Complex Text for Beginning Readers... Good Idea or Not?

I taught second grade for ten years and saw this in practice all the time. This thinking also relieves the decodables versus leveled readers war I have witnessed in my role as a Reading Teacher. What the child needs when they need it should be our mantra, plus the expectation that comprehension takes effort.

I think this is the most important sentence of all: "By all means, read wonderfully complex books with sophisticated vocabulary to kids in kindergarten and grade one, but keep the words familiar, simple, and repetitive with the books they are to read themselves." It is never too early to teach and expose children to sophisticated vocabulary and ideas, engaging them in conversation about them, and helping them making connections to their own world and lives. But in order to help them learn to read independently we need to offer them predictable, patterned texts with explicit instruction and scaffolding if they aren't learning to read by "osmosis" (i.e the phenomena of some children "naturally" learning how to read, as if their brains just soak it up and don't seem to need explicit instruction. Every now and then I come across young children that can do this).

Understanding the science of reading based on research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience brings a good bit of clarity to questions raised in this post. As Tim points out literally hundreds of studies support that word reading is the best predictor of reading proficiency. Researcher Linnea Ehri’s guidance for tracking beginners through five phases of word reading and decoding leading to automatic word reading which perfectly align with Gentry’s encoding phases of invented spelling demonstrate the outcomes of developing reading and spelling brain circuitry expected to be in place by the end of first grade. By end of first grade we should see the advent of a consolidated-automatic-alphabetic word reading and spelling phase. The move from Phase 3 (typically first half of first grade) to Phase 4 is a move from slow and laborious word reading and spelling to automatic use of consolidated chunks of phonics patterns along with automatic word reading and spelling which reduces the memory load and enables comprehension. Indeed there should be instructional differences in what we do in K-1 when the brain circuitry for reading and writing are being developed and for instruction in grades 2 and beyond when foundational reading circuitry should already be in place.

So the Phase 4 first grader who reads Level F Big Wheels at Work in the second half of first grade is learning to read and reading to learn simultaneously even as he engages in deep levels of comprehension. On pages 4 and 5 he reads: “Here is a backhoe. Deep groves in the tires help it grip the earth. It has a strong arm that can dig a hole or tear down a building.” (Haneray, 2013 used with permission) Then he turns the page and reads about a wheel loader. His brain’s word form area benefits from automatically reactivating sight words back, deep, it, along with -ack, -eep, -it, and -ip beginning reading chunks. He may learn new rarely spoken vocabulary such as grip and groove. Upon turning the page he learns how the backhoe compares to a wheel loader engaging in comparison and contrast for comprehension.

So to the teacher who posed the question about teaching in K-1 with complex text: Don’t worry! For beginning readers in K-1 well selected leveled texts offer plenty of fodder for comprehension and learning. (Adapted from Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching, Gentry & Ouellette, Stenhouse, 2019)

I definitely appreciate Tim's response. In terms of texts for beginning readers (K-1), I know that research on decodable vs. predictable books has produced mixed results, but I have long been impressed by Juel & Roper-Schneider's study from 1985. Here are the key points of the study:

• All district teachers provided the same 20-30 minute phonics supplemental instruction
• Classes then used one of two different basals – one decodable (regular words clustered, repeated, presented to emphasize regularity) the other with an emphasis on frequent words
• By Nov of 1st grade: decodable kids were better decoders & showed greater reliance on letter-sound relations, extending beyond those taught; the students using the "frequent word" readers were identifying words more on visual appearance
• End of 1st – decodable kids were far better reading novel words; the frequency reader kids often appeared to abandon phonics strategies when attempting to read words.

The authors concluded: “Emphasis on a phonics method seems to make little sense if children are given initial texts to read where the words do not follow regular letter-sound correspondence generalizations. Results of the current study suggest that the types of words which appear in beginning reading texts may well exert a more powerful influence in shaping children’s word identification strategies than the method of reading instruction.”

To me, this is pretty powerful stuff, even if later studies produced varying findings. I believe that we simply aren't "using all the best tools" in terms of teaching beginning reading if decodable texts that allow students to apply their growing phonics knowledge aren't at least a healthy part of the K-1 reading diet. I received a full set of the WRIGHT SKILLS DECODABLE READERS from the publisher out of the blue years ago. My two kids took their first steps into reading using these books, and they were great! I have loaned them to primary/SPED teachers at each of my wife's schools over the years and they have found them indispensable. If you can get your hands on them, do! I also happened to receive samples of a new set of decodables from the Great Minds organization. The match the Wilson Fundations phonics sequence and are crafted to be engaging and content rich. They looked very good to me. Check them out at... https://gm.greatminds.org/geodes-readable-library.

Sara—

Beginning reading is beginning reading. If a 5th grader reads like a kindergartner or first grader, then I would definitely use beginning reading texts and work on decoding. However if that child could read like a beginning second grader, then I’d ramp up the text difficulty including using grade level texts.

Tim

Mr. Shanahan... Love the discussion and bringing awareness to new ways of thinking.

Mr. Shanahan,

I am all in for students being introduced to complex text in Kindergarten, my question - Should they be writing paragraphs with a focus statement, detailed support sentences and a conclusion at this level?

I am in total agreement with your article. It would be futile to attempt to teach a child to read from complex text when they are not able to read the words.
I do, however, have a question. In this article, you mentioned that ramping up text difficulty in Kindergarten and First Grade would impede student learning progress and that research shows a different pattern for Second-Graders. However, as a Second-Grade teacher, I have students who read on a Kindergarten or First Grade level, therefore ramping up text difficulty for them would impede their learning progress as well. Therefore, where you mention students in terms of grade-level, (e.g. Second-Graders), in the context of this article, shouldn't we consider our students in terms of their instructional levels (e.g., students reading on Kindergarten Level; students reading on Second-Grