarah says?

2. Why does she say this?”

Autism affected these students’ answers. They often failed to recognize the literal inaccuracies – what Sarah said was false. They struggled with these texts more than did their normally developing peers. Their performance on these texts had a strong correlation with their general reading comprehension as well.

Typical reading tests aren’t aimed at identifying social insensitivity. They may include questions that probe the psychology of characters including motivations or emotional responses to events. But that usually isn’t the point of such questions. I know that because these queries are likely to be labeled as literal recall, inferencing, main ideas, supporting details, drawing conclusions, cause and effect – monikers that totally miss the point of the reasons for students’ errors. Those tests offer no direction when it comes to the kinds of instruction that might improve students’ abilities to handle such questions. Having kids practicing with “drawing conclusions” questions won’t cut the mustard.

Sad to say, though the research has identified this gap, it hasn’t provided any solutions.  Obviously, we can continue to include these kids in shared, guided or directed reading situations hoping that over time they’ll gain some purchase on these concepts]. That seems ineffectual to me.

How might this problem be addressed? My answer is through explicit teaching.

I think it would be better to explain to readers that people have emotional reactions to events – that some things may make us happy, sad, or angry. Then I’d expose them to a series of stories in which the events elicit such reactions among the characters. At first, I’d model, telling the students how I thought a character reacted and why. Then, I’d guide students to try to infer emotional reactions in other stories, perhaps with some kind of multiple-choice scheme. Then we’d explore what might make someone jealous or hurt their feelings, and so on; again, linking these to the events in the stories the kids are reading. I can imagine some pretty cool graphic organizers identifying character motivations and emotional reactions.

Another challenge to kids with ASD that Ms. Island alerted me to is the difficulty that many children with ASD have in connecting the ideas in a text. The research supports that insight (Cain & Norbury, 2005; Davidson & Weismer, 2017; Sotáková, & Kucharská, 2017). Many of these kids can understand and remember specific facts from a text but making connections among those ideas – coming up with a main idea or cogent summary may be well-nigh impossible for them.

Again, students on the spectrum can get so intensively focused on the specifics that they miss the overall point, like comprehending individual sentences but missing the cohesive links and author’s intentions.

As with the difficulties in interpreting social cues, the research does a good job of identifying the problem, but experimental instruction targeted specifically on what it is that is hard for these kids just doesn’t exist. Here, however, there have been some small, positive steps suggesting that teaching kids how to use cohesive links may be helpful. That makes sense to me, as would efforts to guide these students to “build up” an understanding of a text: reading a sentence and talking about it, then reading a second, and focusing on its connections with the first, and so on.

Why does all this matter?

First, many kids are being identified as having ASD. Some estimates suggest the likelihood that there is one such child in every classroom. That commonality means that all reading teachers should know something about it.

Second, I subscribe to the premise that these kinds of comprehension difficulties are likely apparent in other kids, too. The frequency and consistency of the problems may differ, but they show up well beyond the spectrum. If we can figure out how best to address these challenges with ASD kids, then we’ll have some proven ways to help everyone else a bit.

Third, because of the qualitative nature of these problems – kids having difficulty with certain kinds of information – it should be apparent that just asking certain kinds of questions will not help many to surmount such difficulties. These problems make the need for explicit comprehension instruction – not just practice – noticeable.

Fourth, this research points out why our reading comprehension questioning schemes fail to tell us anything more than who comprehends well. The kinds of questions that we ask supposedly provide rehearsal with certain kinds of cognitive actions – which we know doesn’t work – rather than identifying the type of information students struggle with or pinpointing why students may fail to understand a text.

References

Brown, H. M., Oram-Cardy, J., & Johnson, A. (2012). A meta-analysis of the reading comprehension skills of individuals on the autism spectrum. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 932-955. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10803-012-1638-1

Davidson, M. M., & Weismer, S. E. (2017). Reading comprehension of ambiguous sentences by school?age children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 10(12), 2002-2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1850

Grimm, R. P., Solari, E. J., McIntyre, N. S., Zajic, M., & Mundy, P. C. (2018). Comparing growth in linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension in school-aged children with autism versus typically developing children. Autism Research: Official Journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 11(4), 624–635. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1914

Head, C. N. (2023). The effects of direct instruction on reading comprehension for individuals with autism or intellectual disability. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Auburn University. 

Henderson, L. M., Clarke, P. J., & Snowling, M. J. (2014). Reading comprehension impairments in autism spectrum disorders. L'Année Psychologique, 114(4), 779-797. https://doi.org/10.4074/S0003503314004084

Keller?Margulis, M. A., Mire, S. S., Loría Garro, E. S., Jellinek?Russo, E. R., Lozano, I., Hut, A. R., Luu, M.?L. N., Izuno?Garcia, A. K., Erps, K. H., Landry Pierce, L. N., Tan, S. X., McNeel, M. M., Gardner, S. M., & Duran, B. J. (2024). Measuring academic skill development for students with autism spectrum disorder using curriculum?based measurement: A scoping review and call for research. Psychology in the Schools, 61(5), 2132–2147. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.23154 

Kim, S. (2023). The use of technology to teach reading skills to individuals with autism spectrum disorder: Systematic quality review, meta-analysis, and single-case research evaluation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Purdue University.

Kim, S. Y., Rispoli, M., Mason, R. A., Lory, C., Gregori, ER., Roberts, C. A., Whitfrod, D., & Wang, D. (2024). The effects of using adapted science eBooks within shared reading on comprehension and task engagement of students with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Austims and Developmental Disorders. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-024-06525-w

Kimhi, Y., Mirsky, Y., & Bauminger-Zviely, N. (2025). The role of theory of mind, executive functions, and central coherence in reading comprehension for children with ASD and typical development. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 55(4), 1302–1317. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-024-06272-y

Lee, H. K., Chan, W. S., & Tong, S. X. (2022). The heterogeneity and interrelationships among theory of mind, executive function, and reading comprehension deficits in Hong Kong Chinese children with autism. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10298-y

McClain, M. B., Haverkamp, C. R., Benallie, K. J., Schwartz, S. E., & Simonsmeier, V. (2021). How effective are reading comprehension interventions for children with ASD? A meta-analysis of single-case design studies. School Psychology, 36(2), 107–121. 

https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000424

Nation, K., & Norbury, C. F. (2005). Why reading comprehension fails: Insights from developmental disorders. Topics in Language Disorders, 25(1), 21–32. 

https://doi.org/10.1097/00011363-200501000-00004

Nicolosi, M., & Dillenburger, K. (2024). The effect of phonics skills intervention on early reading comprehension in an adolescent with autism: A longitudinal study. Behavioral Interventions, 39(3), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1002/bin.2007

O’Hare, A. E., Bremner, L., Nash, M., Happ., F., & Pettigrew, L. M. (2009). A clinical assessment tool for advanced theory of mind performance in 5 to 12 year olds. Journal of Autism and Development Disorders, 39, 916–928. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0699-2

O’Neil, M. (2024). Improving reading comprehension among students with autism. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Grand Canyon University.

Randi, J., Newman, T. & Grigorenko, E. L. (2010). Teaching children with autism to read for meaning: Challenges and possibilities. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40, 890–902. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-010-0938-6

Ricketts J. (2011). Research review: reading comprehension in developmental disorders of language and communication. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines, 52(11), 1111–1123. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2011.02438.x

Ricketts, J., Jones, C. R., Happ., F., & Charman, T. (2013). Reading comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: The role of oral language and social functioning. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 807–816. https://doi.org:10.1007/s10803-012-1619-4

Solis, M., & McKenna, J. W. (2023). Reading instruction for students with autism spectrum disorder: Comparing observations of instruction to student reading profiles. Journal of

Behavioral Education. 

Sorenson Duncan, T., Karkada, M., Deacon, S. H., & Smith, I. M. (2021). Building meaning: Meta?analysis of component skills supporting reading comprehension in children with autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 14(5), 840-858. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2483

Sotáková, H., & Kucharská, A. (2017). The level of social relations comprehension and its impact on text comprehension in individuals with autistic spectrum disorder. Health Psychology Report, 5(1), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.5114/hpr.2017.62725

Turner, H., Remington, A., & Hill, V. (2017). Developing an intervention to improve reading comprehension for children and young people with autism spectrum disorders. Educational and Child Psychology, 34(2), 13–26.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Of course, it makes sense to have books available for when kids finish school lessons early. But setting aside 20 minutes a day for classroom reading is not a good use of instructional time.

It takes a lot of reading practice to improve reading achievement. Even summer reading may not be enough to give your youngster a measurable boost in achievement – though like many professionals who encourage reading, I suspect the benefits may accumulate slowly over childhood (Kim & Quinn, 2013).

Getting kids to read on their own – afterschool, weekends, and summers – is a different thing than reading under the supervision of teachers. Those kinds of independent reading won’t replace teacher-supported reading. Practice is good and we should encourage it as effectively as we can.

Summer is upon us, and I hope this entry will serve as a timely reminder to parents to get your kids reading.

RELATED: Should Reading Be Taught Whole Class or Small Group?

I vividly remember my summer between 3^rd and 4^th grade. Mom decided it was a good idea to make me stay in after lunch to read each day. She even took me to the library to get me started. I’ve been a reader ever since. Gestures like that from parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, godparents, friends of the family, and coaches can have big impacts on kids’ interests. Accordingly, I have several suggestions for doing just that.

Often it is asserted that getting kids to read will make them love it. That certainly was true for me, but the research on these matters is not so sanguine. Sometimes kids just find reading to be difficult, boring, or lonely. I don’t think that problem is solved by sending kids off to read on their own. There is more to it than that. People read not just because they find it pleasurable. They read because they want to know things or because they want to do things that reading enables. They read because of the social connections it allows. As you’ll see, the activities I have recommended tend to have some kind of payoff or social connection. That’s not by accident.

1.     Summer usually allows families to spend more time together. This can be a great opportunity to read with your kids. Children can learn a lot from being read to. If they can already read, then have them read to you, or better yet, take turns reading pages to each other. Make sure you discuss what you are reading. Ask questions, answer questions, explore the ideas together, but read.

2.     As kids get older, help them find books, magazines, or newspaper articles they would enjoy reading – and you read some of them, too. Trips to the library together can be a great source for such material. Reading a book that your child is reading communicates your interest powerfully and facilitates deeper and more meaningful discussions. The point is to share the reading experience.

3.     Even if you are not reading the same books, talk to your children about what they are reading. Ask questions such as what happened in the story or what might happen next, who is their favorite character, or who is the villain and why. This builds summarization and recall skills, and your interest will increase their interest.

4.     Create a summer reading nook or spot in your home. Make sure there is good light and comfortable seating and try to set aside one TV/video-game-free night per week for family reading. Reading night can be a special snack night, too. There is nothing better than reading with a big bowl of popcorn or cookies and milk.

5.     If your child’s school program provided materials for summer activities, use them.

6.     If you are taking a trip this summer, send for brochures and maps and have your children read them with you. They love to be involved in that kind of planning.

7.     Don’t ignore the value of graphic novels or a popular book series like the Twilight books. These are great ways to encourage adolescents to read more.

8.     Whether you are reading to your children, or they are reading themselves, plan an outcome event or activity based on the reading. For instance, if the book has been made into a movie, watch the DVD together after reading it. Book reading can lead to picnics, museum and zoo visits, ballgames, or even family vacations. We took our kids to Chincoteague Island and Hannibal, Missouri because we had read Misty of Chincoteague and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

9.     If you really want to get crazy, team up with your child to create a book club for him or her and their friends. Many adults read because they have joined a social group that agrees to read books together. They pick a book to read and then monthly, they get together and talk about it, usually with wine. With the kids, let’s skip the wine, but engaging them and their friends in that kind social contract can be a real winner. Moms and dads may even join the group. I know one teacher who had a monthly book club for adolescent boys and their dads – very successful.

1. Write notes or letters to your children. What a great opportunity to remind them of experiences that they had when they were younger or to tell them about the lives of older people in the family, like their grandparents. Kids love getting letters and sometimes they’ll even write back. Other writing activities make sense, too. https://www.startwithabook.org/summer-writing
2. Don’t just focus on storybooks. Kids often prefer to read fact rather than fiction, including books and articles about the environment, animals, current events, sports, and other factual topics. Right now, some of my grandkids are excited about ballet, robots, soccer, and dance – there are sources available on each of those topics. Talk to them about what they like and help them find reading materials that match their interests.
3. Consider taking on a family cultural study… reading some books about or from a particular country and then supplementing this reading with examinations of relevant art, visits to museums, meals at ethnic restaurants or cooking experiments at home, etc.
4. Take on a genealogical study. Kids love finding out about their families and there is a lot of reading and writing involved in that kind thing.

https://www.genealogy.com/articles/research/67_taylor.html

13.  Most communities provide activities aimed at promoting reading. Check with your local library, park district, museums, zoos, churches, and the like. However, just in case those resources aren’t available or for some reason you can’t avail them, there are many useful sources available through the Internet.

The links below provide specific book recommendations for children of various ages, and more ideas and resources on how to encourage summer reading.

https://www.cbcbooks.org/readers/searchable-reading-lists/favorites-awards-lists/

https://www.readingrockets.org/books-and-authors/literacy-calendar/summer-reading

https://www.ala.org/alsc/summer-2025

https://lemonlimeadventures.com/must-try-summer-science-activities-for-kids/

https://www.scholastic.com/site/summer/home.html

https://kids.scholastic.com/kids/games/homebase/

https://www.nea.org/resource-library/get-serious-about-summer-reading

https://www.weareteachers.com/10-summer-reading-programs-for-kids/

https://www.science-sparks.com/summer-science/ 

https://lemonlimeadventures.com/must-try-summer-science-activities-for-kids/

https://summerreadingchallenge.org.uk/

READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

References

Kim, J. S., & Quinn, D. M. (2013). The effects of summer reading on low-income children’s literacy achievement from kindergarten to grade 8: A meta-analysis of classroom and home interventions. Review of Educational Research, 83(3), 386-431. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654313483906  

Teacher question 2025: I respect your opinion and would love to get your thoughts on some new information that is out right now. In our community the idea of providing core foundational skills instruction to small groups is being promoted as the “science of reading.” Our schools teach foundational skills on a whole classroom basis and then use tiered intervention time for filling gaps. This has been highly effective. Could you help to clarify this issue?

Original Teacher Question: I was curious what your thoughts are regarding small group instruction in elementary school during the ELA block. I’m unaware of any definitive research on the effect size of small group instruction or the impact it has regarding student achievement in reading. There seems to be a few different schools of thought: direct whole group instruction for all components of reading, shortened whole group reading followed by differentiated small group instruction, whole group instruction followed by student work groups facilitated by teacher walking around. It seems all three could be effective depending on the students, the teacher and rigor of text or content being used.  However, I’m curious if there is a research-based recommendation?  

RELATED: Encouraging Summer Reading

Shanahan’s response:

Small group teaching is ubiquitous in elementary reading classes. That was true when I myself was being taught to read (65 years ago), though our classes then were so large that “small group” meant groups about the size of today’s typical class.

By the beginning of the 20^th century there was much within-class grouping, but that was due to the pervasive one-room schoolhouse. Those “groups” were the “grades.” My dad, a product of such a school, bragged for years that he “graduated at the top of his class”—meaning the other kid flunked.

When I was first exploring the idea of becoming a teacher, the lore of the time was that reading teachers always had three reading groups: the Robins, Blue Jays, and Crows. As a teacher’s aide it certainly looked that way to me, and I wasn’t surprised during my student teaching when Mr. Krentzin had me take over those leveled reading groups one at a time.

Admittedly, as a primary grade teacher, I always grouped my kids for reading instruction. Studies have long reported that more than 90% of primary grade teachers group for reading, with high incidence in the upper grades as well (e.g., Austin & Morrison, 1963).

Historically, small group reading instruction has been aimed at matching kids with books of certain levels – a practice the effectiveness of which is refuted in my forthcoming book (Shanahan, 2025). As that 2025 letter above illustrates, now small group teaching is as likely to be aimed at phonics – and not as a follow up for the stragglers, but as initial teaching.

Where this valencing of small group literacy teaching will end is anyone’s guess. Kids need instruction in words (phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, morphology), fluency, comprehension, and writing. Perhaps we could have 3 groups for each. For a 2-hour block that would allow for 10 minutes of teaching of each topic to each group each day. Future research could sort out how long it would take such an approach to drive the average teacher insane!

This blog entry was originally written with a focus on those typical leveled reading groups along with an odd practice that was appearing during the 2010s. Schools were (and are) organizing their schedules around “small group time.” Schools that require a period of small group teaching are mindlessly promoting the value of such teaching — no matter the situation. I was seeing identical lessons taught to one small group after another to accomplish a principal’s or curriculum coordinator’s small group mandate.

I thought this recent shift to foundational skills by small group advocates would require a whole new response from me. But a careful review of the research shows this to be unnecessary. Their use of the term “science of reading” must only refer to their commitment to phonics – and not to any research supporting their small-group approach.

I had largely completed this rewrite when I came across a quote that brought me up short. “Research has shown us that the traditional whole-class phonics lesson is not the way to develop fluent readers – not for kindergartners or, in fact, for any students in any grade level” (Seger & Stukey, no date).

I hunted for that research but, of course, there wasn’t any. People make those kinds of assertions and then cite sources that don’t actually support the idea. In this case, a paper by Nell K. Duke and Anne E. Mesmer (2018-2019) was cited which explicitly recommends teaching phonics whole class with small group follow up as necessary – a completely different idea than what that quote seems to promise.

Does small group teaching advantage kids in learning to read?

John Hattie identified three meta-analyses on small group instruction and reported it to have a medium-to-large effect (.49) on learning. However, few of the studies in those meta-analyses focused on reading, they weren’t always comparing small group teaching to whole class instruction, and some of the reading studies were from back in the day when 45-60 kids in a class was common practice. Several of the studies were based on secondary school and college teaching, too.

Robert Slavin conducted some best-evidence syntheses of the research on grouping back in the 1980s (with an overall effect size of .32). But at that time, he found no reading studies that compared grouping for reading instruction with whole class teaching (Slavin 1987a; 1987b; 1988).

Not exactly the evidentiary base I was hoping for.

However, even if we were to rely on those meta-analyses, the payoff of grouping for reading instruction had lower effects than was found for the other subjects (only .13), and it mattered a great deal how large the groups were—groups of 5 or larger received little or no learning benefit from within-class grouping (Lou, et al., 1996), meaning that most teachers would require at least 4-6 groups.

There are a couple of sizable and especially pertinent individual studies I think we should consider, however.

For example, Kamil and Rausher (1990) conducted a study in which they compared whole class reading instruction with small group teaching in a large suburban school district. Surprisingly, they found that small groups “were not superior to whole class” teaching in terms of learning. There was just “too much variance within classrooms for the grouping patterns to have much of an impact.”

Even more sobering is a large study of grouping in reading conducted by Sørensen & Hallinan (1986). They found small group teaching more effective than whole class instruction—that is, if one compares 30 minutes of small group teaching versus 30 minutes of whole class teaching, the kids in the small group tend to make larger learning gains.

However, they also found small group teaching provides kids with fewer learning opportunities. Basically, teachers teach more content when working with whole classes.

Comparing equal amounts of small group teaching with whole class teaching might make sense to researchers, but it has little to do with the actual circumstances of classrooms. If a teacher has three groups who each receive 20 minutes of teaching, this should not be compared with 20 minutes of whole class instruction… but with 60 minutes—the time it takes to teach the three groups. It may be fairer to compare it with 65-75 minutes because it takes transition time to manage those groups.

When one compares small group and whole class instruction in this more appropriate way, small group teaching loses any advantage; that is, no differences in average achievement.

Of course, there are no such studies focused on foundational skills instruction. This is a case where it is necessary to generalize from the existing data, which shows no consistent benefit to small group teaching.

In the 2020s, there are studies of the effectiveness of small group decoding interventions, but none that compare them with whole class teaching. Interestingly, those recent studies reveal a decided unevenness of results. Research simply doesn’t find small group teaching to be especially powerful or consistent. It is not a panacea. As one study concluded, “for many students, simply receiving-evidence based reading instruction in a small-group setting is insufficient” (Kulesz, et al., 2024, p. 363). One explanation of this ineffectiveness is the great dosage differences that the approach creates (Piasta, et al. 2024). The more small groups, the less teaching anyone receives.

That unevenness is complicated by the complex nature of literacy. The simple view of reading says reading depends on two components: decoding and language. If we group instruction for one, we must reduce its dosage to accommodate those additional lessons. Or, if we group for one component and maintain its dosage, we must reduce the time accorded to the other, which is a bad deal, too. You need both components. Neglecting one to serve the other many provide a temporary boost in screening test results, but overall, it won’t help kids to become successful readers.

I’m not sure how folks who encourage small group foundational skills teaching want the kids grouped. There are many possibilities. It could be done randomly – reducing the number of kids taught at one time with no alteration of the heterogeneity. More likely the plan is to it separate the better decoders from the strugglers. There are no direct studies of this, but those studies of separating kids based on reading level are informative.

Sørensen and Hallinan (1986) concluded that high achieving groups tended to gain learning opportunities when separated, but that such opportunities were diminished or reduced for the lower achieving groups – an unevenness of group experience still evident in more recent studies (e.g., Kulesz, et al., 2024; Piasta, et al., 2023; Piasta, et al., 2024; Roberts, et al., 2023). That earlier research showed that Black kids and poor kids were more likely to be placed in those low groups and that they ended up with lower rather than greater progress. While there was not any overall or average learning benefit from small group teaching, there was a rotation, ensuring that the most vulnerable kids learned less.

My conclusion from all this is that small group teaching can be beneficial – teaching a lesson to fewer kids, under some circumstances, can improve the impact of the lesson. This advantage is far from certain, however. And, because amount of instruction – dosage – matters, too, we should be concerned about the reduction in teaching that small group approaches usually impose. At best, this results in a tradeoff – the kids seem to learn more in each lesson, but the reduction in curriculum coverage trashes those benefits. However, it is also likely that this tradeoff is an uneven one, an unfair one – conferring a small learning benefit to the most advantaged kids while delivering more substantial social and academic harm to the most disadvantaged.

I don’t think we should prohibit small group or even individual teaching because sometimes we can gain well-targeted learning benefits from them. But I would use these tools strategically. I would never organize my instruction with the purpose of providing daily small group time, per se. In fact, I would try to minimize my reliance on small group teaching whenever possible.

Instead of encouraging more and more small group teaching, districts should provide professional development in the most effective ways to deliver whole class instruction. This should include attention to the nature and use of seatwork. Seatwork is needed in both situations. With small groups, the emphasis is typically on keeping kids busy while the teacher works with other groups (e.g., “shut up sheets”). However, for whole class teaching the assignments can be more instructional since the teacher is able to circulate among the kids while they work giving support and additional guidance.

My watchword is “never do with a small group what you could do just as well with whole class teaching.”

References

Austin, M. C., & Morrison, C. The First R: The Harvard report on reading in elementary schools. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1963.

Duke, N., & Mesmer, H. A. E. (2018-2019). Phonics faux pas: Avoiding instructional missteps in teaching letter-sound relationships. American Educator. https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2018-2019/duke_mesmer 

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. London: Routledge.

Kamil, M. L., & Rauscher, W. C. Effects of grouping and difficulty of materials on reading achievement. National Reading Conference Yearbook, 39, (1990): 121-127.

Kulesz, P. A., Roberts, G. J., Francis, D. J., Cirino, P., Walczak, M., & Vaughn, S. (2024). Latent profiles as predictors of response to instruction for students with reading difficulties. Journal of Educational Psychology, 116(3), 363-376. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000832\

Lou, Y., Abrami, P. C., Spence, J. C., Poulsen, C., Chambers, B., & d’Apollonia, S. (1996). Within-class grouping: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 66(4), 423–458. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170650

Piasta, S. B., Hudson, A., Sayers, R., Logan, J. A. R., Lewis, K., Zettler-Greeley, C., & Bailet, L. L. (2024). Small-group emergent literacy intervention dosage in preschool: Patterns and predictors. Journal of Early Intervention, 46(1), 39. https://doi.org/10.1177/10538151231155411

Piasta, S. B., Logan, J. A. R., Zettler-Greeley, C., Bailet, L. L., Lewis, K., & Thomas, L. J. G. (2023). Small-group, emergent literacy intervention under two implementation models: Intent-to-treat and dosage effects for preschoolers at risk for reading difficulties. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 56(3), 225-240. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222194221079355

Roberts, G. J., Cote, B., Mehmedovic, S., Lerner, J., McCreadie, K., & Strain, P. (2023). Integrating behavior support into a reading intervention for fourth-grade students with reading difficulties and inattention. Journal of Behavioral Education, 32(2), 277–299. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10864-021-09457-y

Seger, W., & Stukey, M. R. (no date). Foundational skills instruction: Whole group? Small group? What’s best? Collaborative Classroom. https://www.collaborativeclassroom.org/blog/foundational-skills-instruction-whole-group-small-group-whats-best/

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled readers, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Slavin, R. E. (1987a). Ability grouping and student achievement in elementary schools: A best-evidence synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 57(3), 293-336. https://doi.org/10.2307/1170460

Slavin, R. E. (1987b). Grouping for instruction in the elementary school.” Educational Psychologist, 22(2), 109-127. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2202_2

Slavin, R. E. (1988). Synthesis of research on grouping in elementary and secondary schools. Educational Leadership, 46(1), 67-77.

Sørensen, A. B., & Hallinan, M. T. (1986). Effects of ability grouping on growth in academic achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 23(4), 519-542.  https://doi.org/10.2307/1163088



 READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

 Click here to see the original posting the 64 comments it elicited.

Dear Dr. Shanahan,

I have been searching for research around student testing. Could you point me in the direction of relevant research:

• Does testing time of the day make a difference?
• Does it matter if the testing proctor is that student's teacher for that subject?
• What effect does testing over several days in short bursts have?  

With the state test, all grades are tested on the same day at the same time. But our benchmark tests are different. We give those three times a year (a test with four passages and 35 questions, taking about two hours to complete).

Students are tested within their ELA or Math class for several days over a week for the benchmark. My students get into the testing groove, and then they must stop. They have about 30 minutes of testing time each day. Every day, it is harder for them to get into the groove. They stop reading and start just clicking away. Our morning classes do better than those tested after lunch.  

We lose 13-15 days each year of instruction within ELA for the district benchmarks. I think the tests should be completed like the state tests. My colleagues argue that 1) teachers would feel best administering tests to their students, 2) the teachers who do not teach ELA or Math would lose instructional time, and 3) non-testing teachers don't want to be responsible for administering the benchmark.

Currently only 30% of our students meet state standards on the state test. The benchmark is higher than that.    

Shanahan’s response

As my three-year-old granddaughter, Cassidy, likes to tell me, “Grandpa, you’re old!”

I’m so old that I can remember a time in schools that students took few standardized tests. Teachers might improvise an arithmetic test or perhaps use the exercises in a review unit for that purpose. But reading tests were unusual in most regular classrooms, and instruction outside the classroom wasn’t common either – this was before Title I and IDEA funding.

Teachers determined kids’ reading ability mainly by listening to them read during lessons and their judgments were subjective. That’s how they determined reading group assignments and what to tell parents about little Johnny or Janie’s reading. Kids might not even know they were being evaluated.

That may sound idyllic to some – even to me at times – but that system allowed lots of kids to fall through the cracks. If Mrs. Smith didn’t know what to do with one of her struggling charges, there was a good chance she could just ignore the problem with no one the wiser. Likewise, the incompetent reading teacher could soldier on without any need for improvement, as long as her classroom was orderly that is.

These days, everyone – school administration, the state, newspapers – all seem to be peeking over a teacher’s shoulder. Unfortunate test scores may end a superintendent’s term. Perhaps, there’ll be a new curriculum, or a new regime of professional development. Kids get pulled out or pushed back in based on those scores.

The idea of benchmark testing is to identify problems before the official evaluation (the state tests) reveals that publicly. It gives districts, schools, teachers, and students a chance to address a looming problem before it becomes a public one.

That, however, only works if the benchmark tests do a good job of predicting. The tests must be reliable (meaning student performance is consistent), valid (meaning the tests manage to identify the kids – and only those kids – who will eventually fall short on the state test), and efficient (they shouldn’t be costly financially or in terms of instructional time).

Given the length of the tests that you describe, my guess is that they’re reliable. Tests that long usually are.

Given that the benchmark test is somewhat harder than the state test, I presume adequate validity. The benchmark should be harder since the cost of failing to address the needs of a struggler is higher than that of giving extra tuition to a youngster who would succeed anyway. A few more kids may get more reading help than is necessary, but this isn’t a real loss since that additional teaching still may boost these kids’ performances.

To be certain of the validity, you would need to compare the list of kids who received extra support because of the benchmark test with the students who fall short on the state test. Certainly, all or most of the kids who fall below standard on the end of year test should be flagged by the benchmark test. How many were missed? The larger the number, the less valid your test.

I’d also be curious about how many kids benchmarked low and state-tested high. Such a difference may suggest that both the predictor and the remedial teaching are sound, since the regime would appear to be protecting those kids from failure. However, given such a high failure rate, my guess is that the two numbers don’t differ that much.

Efficient? Here, I have serious doubts. This testing protocol is depriving kids of lots of instruction (13-15 days, whew!).

That’s more problematic in a school with a high percentage of failing kids. If 70% of the kids are not accomplishing the standard, then it may be meaningless to try to shift resources to them – it would probably be better to just focus on improving the overall reading instruction. Targeting the laggards makes greater sense, when there are fewer laggards!

That’s also problematic because kids in middle school typically don’t change that much in reading over a three-month period. It appears that you’ve adopted a practice that makes lots of sense with foundational skills in the primary grades and are applying it to seventh- grade reading comprehension – two very different animals. In the primary grades, kids’ decoding and fluency skills change frequently. Close monitoring can keep kids from slipping through the cracks.

But, when you’re 12, reading comprehension doesn’t change that much over short periods of time. I suspect that most of those kids repeatedly ace the benchmarks or fail them. I bet the numbers of kids who swing between categories are small and that most of that shifting is due mainly to the unreliability in the tests rather than to changes in what kids know.

This practice – monitoring kids’ reading status – makes so much sense that people aren’t thinking about it clearly. Your district’s approach is akin to the “bubble kids strategy.”

The state determines your success by the numbers who do better than a a certain score. We could try to improve reading instruction for everybody, or we could focus our resources mainly on the kids on the bubble – that is, the ones who come close to the magic score.

In some schools, principals aim to make their school look better by dragging those kids across the line.

Let’s say, 325 is the target score. Those principals will devote all remedial resources to kids with scores in the range of 310-324. They are neither trying to teach everyone nor are they trying to teach anyone very much. They just want a few more kids across that line.

Thank goodness, your district’s approach doesn’t sound like it poses the same ethical problems as the bubble kid strategy, since it should be ensuring that even those far below the target score are going to get help. Nevertheless, it seems likely that your successes – kids predicted to fail who eventually succeed – are surely bubble kids.

When states choose such a single narrow assessment goal, school districts will respond. If a state wants more kids across that line, then resources swing towards kids near the line.

What if a state emphasized reducing the numbers of kids in the bottom 30%ile instead? I’m not touting that as a superior goal but am only pointing out that schools like yours would likely shift their targeting scheme towards addressing the needs of a different group of strugglers.

What if a state emphasized average reading scores? I’m not touting that as a superior goal either. That, too, would encourage a different pedagogical response. Perhaps there would be a greater emphasis on the quality and quantity of classroom instruction instead of targeted remedial assistance. It would be the rare school willing to sacrifice 13-15 days of valuable instruction for testing that mainly provides information they already know. In a school like yours, with so many kids behind, I think trying to raise the average would be a really good idea. It doesn’t sound like that is a goal. It should be.

Towards that end, it would be smart to reduce the amount of unnecessary testing. I feel sorry for the kids who never pass the state test, but who must engage in 13-15 days of testing each year to qualify for the extra help. At some point you’d think adults would show some compassion for them. Why not concede the point, skip the testing, and help them anyway. Kids who test far above the cutpoint may not be as frustrated but there is no benefit in this for them either.

Yep, I’m for something really crazy: more teaching, less testing!

As to your specific questions, from the research, I don’t think those variations in testing practices matter that much.

Time of Day.  Does time of day matter in kids’ test performance? At NWEA – the MAP testing people – data shows that kids do best early in the day on their reading and math tests, and they fade as the day goes on (Wise, 2023). Their solution? To get the best scores, test in the morning and not after lunch. This goes along with an earlier study, this one from Denmark, that reported lower test scores as the day goes on. 8:00AM scores were better than 9:00AM, 9 better than 10, and so on throughout the day.  Though they also found that providing break time prior to testing minimized this fall off (Sievertsen, Gino, Piovesan, 2016). Students showed greater cognitive persistence early in the day and work breaks allowed them to recharge or regain their freshness.

That sounds reasonable – until you read some other studies. For instance, Cusick and company (2018) found that time of day made no difference in test performance. According to that study, test time had no impact on how well kids did on the tests. Still another investigation contradicted this finding, reporting that the best performances were accomplished… wait for it… after lunch (Gaggero & Tommasi, 2021).

You heard it. Kids either do better in the morning or the afternoon, except when it doesn’t matter. That sounds like a noise factor to me.

Your observation that morning kids outperform the afternoon crew is easy enough to check with your own data. First, make sure that those groups are equivalent. Compare the class averages using their previous year’s state scores. If they’re very close, then compare the morning and afternoon benchmarks. Is one set markedly higher than the other? Such a comparison should reveal whether this is a problem or not.

While you’re at it, I’d get the district’s testing people to correlate separately these groups benchmark scores with their end of year state test scores. Benchmarking is used to predict success on the state test. If the correlations differ much, then you’re likely doing a better predicting job at some time of the day. Of course, if the correlations aren’t that different, then this set of research studies is probably correct – time of day is not meaningfully or consistently impacting your kids’ performance.

Proctoring. Research shows that students perform better when their classroom teacher is the test proctor (DeRosa & Patalano, 1991). That makes sense but why the score boost from a familiar teacher? These researchers assumed familiarity reduced anxiety, the students could relax and do their best in their customary situation. That may be, but an interesting twist is introduced when you listen to teachers’ explanations of how they handle test administration (Childs & Umezawa, 2009). In this study, many third-grade teachers admitted they would not be scrupulous in following test administration procedures because they wanted to support “students to do their best work,” to provide “a positive testing experience for the students,” and to maintain their usual “pedagogical routines and their relationships with the students.”

These benchmark tests are not high stakes exams. Their only purpose is to identify who should get additional help. There would be no logical reason for teachers to artificially heighten these scores. Nevertheless, experience tells me that many teachers do exactly that anyway. Instead of trying to make sure that everyone who needs it gets the help they need, these teachers are trying to make their scores look better. (I don’t like putting the teacher’s interests into conflict with the students’ interests).

Some things teachers may do – like offering encouragement during testing – have not been found to be particularly effective (Barona & Pfeiffer, 1992; Johnson & Hummel, 1971). However, that doesn’t mean they can’t goose the scores. For instance, one study reported that extending testing times a bit could make scores look better, even for high achievers (Baldwin, et al., 1991). That would be an example of an inappropriate way that familiar proctoring may help kids to do their “best work.”

I doubt that proctoring differences matter much in terms of overall scores, but I’d remind teachers that if they manage to boost kids’ scores inappropriately, it will deprive them of needed help. Teachers care about their students – so make sure they really know what is best for the kids!

Short Burst Testing. I know of no research on this practice but four days of testing three times a year seems like overkill to me. As noted earlier, I’d strive for a program that did less testing and more teaching.

To sum up, in terms of these concerns, if you want your test to be highly predictive of the state test results, then you would want the prediction power of your benchmark testing to be high. One way to increase those correlations is to make the predictor tests as much like the criterion as possible. That means making the tests highly similar in their design and in how they’re administered. It’s possible that realigning the benchmarking to be more like the end-of year tests could improve your predictions. By how much is the question? I think you’d do better concentrating your deep thinking on figuring out how to extensively reduce the sheer amount of unnecessary and uninformative testing that this regime now requires.

References  

Cusick, C, N., Isaacson, P. A., Langberg, J. M., & Becker, S. P. (2018). Last night’s sleep in relation to academic achievement and neurocognitive testing performance in adolescents with and without ADHD. Sleep Medicine, 52, 75-79.

Gaggero, A., & Denni Tommasi, D. (2023). Time of day and high-stake cognitive assessments. The Economic Journal, 133(652), 1407–1429, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac090

Sievertsen, H. H., Gino, F., & Piovesan, M. (2016). Cognitive fatigue influences students' performance on standardized tests. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(10), 2621–2624. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1516947113

Wise, S. (2023, May 20). Don’t test after lunch: Time of day affects test-taking engagement. NWEA. https://www.nwea.org/blog/2023/dont-test-after-lunch-time-of-day-affects-test-taking-engagement/

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Teacher question:

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

 Shanahan response:

You’re right. I rarely comment on specific programs. But I’m happy to discuss program research or how consistent with the research a specific aspect of a program might be.

Let’s start with the claim that Orton-Gillingham (OG) style programs are the “gold standard.”
To me, a gold standard for an instructional program would be an approach that consistently resulted in positive learning outcomes and did better than competing methods. This outperformance would be demonstrated by direct research comparisons, or by meta-analyses summarizing a bunch of disparate but related comparisons. Basically, a gold standard approach would result in more learning.  

If OG was the gold standard, then it would reliably do better than other explicit decoding approaches in teaching kids to read.

Back in National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) days, we analyzed evaluations of phonics instruction across 38 experimental and quasi-experimental studies – considering 18 different phonics curriculum sequences. Our conclusion? Phonics was a valuable ingredient in literacy teaching, and programs with explicit systematic phonics tended to outperform those that did not.

What about different types of phonics teaching? We made some of those comparisons, too. For instance, synthetic phonics (reading words from individual letters and sounds) resulted in higher average effects over analytic phonics (focused on syllables, morphemes, and use of known words as analogies), but this difference wasn’t statistically significant. Basically, there was no real difference in the effectiveness of synthetic and analytic phonics.

We didn’t compare individual phonics programs with each other because there were usually only one or two studies of most programs.

One exception to this was OG. There were enough studies of OG programs to allow the computation of a meaningful estimate of effectiveness. Nevertheless, we didn’t do that. I still think that was a good choice. I suspect those results would be a bit misleading. When OG failed, it was usually being delivered to severely disabled populations, including with kids so disabled that they were hospitalized. It is fair to say that OG didn’t do especially well with such kids. But none of the comparable programs were ever evaluated under those circumstances. There is no reason to think they would have done any better.

Over the past 25 years, more research has accumulated, and OG now has its very own meta-analysis (Stevens, Austin, Moore, Scammacca, Boucher, & Vaughn, 2021). That study found OG to be effective but with rather modest benefits – a lower degree of effectiveness than was reported for the average phonics program studied in the NRP report.

So much for being a gold standard!

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

Not surprising, those true believers argue against the data:

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

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

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

Those things are not more (or less) true of OG than any other phonics approach. If it’s so hard to find a potent version, then why would we expect it to be more effective than anything else?

There aren’t direct comparisons of OG with other phonics approaches, but generally it looks like it works about as well as any of them (and, sometimes, not as well).

That brings us to a second point – the one about speech-to-print instructional approaches.

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

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

Unfortunately, there are surprisingly few such research studies. Comparisons of print-to-speech and speech-to-print programs being one especially unfortunate area of neglect. We have some relevant research information about differences between those approaches – just nothing definitive.

Basically, speech-to-print approaches encourage students initially to perceive their language sounds prior to focusing their attention on the letters and spellings. As children become aware of the phonemic distinctions between words, then these perceived sounds are linked to their visual or print representations. Beyond that speech sound beginning, these teaching methods encourage much spelling and writing activity – actions that require students to think about what letters represent the language sounds and word pronunciations, rather than solely focusing on sounding out written words.

Phonics programs have usually emphasized print-to-speech. Kids are taught to identify letters, to link sounds to those letters, and then to sound out words by sounding each letter. Think about it.  That instructional sequence is identical to the sequence readers must go through during reading: look at the letters and use that information to generate a phonological representation.  

It seems reasonable to teach students explicitly what we eventually want them to do. That isn’t always the case, however.  To be effective a curriculum design does not necessarily have to mirror the intended outcome quite this accurately. Learning to read and reading are not the same thing, and one doesn’t necessarily benefit from mirroring the other.

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

The possibility that kids might benefit more from speech-to-print than from print-to-speech first started to appear in the 1910s – in the work of Ernest Horn (1919). He explored the idea that spelling instruction and practice might benefit reading. Later, this notion gained purchase when Helen Murphy (1943) discovered that the ability to auditorily discriminate the phonemes in words was a powerful predictor of later reading progress, and she and her advisor, Donald Durrell, built this concept into their beginning reading program (Durrell, Sullivan & Murphy, 1945), a program that eventually morphed into Speech to Print Phonics (Durrell & Murphy, 1964).  

When Jeanne Chall (1967) published her landmark review of phonics research, she concluded that those programs that included spelling, writing, and/dictation did better than those that did not.

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

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

But that evidence is all indirect. It suggests the value of the approach. It doesn’t prove it.

Not everyone agrees with my conclusion. Louisa Moats (1998, 2005, 2010), for example, has several publications that treat this as a settled matter, concluding that speech-to-print is best. There is a difference between what I believe and what I know. There is a preponderance of evidence on that side of the argument, but I’m not satisfied that it is yet proven.

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

No matter where the final evidence comes down, it should be remembered that at some point – any decoding program will necessarily shift its focus to print-to-speech, since that is what we do in reading. Until then, it is fair to conclude that there are real benefits to be derived from activities like explicit early instruction in phonemic awareness, invented spelling encouragement, explicit spelling instruction, word construction from sounds, and so on. These kinds of speech-to-print activities increase learning.

My advice: get a phonics program that includes such activities or layer them into a traditional print-to-speech program (including OG).

References

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

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

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

Durrell, D. D., Sullivan, H. B., and Murphy, H. A. (1945). Building word power. Yonkers on Hudson: World Book Co.

Durrell, D. & Murphy, H. A. (1964). Speech to print phonics. New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich.

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

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

Horn, E. (1919). Principles of method in teaching spelling as derived from scientific investigation. Teachers College Record, 20(7), 52-77. 

https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811902000703 

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

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

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

Murphy, Helen A. (1943). An evaluation of the effect of specific training in auditory and visual discrimination of beginning reading. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University

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

Rowe, D. W., Piestrzynski, L., Hadd, A. R. and Reiter, J. W. (2024). Writing as a path to the alphabetic principle: How preschoolers learn that their own writing represents speech. Reading Research Quarterly, 59: 32-56. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.526

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

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

Vandervelden, M., & Siegel, L. (2001). Phonological processing in written word learning: Assessment for children who use argumentative and alternative communication. Argumentative and Alternative Communication, 17(1), 37-51. https://doi.org/10.1080/aac.17.1.37.51

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

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

Yan, X., Yang, F., Feng, G., Li, H., Su, H., Liu, X., Wu, Y. Hua, J., & Cao, F. (2024). Reading disability is characterized by reduced print-speech convergence. Child Development, 95(6), 1982-1999. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdeve.14134

Comments on Earlier Version

More Past Comments

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

I’ve been getting lots of questions about the “science of reading.”

What is the “science of reading?”

That depends on who you talk to. There is no agreed upon definition. Nor is there any official body like the Académie Française that can dictate a meaning by fiat. In 2020, Reading Research Quarterly published a science of reading issue online with more than 50 articles. There weren’t 50 definitions, but it was close.

The disagreements seemed to turn on two points: the role of instructional research and the scope of reading included.

Some use that term in reference to neurological and cognitive science studies of how brains process written words (e.g., Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene or Reading at the Speed of Language by Mark Seidenberg). The problem with that approach, as valuable as those studies can be, is that it ignores instructional research – the studies that consider the impact of how and what we teach. That wouldn’t be so bothersome if its purveyors weren’t trying to tell us what and how to teach while ignoring the direct evidence.

No one in medicine applies basic scientific findings to medical practice without intermediary tests of effectiveness and safety. Imagine physicians administering COVID vaccines without proof that they work.

Despite careful attention to basic research, only about 10% of medical therapies ever make it through the testing process. “Can’t miss” hypotheses based on terrific basic science research often fail to work in medicine and why would it be any different in reading education? A century of failed hypotheses in teaching (e.g., right-handedness training, learning styles, programmed readers, eye training) should disabuse us of this idea (Shanahan, 2020).

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

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

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

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

Besides this fundamental dispute over the importance of instructional research in any effort to prescribe instruction, there was a disagreement as to what aspects of reading count as a science of reading. 

Historically, science of reading has usually been used to refer to word reading or “decoding” in current parlance. If someone says your school isn’t aligned with the science of reading, they probably are saying that you aren’t teaching phonemic awareness and phonics like they think you should. There is nothing wrong or misleading about using the term that way.

But any science of reading instruction necessarily includes much more than that. Many of those Reading Research Quarterly articles aimed to expand the scope to include more than phonics teaching.

Much of the popular use of the science of reading term is specifically about phonics, but I don’t believe anyone disputes that other topics are part of this science as well, including vocabulary, reading comprehension, domain knowledge, oral language, and so on. Reading researchers shouldn’t feel threatened when someone says that science should dictate the inclusion of phonics instruction in a reading program. That in no ways says that science shouldn’t be used in the same way with all the other complex of skills and abilities on which reading depends. 

How Does Science of Reading Differ from National Reading Panel?

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

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

To me, the National Reading Panel results are part of a science of reading. But it was carried out in the late 1990s. During the past two decades research has expanded. Topics like writing and spelling to improve reading, text complexity, teaching reading comprehension tailored to the specific demands of science and social studies, differentiation of instruction, quality of instruction, and text structure have all generated extensive bodies of research since the Panel closed its books. A science of reading will always be a moving target – knowledge is always conditional and research should always be an ongoing enterprise).

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

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

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

I asked an author about this. She worked on a program that relied on some of those unproven practices, and it was being marketed under the science banner.

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

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

In fact, she was embracing not only practices that haven’t yet been studied, but even some that had been rejected by empirical research.

Unfortunately, the only real protection against such logical overreach is caveat emptor, buyer beware. When someone tells you that something is part of the science of reading, ask for the study or studies that proved it improved learning. Marshalling support for such claims shouldn’t be on the users’ shoulders but on those who make the claims.

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

References

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

Shanahan, T. (2020). What constitutes a science of reading? Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S235-S247. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rrq.349

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

45 Earlier Comments

At our school, we test students oral reading fluency three times a year (aimswebPlus), and we teach fluency in both our Tier 1 and Tier 2 programs. I believe that I have a good understanding of how to teach fluency using repeated reading. However, one step in that process that I’m unsure of is modeling. How much fluency modeling should a teacher do and how is that best accomplished?

Shanahan responds:
Since the National Reading Panel (2000) determined fluency instruction to be beneficial, I’ve been queried often about it. Those questions have focused on text difficulty, amounts of fluency practice, role of speed, inclusion of comprehension questions, how to pair students, and so on. I don’t remember ever before getting a question about modeling.

Some aspects of literacy instruction are obvious sites for modeling or demonstrating. Teachers often profitably provide such support when teaching comprehension strategies or when guiding kids to write or print letters and words.

It is very reasonable pedagogy to show someone how to do something and then to give them a chance to emulate what you demonstrated. Then, of course, the teacher must carefully observe those attempts at replicating the model.

If students miss the mark by too much, then the whole thing should be repeated – with the teacher again demonstrating and explaining the skill. When there is a flaw in the kids’ attempts, that problem should be addressed in the reiteration.

When kids do a reasonably good job duplicating a teacher’s model – not perfect, perhaps, but close enough, I would eschew further modeling. An emphasis on guided practice would be the better route forward in that case.

That all makes sense – and, yet the how to of all that might not be so clear when it comes to text reading fluency. What is it that a teacher is supposed to demonstrate and how do you know when to offer more modeling and when to emphasize guided practice instead?

Books and articles on fluency usually recommend modeling (Algozzine, Marr, Kavel, & Dugan, 2009; Archer & Hughes, 2011; Donaldson, 2011; Harrison, 2011; Josephs, 2010; McBride, 2016) though they rarely provide much in the way of specifics. Their descriptions of fluency teaching reveal some apparent but unacknowledged differences in opinion about both the purposes and the methods for fluency modeling. In some cases, the advice is aimed at communicating general ideas about fluency – like phrasing or reading rate. Other authorities promote a more close mimicking of the reading of specific sentences, paragraphs, or pages. 

Are practices like “reading while listening” or “choral reading” forms of modeling or types of guided practice? The literature doesn’t acknowledge the importance of that distinction.

I know of no recent studies of fluency modeling, but several such studies were meta-analyzed a couple decades ago (Chard, Vaughn, & Tyler, 2002). Basically, the researchers concluded that modeling provided clear immediate benefits – kids comprehended the texts better when they had already been modeled or they read more words right. None of the studies provided convincing evidence of higher reading achievement or fluency improvement that generalized to other passages due to modeling.

Given all that, this is one of those times when experience is the truest guide.

General Fluency Modeling

Early in the school year, when introducing how fluency will be dealt with in your classroom, it’s a good idea for teacher and kids to get on the same fluency wavelength.

Teachers who agree with this often depend on modeling to accomplish it. They read some short portions of text aloud, pointing out fluency features that they want the kids to notice. 

“I read the author’s words. I didn’t change the words or put in other words.” Or “I stopped at the periods and slowed down when I came to a comma.” With those interjections, they may reread a portion of the text to be sure the students noticed.

That seems like reasonably good instructional practice to me, though you might want to change that up a bit to increase engagement.

Personally, I’d include some negative demonstration.

Be careful here… negative models can have unintended consequences, though I’ve never seen that happen with fluency training.

I’ll read a text very slowly and ask students to evaluate my effort. They usually love to point out my problems and to tell me how to read the text. Perhaps, I’ll try it again, bragging that I’m not one of those readers who plods along too slow. This time, I’m likely to race through the text at the speed of light, so fast as to be unintelligible. If the kids were happy to point out my initial problem, now they are beside themselves. “That’s too fast, Dr. S, go slower!” they boom.

We discuss the need to read text at about the speed that we talk, neither slower nor faster. I explain why this matters: we’re practicing fluency to improve our ability to translate print into language that we can understand.

Kids don’t need much explanation for why it matters that we read the author’s words. That’s obvious even to 5- and 6-year-olds. What students often are unaware of is the importance of staying honest with yourself in this regard during silent reading. One of the benefits of oral reading practice is it forces kids to try to decode each word. That, in fact, is why oral reading practice is so good for fluency; teacher and students can hear the problems and the improvements.

But that doesn’t mean that fluency is about oral reading. Readers must be fluent in silent reading, too.

They might try every word when reading aloud, but that may not be the case when reading silently. There it is all too easy to elide and skip those unknown words or to hurry along without correcting any miscues. I might raise this issue by making some oral reading errors in my demonstration, showing the kids how I go back and fix those mistakes. Then we discuss how that needs to work during silent reading.

There are also issues of pausing, punctuation, and typography. In each case, I model both disfluency and fluency. I think the contrasting models makes the features more accessible.

This kind of introductory modeling is worth a serious investment of time – I wouldn’t hesitate to spend 30 minutes on that. I tend to do this all at once, but it can be broken into a series of shorter lessons, addressing each criterion, one at time, over several days.

Usually, such sessions end with the kids formulating a list of “dos and don’ts” for a bulletin board or we include those criteria in a partner reading evaluation form.

I know there are fluency teaching schemes that provide a short version of this with each lesson, usually with little explanation or discussion of the model (e.g. Mize, et al., 2024). I don’t agree with that approach.

Such ongoing, brief, non-explained modeling provides nothing likely to help kids read better.

Likewise, I see teachers schedule daily “model reading” lessons. What they mean by this is that they are reading a chapter book aloud to the class. Kids can learn things from being read to (vocabulary growth is the most obvious payoff). But I’d be very surprised if such reading had any impact on fluency beyond the first weeks of kindergarten.

After one or two of those modeling and explanation sessions, this aspect of modeling would be reduced to occasional brief reviews of the criteria recorded on that bulletin board.

Ongoing Modeling

Otherwise, modeling – if effective – must be briefer, more targeted, and of a somewhat different character.

What does that look like?

Ongoing modeling is more about guiding students to succeed with specific texts. Choral reading or reading while listening are examples of this kind of thing – and as such, these activities should be followed by oral reading practice of those same texts by the individual participants.

I recommend that teachers not carry out these activities with especially long chunks of text. The benefits of this kind of modeling depends heavily on student memory. Even with a full page, readers aren’t likely to remember many words or where pauses were needed.

That’s why I prefer more interactive and individual fluency activities such as paired reading with close teacher supervision, for instance.

With partner reading, the two students alternately read or guide. The reader tries to read a sentence or paragraph fluently, and the partner helps. Perhaps the partner helps with a misread word or marks the word for later attention if neither knows it. After a reading, the partner may recommend a rereading and give some feedback on the different criteria.

Kids vary in the quality of this partnering. That’s the reason for the close supervision – with the teacher monitoring different pairs throughout the lesson. By monitoring I mean more than observation or evaluation. This requires real involvement and active guidance.

The teacher both guides the fluency development, while promoting better partnering.

If students read a sentence poorly, have them try again. Often that is all that is needed to make the reading fluent (and partners often fail to ask for it). The teacher’s interjection is a lesson for both reader and guide.

In other cases, the repetition fails to have the impact I’d hoped for. The reread is as bad as the original. That is where the modeling comes in.

I read the sentence in question aloud and ask the student to try to do it like I did. That may take more than one or two models and attempts.

Such modeling informs students of the proper pronunciations of misread words, how to deal with the specific punctuation in that sentence, or how to phrase the sentence beyond those punctuation signals.

That example is at odds with recommendations I’ve seen that tell teachers to model text reading on Monday, and have kids practice that text the rest of the week. There is little likelihood that such a model would impact even the kids’ first reading attempt the next day.  

Another practice I don’t encourage is a heavy emphasis on dramatic reading, trying to make dialogue sound sad, angry, or joyful. Remember the reason for fluency work is to enable comprehension. Reading the words in a text accurately, with automaticity, and proper phrasing whether done aloud (or silently in one’s head), puts the text into a form that promotes comprehension.

Trying to invest the proper emotional tone into a text is something that comes after comprehension, not before. We use our comprehension to determine how a character must have felt so that we can then try to read those words with the appropriate emotional tenor. Guiding students to determine those emotional factors is an important part of reading comprehension instruction. Getting kids to translate that information into oral reading presentations belongs more in a speech or drama class than in one aimed at teaching reading.

What are the big take aways?

1.     The purpose of fluency work is to enable reading comprehension – not to prepare students for oratorical or dramatic presentations.

2.     The idea is to teach kids to translate print to language – both for oral and silent reading.

3.     There are two kinds of oral fluency modeling – general modeling which reveals quality criteria and specific modeling aimed at helping students to successfully read certain sentences.

4.     General modeling should include explanations of the how and why of the various fluency features or criteria.

5.     Specific modeling depends on student memory, so we should keep the modeling brief and this should be followed immediately by student efforts to replicate the model. 

References

Algozzine, B., Marr, M. B., Kavel, R. L., & Dugan, K. K. (2009). Using peer coaches to build oral reading fluency. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 14(3), 256-270.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10824660903375735

Archer, A. L., & Hughes, C. A. (2011). Explicit instruction: Effective and efficient teaching. New York: Guilford Press.

Chard, D., Vaughn, S., & Tyler, B. (2002). A synthesis of research on effective interventions for building reading fluency with elementary students with learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35, 386-406.

Donaldson, B. E. (2011). Fluency instruction in contemporary core programs. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Utah State University.

Harrison, K. S. (2011). Exploring the growth of text-reading fluency in upper-elementary English Language Learners during instruction based on repeated reading. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of San Diego.

Josephs, N. L. Using peer-mediated fluency instruction to address the needs of adolescent struggling readers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Georgia State University.

McBride, S. N. (2016). A focus on fluency: Reading fluency instruction for Tier 2 and Tier 3 Students at Lancashire Elementary School. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Delaware.

 LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

One last thing: this updated entry sources the idea of teaching with grade level texts to the Common Core standards. Over the past 15 years, many states have replaced those standards. Nevertheless, for the most part, they retained the Common Core’s text level requirements which means this entry is as relevant to today as it was then.

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards were issued (National Governors Association & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). These educational goals, that were soon adopted by most states, differed from previous standards in several important ways. Probably no ox was gored more impressively by these standards than the widely held claim that texts of a particular level of difficulty had to be used if learning was to be accomplished. 

Reading educators (including me) since the 1930s, have championed the idea that there is an “instructional level.” Basically, the claim has been that students make the greatest learning gains when taught with books matched to the students’ learning needs in terms of the level of difficulty that they present. Teachers were to teach from texts neither too hard (incomprehensible) or too easy (nothing left to learn in these).

These days the biggest instructional level proponents have been Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, at The Ohio State University. Their “guided reading” approach has been widely adopted. The basic premises of guided reading include the notion that children learn to read by reading, that they benefit from a small amount of teacher guidance and support during this reading, and -- most fundamentally – that this reading should be done with texts at just the right difficulty level. A major concern of these guided-readingistas has been the fear that “children are reading texts that are too difficult for them.”

Over the decades experts proposed a plethora of methods for determining students’ reading levels and text difficulty levels, along with schemes for matching books and kids. Instructional programs as varied as basal readers, units of study, technology-based instruction, and guided reading have all depended on such approaches.

Common Core Standards are based on a different premise. They reject the idea of an optimum student-text match that facilitates learning. Nor are they as smitten with the idea that students learn to read mainly from reading with minimal teacher support. They expect students to take on challenging texts with whatever amount of scaffolding may be needed to accomplish learning. By design, Common Core discourages much out-of-grade-level teaching or the use of high readability texts. It champions teaching methods that run counter to current practice.

Why make such a big deal out of grade-level text?

One persuasive piece of evidence was a report, “Reading Between the Lines,” published by American College Testing (ACT, 2006). It showed the primacy of text in reading comprehension and the educational value of having students reading challenging text in the upper grades.

Virtually every reading comprehension test and instructional program makes a big deal out of the types of questions asked about text. In our zeal to improve test performance, it is common practice to analyze test performance by question types and then to give students lots of practice with the types of questions they erred on. There are even commercial programs that offer practice with specific question types.

That ACT report reveals a problem with those schemes: they don’t work. They can’t work. Students’ reading performance can’t be differentiated in any meaningful way by type of question. Students perform no differently with literal recall or inferential items (nor with other question types like main idea). If students read a hard passage, they answer fewer questions correctly, no matter the types of questions. They do better with easier texts of course, but that improvement is not accompanied by gains with any particular kind of question.

ACT concluded that, based on data drawn from 563,000 students, “performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are likely to be ready for college and those who are not” (p. 16-17).

Reading comprehension standards tend to be presented in numbered lists of cognitive processes or question types. Standards require students “to quote accurately from text,” to “determine two or more main ideas of a text,” or to “explain how main ideas are supported by key details,” and so on. But if question types (or standards) don’t distinguish reading performance and text difficulty does, then standards should make the ability to interpret challenging texts a central requirement.

That is exactly what Common Core did. They made the ability to comprehend texts of specified levels of difficulty a central requirement of what students must accomplish.

The ACT report describes text features that contribute to challenge, including the complexity of the relationships among characters and ideas, amount and sophistication of the information detailed in the text, how the information is organized, the author’s style and tone, the vocabulary, and author’s purpose. Obviously, if we want higher reading achievement we should teach students how to deal with these kinds of text features during reading, rather than practicing with different question types.

These data suggest that students are likely to learn more from working with challenging texts than from the “low readability, high interest” books that have become an education staple. This is an approach more akin to that taken by athletes: To get stronger, you must experience more physical resistance than your muscles are accustomed to.

The counterargument to this is the widespread belief that there is an optimum difficulty level for texts used to teach reading. According to instructional level theory, when texts are too difficult, students become frustrated and learn little. Accordingly, text challenge need be avoided.

Evidence supporting this “easy book” idea is anemic… the best of it is correlational. Such a dearth of empirical support is surprising given the wide acceptance of this theory in practice.

I must admit that as a teacher I thought the approach was commonsensical and bought into it big time, testing each of my students with informal reading inventories and juggling multiple groups of kids who were reading different grade level texts.

When I worked on my PhD, I studied with the late Jack Pikulski. Jack had a great clinical sense, and he was skeptical of my faith in the instructional level. He recognized the limitations in those tests, and he was equally charry about the readability estimates. For Jack, the combination of two such rough guestimates was rather iffy stuff. I preferred the seeming certainty of the approach and clung to it until my own clinical sense grew more sophisticated.

Early in my scholarly career, I read the source of this independent/instructional/frustration level system, the textbook, Foundations of Reading Instruction. In it, Emmett Betts (1946) attributed how he identified these levels to a doctoral study conducted by P. A. Kilgallon, one of his students.

I managed to get a copy of that study – it had never been published – and to my dismay it included no evidence showing that teaching at an instructional level gave students any learning advantage. Essentially, the instructional level was just made up, something I wrote about at the time (Shanahan, 1983).

A later set of studies aimed at validating this idea (e.g., Powell, 1968) concluded that the instructional level was placing students in books too easy to promote optimum learning. Unfortunately, these studies suffered from the same problems as the original Kilgallon investigation.

It took more than 50 years after the appearance of Betts’ book for someone to study the problem experimentally – that means trying it out to see if it worked (Morgan, Wilcox, & Eldredge, 2000). That study – and others that followed (e.g., Brown, 2018, O’Connor, Swanson, & Geraghty, 2010) – concluded that kids made greater progress when taught reading with more challenging books.

We have placed way too much confidence in what was an untested theory, and now which is a failed one. The model of learning underlying this plan is simplistic and our ability to implement it with maximum learning gains is impossible.

Learning depends not only on the learner’s interactions with text, but on the teacher’s input to those interactions. Instructional level theory limits the role of the teacher by focusing on texts selected purposefully to require little such support, and it ignores that such text placements necessarily impose an upper bound limit – a low upper bound limit – on what students can learn from them.

Instead of maximizing student learning, it minimizes teaching. That is probably why recent research has found that the schools with the greatest achievement gains teach with grade level texts, rather than continually dropping back to the kids’ purported levels (TNTP, 2024).

References

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

Betts, E. A. (1946). Foundations of reading instruction. New York: American Book Company. 

Morgan, A., Wilcox, B. R., & Eldredge, J. L. (2000). Effect of difficulty levels on second-grade delayed readers using dyad reading. Journal of Educational Research, 94, 113–119.

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Washington, DC: Authors.

O’Connor, R. E., Swanson, H. L., & Geraghty, C. (2010). Improvement in reading rate under independent and difficult text levels: Influences on word and comprehension skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 1–19.

Pinnell, G. S., & Fountas, I. C. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Powell, W. R. (1968). Reappraising the criteria for interpreting informal inventories. Washington, DC: ERIC 5194164.

Shanahan, T. (1983). The informal reading inventory and the instructional level: The study that never took place. In L. Gentile, M. L. Kamil, & J. Blanchard (Eds.), Reading research revisited, (pp. 577–580). Columbus, OH: Merrill.

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

The New Teacher Project (TNTP). Paths of opportunity: What it will take for all young people to thrive. TNTP, August 8, 2024, https://tntp.org/publication/paths-of-opportunity/.

Reader Comments on Earlier Version

More Reader Common on Earlier Version

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Teacher question:

Middle school reading scores are either stagnating or dropping in my state, and they are looking at things they can do to help students improve. I’ve read the materials on the need for kids to reach a certain level of decoding to succeed in the upper grades. What do we do from here? What interventions should schools/states add to help these kids catch up on what they missed?

Shanahan responds:

The most likely reason middle school scores are down in your state probably has little to do with phonics instruction. Most phonics is provided in grades K-2. Doing a better job with that at times seems to have improved reading scores in grades 3 or 4, and that’s good. However, over the past 50+ years, higher fourth grade scores have never translated to higher eighth grade reading achievement. The theory that a better start allows greater later progress not only has not been proven, but it flies in the face of almost all national NAEP data and state data from around the country.

I’m very pro-phonics and there are older kids who may benefit from some form of word analysis instruction in the upper grades (Shanahan, 2024). Research does show that some older kids are so low in decoding that it appears to prevent learning progress in middle school or high school (Magliano, Talward, Feller, Wang, O'Reilly, & Sabatini, 2023; Wang, Sabatini, O’Reilly, & Weeks, 2019). But we have no data showing how to address those needs successfully with older students (Shanahan, 2024).

I think it’s a good idea to try to figure out what those missing skills may be and how best to address them but making that my state policy for improving reading achievement wouldn’t be the direction I’d go. I prefer greater certainty than that.

I’d also point out that prior to COVID your upper grade reading scores weren’t that terrific in the first place. Just trying to get back to where you were would not be the best thing for kids either. There’s work to be done.

So, what could your state do? 

I’d recommend several things. For instance, I think it should make a serious effort to increase the amount of reading and writing instruction in grades 3-8. I’d want to make sure that kids are getting a full two hours a day of literacy teaching. Some schools do that now, but there’s a great deal of variation in that. Some schools cut back on that teaching at the end of third grade, and some do so in grade 5. It’s a mistake whenever it happens.

Even when schools schedule that kind of time, their teachers do not always use it wisely to improve students’ reading ability. Imposing requirements is easy. Making sure that teachers know how best to use that time requires more effort.

For example, that instruction should include substantial amounts of word instruction, including vocabulary, morphology, and spelling – and some of those advanced decoding skills that are part of that decoding threshold (e.g., multi-syllable words, exceptional spelling patterns).

Text reading fluency instruction needs attention. That too often stops when kids leave the primary grades, even though fluency development continues for most kids at least through grade 8.

And, of course, explicit teaching of reading comprehension and writing both should be emphasized as well.

Another way the schools undermine the effectiveness of their reading instruction is teaching with the wrong texts. For 80 years, teachers have been told to teach with books at students’ “reading levels.” That means that fifth grade students, for instance, may be taught with fourth, third, or even second grade books. Research shows that to be a bad idea (Shanahan, 2025) – and yet, most teachers say that is how they teach.

Because teaching with below grade texts has been recommended practice for so long and so universally, most teachers have never received any training in how to teach with more challenging books. The same is true for science and social studies teachers, which often causes them to avoid textbooks, further hampering kids’ reading growth (Griffith & Duffett, 2018; Kaufman, Opfer, Bongard, Pane, & Thompson, 2018). Teaching students with below grade books ensures that they never catch up. I guess that’s why the only schools that increase their struggling students’ achievement eschew those practices (Barshay, 2024; The New Teacher Project, 2024).

The kind of phonics instruction that you asked about does have a place, even if we’re uncertain about how best to handle that. Such teaching belongs in the Tier 2 category – extra instruction for remedial students outside the regular classroom. Identifying kids who fail to reach the decoding threshold makes sense. So is providing targeted instruction aimed at improving more advanced word reading skills. Too often when remedial programs focus on phonics, they just keep teaching and reteaching those basic decoding skills – not what the research says is missing.

To make those kinds of literacy policies work, your state should invest in professional development for teachers and principals in grades 3-8. Many states have made such investments in their children in grades K-2 – they’ve beefed up education policies and spent money on making sure that those teachers know what their students need and how to teach those things.

Those kinds of programs and policies have often been successful at achieving somewhat higher early reading scores. It’s time your state, and others, did more than just giving young kids a better start. It should build on those promising beginnings with a serious commitment to graduating students from high school with sufficient literacy proficiency.

A job half done is, well, half done, or flawed, unfinished, deficient, defective. You’re correct that we can do better. Our kids deserve that.

References

Barshay, J. (2024, September 30). The habits of 7 highly effective schools. Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tntp-effective-schools.

Griffith, D., & Duffett, A. (2018). Reading and writing instruction in America’s schools. Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Institute.

Kaufman, J. H., Opfer, V. D., Bongard, M., Pane, J. D., & Thompson, L. E. (2018). What teachers know and do in the Common Core era: Findings from the 2015-2017 American Teacher Panel. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.

Magliano, J. P., Talward, A., Feller, D. P., Wang, Z., O'Reilly, T., & Sabatini, J. (2023). Exploring thresholds in the foundational skills for reading and comprehension outcomes in the context of postsecondary readers. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 56(1), 43–57.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). (2022). NAEP Long-term trend assessment results: Reading and mathematics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/?age=9

Shanahan, T. (2024). What role, if any, should phonics play in a middle school or high school? The answer may surprise you. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 68(4), 325-329.  https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1387

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

The New Teacher Project. (2024). Paths of opportunity: What it will take for all young people to thrive. New York: TNTP. https://tntp.org/publication/paths-of-opportunity.

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.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Disciplinary Literacy Goes to Elementary School

Teacher question: I’m an elementary school principal. I've heard a lot recently about disciplinary literacy. Our school isn't doing enough with that in my opinion. What do you think? What should I have my teachers doing with disciplinary literacy?
Shanahan responds:

Over the past three decades research has shown that people read differently in the different disciplines (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, 2012, 2020; Shanahan, Shanahan, & Misichia, 2011). Historians, for instance, read different kinds of texts, for different purposes, they weigh evidence differently, and focus on different kind of information in the texts that they read than do literary critics or scientists (Wineburg, Martin, Monte-Santo, 2011).

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

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

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

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

Terrific.

But what about elementary school?

Should elementary school teachers teach disciplinary literacy?

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

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

1.     Build basic literacy skills.

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

To accomplish sufficient elementary reading levels, kids should get a strong dose of decoding instruction in the primary grades. In studies of successful phonics instruction, kids were usually provided about 30 minutes per day of such teaching (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Likewise, readers benefit from substantial oral reading fluency or text reading fluency.

Unfortunately, too many children spend grades 2-5 focused on books that are too easy to ensure a sound flight path to disciplinary literacy. Placing kids in below grade level books because they can already read is a serious disadvantage (Shanahan, 2025). We need to teach students to comprehend texts that they may not already be able to read well. That will give them the best chance of being ready for middle school and high school reading.

2.     Develop content knowledge.

I often hear elementary teachers say that the only thing that matters is that their students learn to read. That’s too limited a view of reading. Reading depends on knowledge and too often the time devoted to social studies, science, and the arts are squandered. Study after study shows how little our kids know about geography, history, science, and the like (Hirsch, 2016; Wexler, 2019).

Teachers need to be pro-knowledge. The more kids know about their social and scientific worlds the brighter their future possibilities. We need to make sure that elementary content classes are worth something. Protect the time devoted to them, monitor kids’ learning of that content, and provide frequent and ongoing review. It is absurd to do a unit on electricity in the fall, and then for kids to never see that information again for the rest of the year.

3.     Expose kids to informational text.

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

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

This blog explains what disciplinary literacy is and why it is not a major focus at the elementary school. It recommends that elementary teachers help prepare kids for disciplinary literacy by teaching them to read, building their content knowledge, and exposing them to content texts. Perhaps you could use this at an upcoming meeting to engage your faculty in a consideration of where their current efforts are falling short.

References

Goodall, J. (2010). In the shadow of man. New York: Mariner Books Classics.

Hirsch, E. D. (2016). Why knowledge matters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

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

Shanahan, C., & Shanahan, T. (2020). Disciplinary literacy. In J. Patterson (Ed.), The SAT® Suite and classroom practice: English Language Arts/literacy (pp. 91–125). New York: College Board.

Shanahan, C., Shanahan, T., & Misichia, C. (2011). Analysis of expert readers in three disciplines: History, mathematics, and chemistry. Journal of Literacy Research, 3, 393–429.

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2012). What is disciplinary literacy and why does it matter? Topics in Language Disorders, 32, 1–12.

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Education Review, 78(1), 40-59.

Wexler, N. (2019). The knowledge gap. New York: Avery.

Wineburg, S., Martin, D., & Monte-Sano, C. (2011). Reading like a historian: Teaching literacy in middle and high school history classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.

6 Past Comments

Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

In the current era of readily available teacher-created materials through open marketplaces, and given the critical importance of print materials for beginning readers—particularly for multilingual learners and students with disabilities—what does current research indicate are the best practices regarding the optimal amounts of extraneous visuals to truly support their literacy development effectively?  

Shanahan responds:

I hope most teachers are not spending a lot of time “creating” instructional materials. Some do, of course, but they tend to be a tiny minority. I’d rather their time be spent on figuring out students’ learning needs.

Of course, there are those cut-and-paste artists who create “new” materials by photocopying other people’s work (there’s plenty of that on Teachers Pay Teachers). I wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of thing.

On the other hand, teachers do, themselves, purchase materials or serve on curriculum selection committees that make those choices. The kind of information you requested could be of value to them.

My main interest is with how we can best teach children to read. Accordingly, my answer is aimed at guiding teachers about how to work with pictures in reading instruction. I’ve written before about that kind of thing when it comes to science reading. This entry is focused more on teaching kids to read.

One big issue with graphics has to do with teaching words – both in terms of the memorization of sight words and the mastery of word meanings (vocabulary).

What role, if any, should pictures play in these lessons?  

I know some people will get their backs up about the idea of having kids memorize words (there is a “science of reading”, after all).

Even with decodable text, there may be a need to introduce words kids won’t be able to sound out. An example of this is high frequency words with unusual spelling patterns like of or the.  

Also, sometimes, to keep decodables interesting or comprehensible, some words are introduced that, though decodable, are not yet decodable by the kids at whom this text is aimed – instruction hasn’t yet introduced those patterns. Depending on grade level, time of year, and specific decoding curriculum, words like dinosaur, monkey, plane, garden, or soccer could require some teaching.

Whether the word is the or monkey, I hope publishers will be sure to use those words frequently (Hiebert, Martin, & Menon, 2005). There is no point in teaching a word that won’t be used often. Also, teachers should introduce such words prior to the reading, that way kids can focus on the decodable patterns that they’re supposed to be practicing with those decodable texts.

Obviously, we won’t use a picture with a word like the, but we might with monkey.

However, according to scads of studies, such pictures provide more distraction than support (e.g., Harzem, Lee, & Miles, 1976; Samuels, 1970).

We learn to remember and read words by looking at the words, that is by looking at the combinations of the letters of which the words are comprised (and that’s as true for those exception words as for those that share common patterns).  

Six-year-olds are more interested in looking at pictures of monkeys than at the letters m-o-n-k-e-y. Consequently, when presented with word and picture, they peruse the graphic rather than studying the letter sequence. At best their attention is split, reducing the likelihood of learning.

If your aim is to build vocabulary knowledge however, the picture is a bit different (yes, an intentional pun, forgive me). For this, pictures can be beneficial. Studies show that providing a graphic representation of words – even of abstract words – can increase understanding and retention (e.g., Coyne, McCoach, Ware, Loftus-Rattan, Baker, Santoro, & Oldham, 2022).  

It is cool to provide a picture or even video to illustrate words, but I’ve also long embraced the idea of having students translate words into graphics (literally and metaphorically) as recommended by Camille Blachowicz and Peter Fisher (2006).

If the point is to get students to understand the meaning of a word they don’t know, pictures can be a real help, while if the idea is to help them to read or remember the word, pictures distract. If you want both, start with using a picture to help define the word and then cast it aside so the kids can focus on the letter sequence.

What about reading comprehension?

There are a slew of studies showing that readers comprehend better with illustrations (Aukerman & Chambers Schuldt, 2016; Beveridge & Griffiths, 1987; Hayes & Henk, 1986; Newton, 1995; O'Keefe & Solman, 1987; Sar?, Ba?al, Takacs, & Bus, 2019).

This is especially true for younger kids (Greenhoot, Beyer, & Curtis, 2014).

However, in most studies you can’t tell why. Often these studies just seem to show that kids understand pictures better than words. The pictures aren’t necessarily boosting how well kids understand the prose. No, they seem to provide an alternative – an easier route – to the information.

Should I don my Mr. Know-it-All cloak and lecture you on the sin of teaching reading with illustrated stories?

I don’t think so.

If there’s a “Mr. or Ms. Know It All” on this topic, I haven’t been able to locate him/her.

The truth is there’s no persuasive theory about the specific role pictures should play in comprehension teaching. We know preschoolers often think it’s the pictures – not the print – that tell the story (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982) but as they become more sophisticated readers, they come to view illustrations as little more than secondary adjuncts to most print (Waddill, McDaniel, & Einstein, 1988).

We lack purchase on how to get from here to there.

We know kids prefer books with pictures, and that’s not nothing. There’s also a plethora of advice about the types of illustrations that capture kids’ attention: vibrant colors, cartoon-style illustrations, lively pictures, exaggerated features (big eyes, especially), whimsical properties, and so on (e.g., Hall, 2025). You know, kids are attracted by anything that looks like it escaped from Disney studios.

Nothing wrong with that. Pictures draw kids into books, and these motivational properties neither contribute to nor interfere with comprehension development.

What info should pictures provide and how should they connect to text, and most important, what should teachers do about it?

Studies show that illustrations can boost both literal comprehension and inferencing (Pike, Barnes, & Barron, 2010). When pictures aren’t apt, they may lead to misunderstandings – they sometimes mislead kids as to what a text has to say.

There are different notions about the role pictures may play in comprehension.

One idea, dual coding theory (Pavio, 1971) claims we develop two systems for processing information – one dependent on linguistic codes and one on visual codes: words and pictures. Memory for information is heightened when learners connect the two channels – for instance, seeing the word “dog” and consequently thinking of its visual representation.

In that scheme, you want to develop lots of alternative representations. Learning can be gained from pictures or words but feeding both channels simultaneously may support more thorough and accessible memories.

Somewhat different insights may be drawn from Walter Kintsch’s theory of comprehension (1998). He claims learning is more about developing complete and coherent representations of events and experiences. The theory focuses on verbal learning, but it’s fair to say that young children may struggle to develop those coherent wholes when relying only on verbal information.

When it comes to reading, kids are doing more than just figuring out how to replace oral messages with written ones. They are simultaneously constructing their systems of cognition. Pictures may add a concreteness to verbal experiences making it easier – sometimes even making it possible – to form a coherent understanding.

Kids are not just replacing the words with the pictures during comprehension but they are using the pictures together with the words to construct a complete and coherent representation of meaning (Davis, Schrodt, & Lee, 2024; Lesgold, de Good, & Levin, 1977; Seger, Wannagat, & Nieding, 2021; Terry & Howe, 1988; Waddill, McDaniel, & Einstein, 1988).

Those theories don’t have much to say about criteria for good illustrations. They may, however, tell us something about what we could do with those pictures.

I think we should involve kids in more thorough analyses of the illustrations, evaluating the different information sources. What do the words tell you about the character or the event that the pictures don’t? And vice versa.

For example, let’s think about that for this short piece of illustrated text (from the gifted Kyrgyz illustrator, ??????? ???????, https://www.behance.net).

Both the picture and the words tell us this is a forest, and they disclose that the characters are a red panda, and a little mouse who are friendly with each other.

If you don’t know what a forest, red panda, or mouse are, then the pictures might serve as useful graphic definitions.

I’d ask boys and girls what a forest is, and if they knew, then we’d look at the picture to see if the illustrator got it right. If they didn’t know, then we’d use the picture as part of the definition. Also, kids might not know what a panda or a mouse look like, and it would be worth asking them, “Which one is Roo and which one is Tick?”

The words also carry important information that the pictures fail to – these animals are about to go on their first adventure together, and this adventure will involve friendship, courage, and magic. The picture shows their friendship (I think they’re smiling at each other), but it says nothing about courage or magic, or even that their friendship will matter somehow in their upcoming adventure. Nor does it tell their names, Roo and Tick.

On the other hand, the words are silent about how happy these animals are, nor do they mention that they can climb trees. The words tell us that there’s a forest, but it says nothing about the trees in that forest. Not only do these trees have leaves and branches, but vines, too (Tick is holding onto a vine, I think).

One difference between the picture and the words is how the mouse is characterized. The text says he’s little, but in the graphic, he seems almost as big as Roo – that would be a very big mouse. That’s one of those differences between text and picture.

The point of exploring such ideas in a discussion is to get kids exploring both the verbal and pictorial codes and their relationship (Pavio), and to use both together – along with prior knowledge – to develop a more complete and coherent representation of this story (Kintsch).

Advocates for the importance of knowledge in comprehension sometimes make it seem like the point of schooling is the accumulation of lots of random trivial facts, the kind of thing that can win you a lot of money on a quiz show. They may make it seem like lists of cultural information are the key to sound comprehension.

I don’t think it really works that way.

That’s why a story like this one can be so valuable, despite it being a fictional talking animal kind of yarn. Kids not only may gain factual information (about forests, mice, and red pandas) and cultural information (the natural darkness and wildness of forests can seem magical and mysterious), but they may also learn how these elements combine into coherent, meaningful memories – you know, learning.

Kids have difficulty doing that just with words, so the combination of verbal and graphic information matters.

Over time, as kids get better at that process – they need fewer pictures and more words.

Comprehension and learning to comprehend are different, but interdependent. Taking kids through that process repeatedly with a range of factual and fictional texts can provide them with processes and insights into how one goes about developing coherent representations. That’s kind of a reading strategy.

However, when we develop such representations, we employ past representations stored in our memories. We are inputting not only lots of those cultural touchstones (e.g., 1776, revolution, George Washington), but also coherence schemas (e.g., adventure stories, conflict, pride) that help us to organize those facts into something more substantial. That’s where prior knowledge comes in, and why we want kids to learn more than how to process text when we are guiding their reading.

Pictures may initially compete with the words in comprehension, but they’re essential for helping kids to gain coherent representations of what they read. The trick is neither to avoid the pictures nor to allow them to overwhelm the words. One of the things that can be accomplished during shared and guided reading is to show kids how to combine pictures and words to develop coherent representations, and then to wean them from the pictures over time.

Get the picture?

References

Aukerman, M., & Chambers Schuldt, L. (2016). “The pictures can say more things”: Change across time in young children's references to images and words during text discussion. Reading Research Quarterly, 51(3), 267-287. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.138

Beveridge, M., & Griffiths, V. (1987). The effect of pictures on the reading processes of less able readers: A miscue analysis approach. Journal of Research in Reading, 10(1), 29-42. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817.1987.tb00280.x

Blachowicz, C. L. Z., & Fisher, P. (2006). Teaching vocabulary in all classrooms. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.

Coyne, M. D., McCoach, D. B., Ware, S. M., Loftus-Rattan, S., Baker, D. L., Santoro, L. E., & Oldham, A. C. (2022). Supporting vocabulary development within a multitiered system of support: Evaluating the efficacy of supplementary kindergarten vocabulary intervention. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(6), 1225-1241. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000724

Davis, T. D., Schrodt, K., & Lee, S. (2024). An exploration of the impact of quality illustrations in children’s picture books on preschool student narrative ability. Reading Psychology, 45(7), 639. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2024.2351480

Ferreiro, E., & Teberosky, A. (1982). Literacy before schooling. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Greenhoot, A. F., Beyer, A. M., & Curtis, J. (2014). More than pretty pictures? how illustrations affect parent-child story reading and children's story recall. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00738\

Hall, L. (2025). The power of pictures. How book illustrations boost early literacy. Bloomington, IN: Literacy from the Start, Indiana University.

Harzem, P., Lee, I., & Miles, T. R. (1976). The effects of pictures on learning to read. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46(3), 318-322. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8279.1976.tb02328.x

Hayes, D. A., & Henk, W. A. (1986). Understanding and remembering complex prose augmented by analogic and pictorial illustration. Journal of Reading Behavior, 18(1), 63-78.

Hiebert, E. H., Martin, L. A., & Menon, S. (2005). Are there alternatives in reading textbooks? An examination of three beginning reading programs. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 21, 7-32. https://doi.org/10.1080/10573560590523621

Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. Cambridge University Press.

Lesgold, A. M., de Good, H., & Levin, J. R. (1977). Pictures and young children's prose learning: A supplementary report. Journal of Reading Behavior, 9(4), 353-360.

Newton, D. P. (1995). The role of pictures in learning to read. Educational Studies, 21(1), 119-130. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305569950210109

O'Keefe, E. J., & Solman, R. T. (1987). The influence of illustrations on children's comprehension of written stories. Journal of Reading Behavior, 19(4), 353-377.

Pike, M. M., Barnes, M. A., & Barron, R. W. (2010). The role of illustrations in children’s inferential comprehension. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105(3), 243-255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2009.10.006

Samuels, S. J. (1970). Effects of pictures on learning to read, comprehension, and attitudes. Review of Educational Research, 40(3), 397-407. https://doi.org/10.2307/1169373

Sar?, B., Ba?al, H. A., Takacs, Z. K., & Bus, A. G. (2019). A randomized controlled trial to test efficacy of digital enhancements of storybooks in support of narrative comprehension and word learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 179, 212-226. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.11.006

Seger, B. T., Wannagat, W., & Nieding, G. (2021). Children’s surface, textbase, and situation model representations of written and illustrated written narrative text. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 34(6), 1415-1440. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-020-10118-1

Terry, W. S., & Howe, D. C. (1988). Effects of incidental pictorial and verbal adjuncts on text learning. Journal of General Psychology, 115(1), 41-49. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221309.1988.9711087

Waddill, P. J., McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (1988). Illustrations as adjuncts to prose: A text-appropriate processing approach. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(4), 457-464. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.4.457

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

I’m confused. I've understood your message that we should stop obsessing about deriving an independent or instructional reading level. But I’ve also read that you feel that there is a place for F&P style running records (many schools still use them!). If a running record is producing a reading level, isn't this going against the idea that we should do away with the instructional level? Aren't there other problems with these tests, too (design problems, large standard errors, etc.)?

Shanahan responds:

You have it right, sort of. I thought my position on this was adroit and artful and you seem to find it to be abstruse and confusing. Hmmm… let’s take it step by step.

First, you are correct that I believe it is a big mistake to try to teach most kids reading at their supposed instructional level. The instructional level is meant to identify a text that will be maximally effective in teaching. You know the routine. The teacher is supposed to test students to identify this level by listening to their oral reading and asking questions. Different schemes have different criteria (90, 93, 95 percent word accuracy, 75 percent comprehension). No matter the criteria, placing kids in texts in this way does not boost their learning. There is, in fact, a growing body of evidence suggesting that it lessens learning.

Second, you are also correct that I claim it can be useful to collect this kind of information, and I admit that sounds at least a bit contradictory. Why measure the instructional level if you aren’t going to use that to choose the books you are going to teach?

My reasoning here has to do with what it means to NOT teach at the instructional level. I’ve come to believe that the instructional level is a device that results in both minimized learning and teaching. If kids are placed in texts that they can comprehend reasonably well, there isn’t much about reading that can be learned from those texts. The differences between their performance levels and the text demands are likely so small that the kids should be able to figure out what is unknown without much teacher help.

But what if the books are hard for the kids? That means they may not be able to accomplish high comprehension without some instruction and other teacher support. I think it can be helpful to a teacher to have some idea as to how much difficulty a text may pose for their students. The greater the gap between texts that can already be read reasonably well by the kids and the texts to be used for teaching, the greater the scaffolding and support that will be needed.  

Administering oral reading fluency tests and informal reading inventories can provide a rough estimate of that gap. The further behind a student is in their reading performance, the more assistance that will be provided. This information might encourage a teacher to place certain kids closer at hand. Or it may be used to help decide which kids should have the opportunity to try reading the text aloud before taking it on for comprehension’s sake. The teacher might want to offer more word instruction before or after to these students or may direct more questions to them. Perhaps, teachers will go out of their way to select instructional texts that would be an especially good match to the background knowledge of the kids likely to be far behind.

Let’s be careful here. I’m not claiming that those tests will specifically identify missing or underdeveloped skills, except in the most general sense. The tests will give me a gross estimation of how fluently students can read this book and whether there will be a small or large overall gap between an easy text and the instructional text.

Some teachers may forego such testing. This would not be a tragedy. With a little care, they could launch into teaching the grade level texts and monitor closely how well the kids’ do with them. It doesn’t take long to figure out which kids need the most assistance.

Another possibility is to “test” their students using the texts they intend to teach. That was the original idea of the informal inventory. The teacher was supposed to determine how well kids could read the instructional text (not some other text that would predict performance with those teaching texts).

In any event, this information whether drawn from a published informal reading inventory or from a DIY version, can only offer a rough gauge of the lag that may exist. As you noted to me in your letter, the standard error of measurement of a typical IRI can be pretty big.

In the best cases, such a test may be accurate within plus or minus a half-grade level. For instance, if a test says the students’ level is second grade, that means that we can be 95 percent certain that their actual instructional level is somewhere between Grade 1 and Grade 3. Not a very helpful indicator.

Such test info may help you get started. However, keep your eyes open. Believe what you see day to day, rather than the initial test. If it says youngsters will struggle and they don’t or vice versa, adjust your plan.

I hope that clarifies what at first blush may sound inconsistent or contradictory.

However, like you, I’m not a big fan of running records. Research has not been especially kind to them.

I’d recommend against evaluating oral reading errors – the useless efforts to determine their orthographic-phonetic, syntactic, semantic accuracy. There will be serious reliability problems with such analyses – and there is no validated instructional protocol based on differentiated responses to these.

In terms of the reliability of running records, research has varied. Studies estimate at best you would need to have students read four passages per level to get a reliable estimate of reading performance – some studies indicated that it would take a whopping eight to ten passages per level (D’Agostino, et al., 2021; Fawson, et al., 2006). Which teachers would have the time to do that? Even if they did, there is no clear value to having done so.

Matt Burns and his colleagues have found similar problems with typical informal reading inventories, too (Burns, et al., 2015). I don’t disagree with that prescient evaluation, but I don’t see it as a death sentence.

There is reason to believe that lengthening these tests can make them much more reliable. For instance, if a teacher wants to check kids out on their reading textbook, it would be wise to have the students read for 3-minutes (Valencia, et al., 2010), calculating reading levels from that, rather than from the brief passages in most published IRIs.

Even better, I think, would be to have students read 3 different passages for a minute each. How many words students can read correctly per minute is a useful statistic, that when averaged can do a reasonably good job of predicting performance.

Another reason IRIs may struggle with reliability has to do with the inclusion of comprehension questions. Comprehension can be affected by how well that text reflects students’ knowledge. Two equivalent passages on different topics may provide very different reading level estimates. Interest in a topic – which correlates with knowledge, of course – can have a similar effect. There simply aren’t enough passages and questions in this kind of testing to provide a sufficient estimate of comprehension ability.

Nevertheless, I trust oral reading tests a lot more when the students know they will be questioned or expected to retell (my preference) what they have read. I don’t necessarily invest a lot of confidence in any scores that may result from their responses, but I do trust the oral reading performance more when students are reading for comprehension rather than trying to show me how fast they can read.

So… indeed, it is useful pedagogical information to have estimates of the distance between texts students can read well and those used for teaching.

The problem of leveled reading instruction isn’t the books (all books have some average level of difficulty – so, let’s not throw away the books that have level estimates), nor is it that kids don’t have levels (let’s face it, there are books one finds to be easy and those that are a slog). No, the problem is that we are taking these levels – both of students and texts – too serious and are using them to reduce opportunity to learn. Instead of staying focused on teaching kids how to read grade level books, we are limiting learning through wasteful testing regimes and misguided policing efforts aimed at protecting kids from challenging books.

It seems to me that informal oral reading tests can provide valuable insights to teachers as to how hard a text may be for students. Not to identify the specifics of what may need to be taught, nor to hold kids back to some mythical optimal level, but to help the teacher to monitor and guide to success all students.

References

Burns, M. K., Pulles, S. M., Maki, K., Kanive, R., Hodgson, J., Helman, L., McComas, J., & Preast, J. L. (2015). Accuracy of student performance while reading leveled books rated at their instructional level by a reading inventory. Journal of School Psychology, 53(6), 437-445. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2015.09.003Je

D’Agostino, J. V., Rodgers, E. Winkler, Johnson, T., & Berenbon, R. (2021) The generalizability of running record accuracy and self-correction scores. Reading Psychology, 42(2), 111-130. https:/doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2021.1880177

Fawson, P. C., Ludlow, B. C., Reutzel, D. R., Sudweeks, R., & Smith, J. A. (2006). Examining the reliability of Running Records: Attaining generalizable results. Journal of Educational Research, 100(2), 113–126. https://doi.org/10.3200/JOER.100.2.113-126

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Valencia, S. W., Smith, A. T., Reece, A. M., Li, M., & Wixson, K. K. (2010). Oral reading fluency assessment: issues of construct, criterion, and consequential validity. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(3), 270-291. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.45.3.1

Teacher question:

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

Shanahan responds:

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

Did that convince you? Well, let’s try again.

The correct answer is that it depends. It depends on your purpose.

Your professor (and the research study he cited) are focused on how well students can read a text. They are correct – students usually don’t read harder texts as well as they can read simpler ones – though there are a few exceptions to this. That means that if your goal is to ensure students read a particular text well – fluently and with high comprehension – then it’s a good idea to place them in those easier texts.

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

No, lessons are supposed to help kids improve their reading ability. My purpose is to enable kids to read successfully texts that they cannot already read well. That’s a very different purpose, and it requires a very different answer.

Your professor is confusing reading comprehension and learning to read. He or she isn’t unique in this confusion. The original conception of the “instructional level” was based on the same idea (Betts, 1946). The originator of the original criteria for determining the instructional level, Emmett Betts, assumed that students would learn reading best with texts that would ensure high comprehension from the start. This was not a research finding, just a bit of ideology or untested theory.

The way he went about that was by identifying texts that allowed for high comprehension (75-89%) and a level of oral reading fluency that would not be likely to interfere with comprehension (95-98%).

We have plenty of studies, including the one that you cited, showing that students usually can read simpler texts better than challenging texts.

What we don’t have – despite many attempts – is convincing evidence that teaching kids from such texts offers learning advantages. Teaching with those texts has not been found to make kids better readers.

In an exhaustive review of existing evidence (Shanahan, 2025), it was concluded that research shows just the opposite. Placing most kids in such books provides no learning advantage, and often it has been found to be detrimental to learning.

There are many reasons why developing readers may find a book to be difficult: decoding and fluency challenges, unknown vocabulary, complicated syntax, subtle or confusing cohesive links, complicated or deep discourse structure, sophisticated content or ideas, lack of or failure to use relevant prior knowledge, extensiveness of the reading, and so on.

If the point is immediate comprehension, then those difficulties are a real problem. Any and all of those can interfere with understanding a text.

However, if our goal is to increase the students’ abilities to read, then those difficulties are an opportunity for teaching and learning.

When you place kids in texts that they can read as well as the instructional level dictates, there just isn’t that much to figure out. Those texts are opportunity deserts. Kids might accomplish the intended level of comprehension, but those texts afford kids little chance to increase or improve their reading ability – since their current skills are sufficient to making sense of the instructional text.

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

This quote doesn’t go as far as I would, however. It makes it sound like our purpose is to ensure comprehension – we’re going “to assist [italics added] students as they read more challenging texts.”  I assume that means the teacher is going to help students to comprehend the text. I want that, too, but it should be a side effect of the main event.

What I’m referring to as the “main event” here is teaching the kids to read better – we want the kids to eventually understand this text, but our primary purpose is to provide the knowledge and tools that will allow this improvement to generalize to other texts.

I can assist kids’ comprehension any number of ways – by telling them what the text says or by reading it to them, things that many teachers do every day.

But what I really want to do is to develop in students a determination to comprehend, to recognize when that isn’t happening, to have an awareness of possible sources of that failure, and the tools that would allow them to pierce the veil of the puzzling text.

You can’t teach those things with texts the students can already grasp with minimal effort.

That’s why we should not avoid complex texts. We must teach students to read them.

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

There is a surprising amount of research that explores the impact of rereading and usually with positive results. When understanding doesn’t come automatically from a single read, it makes great sense to reread a text in its entirety or to reread specific parts of a text.

What might you expect with a second reading?

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

Having students read texts or parts of texts a second time improves reading performance. Teachers should provide guidance to students even with the rereading of texts if they are sufficiently challenging to merit such attention.

The study that reported greater awareness of causal connections on a second read (Millis & King, 2001) reported this improvement for both good and poor readers. But those gains were greatest with the better readers. Good readers had a clearer idea of what to look for when they went back and read again. Teaching students to look for causal connections in this context, including signal words (e.g., because, so, so that, if… then, consequently), makes sense. It would give the poorer readers both a better chance to comprehend the text at hand, as well as providing them some tools that would be useful with other texts.

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

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

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

Tell your professor that!

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

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

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

I say “purported” because the claim seems to be that in the past teachers were teaching their kids to read books, and now they aren’t. I’ve been around quite a while, and I don’t remember the past that way.

I say “purportedly damaging” because the idea that teaching reading with excerpts harms kids or limits their learning in any significant manner is a claim made without evidence – you know, an opinion. Not only do we lack research showing that books do a better job of increasing reading ability, we have no evidence that one approach does more to encourage kids to read on their own.

It’s important that I point out here that I’ve worked on various textbook reading programs, on and off, for almost 50 years. All those programs from various publishers depended heavily on short stories, magazine-style articles, and excerpts from longer works. Those programs have also usually included options for book-length texts as well.

I’ve engaged in that work not because I thought shorter works were necessarily better than books when it comes to teaching reading, but because I see it as a reasonable option. In other words, I’m not against using complete books to teach reading, I’m just not persuaded that it’s necessarily the best way to go.

This is the kind of question I’d like to answer with research. I’d love to say that “Smith and Jones (1998) found that teaching reading with books increased reading levels by 26 points over what resulted for the excerpts group.” Or vice versa.

The problem is that there is no such research.

The major claim that books outdistance shorter works is that they somehow foster greater “reading stamina.” That sounds important, though the assertions are decidedly foggy. For example, how does one measure stamina? That concept is more complicated than it might appear at first blush.

Even more hazy is instructional guidance for teachers. What grade levels are we talking about? How many books should be used for instruction in a school year? And, most importantly, how are these books best taught?

As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been flamed over the years for discouraging high school English teachers from reading novels to their classes (or using Audible or its competitors to do this for them). Book teaching may be a wonderful practice but is the point for the kids to know the books or for them to know the books through their own reading efforts? I’ve argued for the latter, but many whole book proponents seem to be on the other side of that discussion.

It seems to me that there are (at least) two factors in reading stamina. The first of these has to do with being able to process words and ideas continually for some length of time. You know, sustaining attention. Can a student, for example, productively read a 1000-word passage with comprehension – and without interruption (neither stopping to check messages or to respond to teacher queries)?

Each year, we’d like to see kids making progress in this kind of stamina – increasing the numbers of words/pages/minutes they can productively keep reading.

I see no reason why this would be better accomplished with Charlotte’s Web in its entirety than with a tall tale about Paul Bunyan or a chapter from E. B. White’s classic. If we are striving to increase students’ sustained attention from 250 to 500 words, one won’t find a 30,000-word text to be more salutary than a 1,500-word one.

There is another aspect of stamina that may be easier to encourage with book-length engagements, though even this may be addressed successfully with shorter selections. Books used for instruction tend to be experienced as a series of related excerpts. Monday and Tuesday we’ll take on chapter 1, and on Thursday, perhaps, we’ll proceed to the second chapter.  After several weeks (depending on the length of the book and the depth of the teaching), that book will have been “read.”

That approach–if successful—requires that students retain memories from one chapter to the next while formulating their understanding of the entire book. That is a form of stamina, too. It requires a continuous cognitive effort to remember and use text information over a longer stretch than would usually be required with a series of random excerpts.

However, it would be the rare program that presents reading instruction as a series of random excerpts – the texts tend to be organized around authors, topics, and/or text features. That means that students need to use information from one text when taking on another – though typically there wouldn’t be as many excerpts in such a series as one would find with most novels.

My point isn’t that there is no cultural benefit to be derived from having read The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, or Beloved in their entirety. Those are wonderful books and the more kids who know them the better. However, I also think it’s wonderful for kids to get to know Steinbeck, Salinger, Morrison, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Melville, Lee, Knowles, Crane, Golding, Dickens, Homer, Frank, Bradbury, Wiesel, Twain, Atwood, Doerr, Lowry, Kesey, Keyes, Smith, Hinton, Updike, Orwell, and so on. There are so many fine authors and wonderful books, stories, plays, and essays, that a whole book curriculum is certain to be deficient when it comes to familiarizing students with this range of voices.

I think it’s quite reasonable to include some complete books in a curriculum. But, even with that, I would want that teaching to be balanced with enough shorter works to ensure an appropriate breadth of reading experience.

What can we say with certainty?

(1)     Complete books have never played a big role in American reading instruction, grades K-5. There have been exceptions to this, of course. Programs like Units of Study – though short on teaching – encouraged kids to read lots of complete books (though often not the kinds of texts the whole book advocates may be imagining).

(2)     Secondary school teachers have usually included more books in their English classes than has been common in the elementary years – focusing heavily on plays, novellas, and reasonably short novels. But even there an emphasis on excerpts and shorter works has been ubiquitous for generations. Various surveys conducted over the past 40 years or so, suggest that secondary teachers have continued to emphasize certain books over that time period, but they do not reveal whether there has been a shift in the numbers of those books taught or the numbers of classrooms teaching them (Applebee, 1989; Applebee, 1993; National Council of Teachers of English, 2025; Seaman & Seaman, 2023).  

(3)     There is no research showing that books are superior to excerpts or that excerpts are superior to books when it comes to developing reading ability.

(4)     It is important to remember that the reading one does in an English class for instructional purposes is not the only reading in which students should be engaged. It would be wise for parents and teachers to promote this idea heavily, and to encourage the reading of some of those wonderful classic novels beyond the classroom. Adolescents must take some responsibility and play some role in their own education, and the adults around them need to encourage good choices in those regards.

(5)     There is no reason why schools cannot combine both excerpts and whole books in their English Language Arts instruction – fostering both depth and breadth.

References

Applebee, A. N. (1989). A study of book-length works taught in high school English courses. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Applebee, A. N. (1993). Literature in the secondary school: Studies of curriculum and instruction in the U. S. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2025). The state of literature use in U.S. secondary English classrooms: A public report. https://ncte.org/blog/2025/07/literature-use-in-secondary-english-classrooms/

Seaman, J. E., & Seaman, J. (2023). Curriculum of many sources: Educational Resources in the U. S. K-12 Education, 2023. Oakland, CA: Bayview Analytics.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Shanahan responds:

I don’t want to undermine anybody’s motivation or love of reading.

Though reading experts have long labeled some texts as “frustration level,” I hope you won’t take that moniker too literally.

To be fair, your concern does seem justified according to some studies. For instance, middle school students say that when texts are difficult, their interest declines (Wade, 2001). Correlations among reading comprehension and affective variables like motivation tend to be significant and positive. Some studies report more off task behavior with frustration level texts, though usually with no detriment to learning (Durik & Matarazzo, 2009).

When reading such studies, it’s hard to remember that the instructional level idea is about guided or directed reading, not independent work. Someone trying to read a challenging text on their own might give up – what other choice do they have? But the situation is quite different when reading a text under a teacher’s tutelage.

It’s also important to know that while some studies have suggested a link between text level and motivation, there is also contrary evidence. A study conducted by Linda Gambrell and her colleagues, for example, found through observations that students placed in frustration level texts were more likely to be off task and to present behavior problems in classrooms (Gambrell, Wilson, & Gantt, 1981). That part of the study is often cited by leveled reading proponents.

However, these researchers did something very interesting, something that is usually ignored. They shifted these students into instructional level texts to generate the desired behavioral improvements. To their surprise, the new text placements had no impact on behavior. Lower-performing students were most likely to be placed in challenging texts and to exhibit discipline problems, but those correlates were evidently NOT causally related.

Another study concluded that teachers often failed to distinguish behavioral problems from low reading ability (Learned, 2016). In other words, low readers were presumed to pose disciplinary challenges for teachers whether there was misbehavior or not. This researcher concluded that the students’ overly easy text and task placements were causing students’ low enthusiasm and misbehavior rather than reducing it. Boy, talk about seeing a problem in a different light (oh, by the way, the students agreed with the researcher that the texts were boringly easy).

I think what teachers may miss is that engagement is more than a text level phenomenon. Researchers have come to see affective variables as being more situational or event-driven than generalized or person-centered (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). Text difficulty may have an effect, but so does text content, the novelty of a lesson, and several other instructional variables, all of which interact – dominating in some cases and compensating in others. Students may be discouraged by text difficulty in one instance (e.g., generating feelings of incompetence), and encouraged by it in another (e.g., feelings of challenge and worthwhile accomplishment).

Let’s face it. Motivation is complicated. Students in a reading lesson may be driven by a desire to please their parents, to identify with a teacher, to connect with peers, to seek competence, or to pursue interesting information from a text. These desires not only may reinforce or cancel each other out, but they may stimulate complex responses. Difficulty can lead both to withdrawal and intensification of effort. Motivation can vary minute to minute – students who are motivated early in a text may be less engaged by the end.

One problem with instructional level theory is that it treats motivation simplistically. It assumes that difficulty alone matters and that if instruction is arranged so that students will find texts easy, then they’ll want to read and want to learn to read.

Students may hope to avoid difficulty, but they also prefer to work with text better aligned with their maturity levels (Lupo, Tortorelli, Invernizzi, Ryoo, & Strong, 2019). Assigning a fourth grader to a second-grade book is more likely to discourage students’ reading than to support it. The embarrassment inherent in low group assignment has disheartened more than a few children. A steady diet of such instruction may do more to suppress personal reading than would working with grade level texts. Sadly, in far too many classrooms, students are not even allowed to try to read books on their own if they are not at “just the right” level (Glasswell & Ford, 2011; Hoffman, 2017), enforcing a sense that, “you are low reader and there is nothing you can do to overcome the limits that imposes.”

Another serious motivational problem inherent in the instructional level is that the reading improvement that it fosters is so gradual as to be imperceptible to most readers. Because the distance between text levels and student levels are so small, any learning gains are necessarily tiny. This may be why so many students express dissatisfaction with their reading instruction. Unlike in other school subjects, it is difficult to perceive improvement.

Instead of avoiding challenge, I think it better to introduce it intentionally, placing students in books that they cannot already read well.

Rather than reducing the demands of the curriculum, teachers should offer pedagogical and emotional supports toward mitigating the difficulty and encouraging persistence in its face.

Let students know what you are up to and scaffold their success as well as their awareness of improvement.

Be positive and encouraging and focus reading lessons on texts worth reading.

Finally, don’t overdo it. Not every text need be especially demanding to build proficiency while maintaining a high level of motivation.

References

Durik, A. M., & Matarazzo, K. L. (2009). Revved up or turned off? How domain knowledge changes the relationship between perceived task complexity and task interest. Learning and Individual Differences, 19(1), 155-159.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2008.08.005 

Gambrell, L. B., Wilson, R. M., & Gantt, W. N. (1981). Classroom observations of task-attending behaviors of good and poor readers. Journal of Educational Research, 74(6), 400–404. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1981.10885339

Glasswell, K., & Ford, M. (2011). Let’s start leveling about leveling. Language Arts, 88(3), 208-216.

Hidi, S., & Renninger, K. A. (2006). The four-phase model of interest development. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 111-127. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_4

Hoffman, J. V. (2017). What if “just right” is just wrong? The unintended consequences of leveling readers. The Reading Teacher 71(3), 265-273.  https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1611

Learned, J. E. (2016). ‘The behavior kids’: Examining the conflation of youth reading difficulty and behavior problem positioning among school institutional contexts. American Educational Research Journal, 53(5), 1271-1309.

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. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.247

Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Wade. S. E. (2001). Research on importance and interest: Implications for curriculum development and future research. Educational Psychology Review 13(3), 243–261.

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

Annually, I consult Charity Navigator (U.S.) and Charity Intelligence (Canada) to identify the top-rated literacy charities (4-stars in U.S., and 5-stars in Canada). What that means is that you can be sure that every one of these charities:

• Is international, national, or multi-regional in scope,
• Focuses entirely or mainly on providing books and literacy instruction to populations in need,
• Provides these services directly to children,
• Is transparent in its reporting, and
• Spends all or most of their donations fulfilling their missions rather than on paying for fund-raising and other overhead costs.

Any donations to these organizations will make good literacy things happen for lots of boys and girls.

I have no connections to any of these charities.

It’s worth reminding everyone that there are literally hundreds of local, state, and provincial charities that meet all but the first of my criteria. These are terrific agencies, but there are far too many for me to evaluate. If you seek a worthy place to make local literacy donations, I encourage you to check with Charity Navigator or Charity Intelligence. 

Of course, the major purpose of this entry is to encourage financial support for these valuable institutions. However, it could be used in a couple of other ways as well.

This wonderful list not only details worthwhile charities. Many of my readers serve children from economically distressed families – the same types of kids who are the focus of these agencies. This list may be useful for identifying potential sources of support for your kids or partnerships for your schools.

I understand that some of you may not be able to make a financial contribution to these charities, but many of them seek the assistance of volunteers. That may work better for some of you.

I’m recommending these charities today, but will keep these listings on the charity page of my website through the coming year: Shanahan Charities 

Barbara Bush Foundation supports reading mentoring programs for children in grades 1 through 3. Read Squad, for instance, pairs struggling young readers with teen mentors, as well as provides books and resources to be used at home to support skill development for both children and their parents. There are now 150 of these programs across 6 states, and since 2002, they have distributed more than 600,000 books and helped improve the reading skills of more than 41,000 children.

Barbershop Books is a family and community engagement model that helps libraries, school districts, city governments, and local nonprofits to implement early literacy programming in neighborhood barbershops for Black boys. This reading identity development program uses boy-approved books to create child-friendly reading spaces in barbershops. Participating barbershops receive early literacy training and branded materials, increasing access to male reading role models and out-of-school time reading opportunities.

Book Trust is a national early literacy nonprofit aimed at increasing book ownership for thousands of students to promote reading motivation and engagement. They provide books to children through more than 100 school partnerships. Over the past 25 years, they have provided more than 10 million books to more than a half million kids. Last year alone, nearly 50,000 students were able to choose almost 600,000 books. 

Books for Africa. Most African children who attend school have never owned a book of their own. In many classrooms, 10-20 students share one textbook. Books For Africa supplies sea containers of books to rural school libraries, orphanages, adult literacy programs, and community resource centers (containers hold about 25k books). Founded in 1988, Books for Africa collects, sorts, ships, and distributes books to children in Africa. Books donated by publishers, schools, libraries, individuals, and organizations are sorted and packed by volunteers who carefully choose books that are age and subject appropriate. They send good books for whole classes to use. In the past year, they have provided more than 1.6 million books to children in 31 countries. 

Children’s Literacy Initiative provides professional development and resources aimed at improving early literacy instruction and learning. Their efforts provide coaching for teachers, workshops and seminars, and they stock classrooms with books. They help educators serving high-need student populations to learn high-impact instructional strategies aimed at school improvement. Currently, the Initiative serves more than 250 schools in 6 states with more than 16,000 children. Over the past 12 years, CLI has helped more than 30,000 teachers deliver quality PK- 5 literacy instruction.

Curious Learning works with partners to curate, localize, and distribute free open-source apps in more than 40 languages 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 who wants to learn to read, to the parent who wants more for their children, and to the teacher striving to help many. Their technology resources have been downloaded more than 6 million times.  

Ferst Readers aims at 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 provide age-appropriate books to ensure that 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 9 million books since 1999 (more than 600,000 books each year now in 11 states)!

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 6.5 million kids each year in low-income communities across North America, providing books and resources through a powerful network of more than 600,000 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.

International Book Project develops lasting partnerships with under-served communities to provide books, promote literacy, and advance economic opportunity across the country, and around the globe. The books they ship are individually curated to the requests of their partners and range from a few dozen books to sea containers of 30,000+ books for libraries and schools. Since their founding in 1966, International Book Project has shipped close to 8 million books to 168 countries.

Raising a Reader focuses on increasing and improving home shared reading routines through the development of family literacy libraries. Their program currently operates through 296 affiliates in 34 states. Over the past year they have served nearly 150,000 children and their families. This program has been proven to increase the amount of shared reading that takes place in homes across the country.

Reach Out and Read, for more than 35 years, has used pediatric checkups to help parents and children build trust, strengthen language skills, and nurture emotional health through reading. They are now in all 50 states and serve 4.6 million children through their 6,500 program sites that provide almost 8 million books each year. Their pediatric network provides families with the knowledge and tools they need to make reading a part of their daily routine.

Reading is Fundamental is the oldest of the book ownership programs. It 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 5 million books and other literacy resources, and their efforts reach 91 percent of all elementary schools in the United States (serving 24 million children). They also support summer reading programs, and their Skybrary digital library for children ages 2 to 9.

Reading Partners helps 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. Over the lifespan of this program, more than 3 million direct tutoring sessions have been delivered.

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 52 million children in 29 countries and they have distributed more than 39 million books.

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 the 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 promotes every child’s right to read. It works in partnership with locally based organizations to promote local literacy education efforts around the world. In 2024. It provided literacy programs to more than 500,000 children and trained more than 14,000 teachers in more than 1,800 schools. CODE distributed almost 400,000 children’s books.

READ MORE: Shanahan on Literacy Blogs

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

What Teachers Need to Know about Sentence Comprehension

Awhile back, I posted an opinion piece calling for the explicit teaching of sentence comprehension. With schools aiming to expose kids to complex text, one might think such instruction would be de rigueur. Texts are often complex because they include complicated sentences and experience tells me that students often fail to grasp the meaning complicated sentences – undermining their ability to identify main ideas, make inferences, draw conclusions, or answer any of the other question types.  

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

While that rant gathered some attention, it came up short.  

Accordingly, I have decided to take a mulligan.

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

This piece should remedy those omissions.

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

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

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

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

First, the research.

The desert has become an oasis. 

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

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

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

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

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

Those studies cited above found sentence knowledge to be of value to comprehension as early as 30-months old and throughout the school grades, K-12. Syntax mattered with regular classroom kids and those with dyslexia. This pattern held in English, French, Dutch, and Cantonese. Syntax mattered with native English speakers and with English Language Learners. This was true in studies that measured syntax and comprehension simultaneously, and in longitudinal studies which considered the impact of syntax on learning.

The amount of comprehension variance explained by syntax varied quite a bit from study to study (~5% to 30%). Researchers attributed some of those differences to variations in the syntax measures.

Those analyses suggest that the ability to make sense of complex sentences is more crucial than the ability to evaluate grammatical accuracy (e.g., Brimo, Lund, & Sapp, 2018). Researchers paid less attention to variations in reading comprehension measurement.

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

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

Another relevant collection of studies is those focused on oral reading fluency or text reading fluency. Such research has long shown that oral sentence reading requires skills beyond those required to read word lists – even when the words in the lists and sentences are identical (Jenkins, Fuchs, van den Broek, Espin, & Deno, 2003). Sentence reading did a better job than word list reading when it came to predicting reading comprehension. Students with comprehension problems do better with word lists than text reading fluency (Cutting, Matterek, Cole, Levine, & Mahone, 2009). Research also has reported that syntax and text prosody are related to each other and to reading comprehension (Veenendaal, Groen, & Vehoeven, 2015).

If that provocative but incomplete review of the research doesn’t convince you that sentence comprehension is a thing in reading, then I doubt that you can be convinced. Your lifetime membership in the Flat Earth Society is safe.

For the more open minded, let’s turn to the teaching of sentence comprehension.

I wish there was an equally impressive array of studies showing that sentence comprehension instruction improves performance on state reading tests. I can’t do that.

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

MacKay and company rightly point out that some interventions aimed at improving sentence comprehension haven’t worked (e.g., Balthazar & Scott, 2018), and that some of these interventions have been hopelessly confounded (e.g., Morris, et al., 2012; Proctor, Silverman, Harring, Jones, & Hartranft, 2000; Reynolds, 2021). Several studies reported significant reading comprehension improvement, but they didn’t just teach syntax. This instruction also included attention to morphology, vocabulary, and/or text structure. The gains could have been due to any of those.  

The same point could be made about paraphrasing studies (Stevens, Vaughn, House, & Stillman-Spisak, 2020). Paraphrase teaching usually includes some attention to translating sentences into one’s own words – but for the most part, these studies go beyond sentences to emphasize paragraph paraphrases.

Nevertheless, I would recommend sentence comprehension teaching.  

First, studies that show a close connection between text reading fluency and reading comprehension are persuasive. I cited a few such studies above but could easily include many more; see Breznitz, 2005 for a more rigorous treatment of these issues. MacKay and her colleagues didn’t consider this work, but there are many studies in which oral reading guidance and chunking instruction improved reading comprehension (NICHD, 2000; Stevens, 1981). Teaching students how to read sentences aloud with proper prosody works, and I believe those practices to be clear examples of effective sentence instruction.

I know researchers, also, differ in the weight they accord to sentence manipulation instruction. I tend to be persuaded that sentence combining and reduction improves reading comprehension (Neville & Searls, 1985; O’Hare, 1973; Wilkinson & Patty, 1993), and that provides another body of supportive instructional data – though the quality of some of these studies is admittedly dubious. The results appear to be equally strong in the best designed and implemented of these studies.

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

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

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

My advice to teachers?

1.     Teach oral reading fluency with grade level classroom texts, including the texts for social studies and science. In the upper grades focus specifically on prosody issues. If the students are not reading the sentences properly – attending to punctuation and pausing in the appropriate places in terms of meaning, then the sentences will make no sense. I know of no research on this, but I wouldn’t hesitate to have students trying to read aloud various complex sentences that I pulled from the texts with which they are working.

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

3.     Lots of times teachers tell me they aren’t too sure whether a sentence may prove to be complex for their students. A good readable source that can provide guidance for identifying sentences that may be barriers to comprehension can be found for free online; an article by Cheryl M. Scott and Catherine Balthazar provides great advice regarding sentence length, subordination, relative clauses, passive voice, and other syntactic issues. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4373700/)

However, remember that even more basic sentences can pose challenges for elementary kids. No matter how complex a sentence may be, it is only worth breaking down if it poses an impediment to comprehension. Scott and Balthazar's guidance may help you to notice whether sentences pose particular kinds of problems (like a passive sentences that may lead to confusions of actors and what or whom is being acted upon). Exercises aimed at comprehending syntactic structures, should start with a question aimed at determining student understanding. If the students understood the sentence, there is nothing to teach. Move on. If the sentence is misunderstood, it is worth teaching.

4.     That reading intervention described earlier – guiding students to read each sentence, to paraphrase them, and to break them down when the paraphrasing doesn’t go well – sounds great to me. That strikes me as a very intelligent and supportive approach to these skills – moving things along when the kids have no problem with a sentence and digging in to resolve the problem when they do. 

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

6.     Earlier I noted several successful reading interventions that have included sentence work. Those studies can’t prove the potency of sentence teaching, though including it didn’t prevent these instructional routines from being successful. As in those studies, I’d include sentence work along with lessons in vocabulary, morphology, text structure, and so on. These days vocabulary instruction seems to be getting a lot of play, though the contribution of syntax to reading comprehension is similar of magnitude (Deacon & Kieffer, 2018; Shiotsu & Weir, 2007).

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

45(2), 99–127.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LISTEN TO MORE: Shanahan On Literacy Podcast

23 Past Comments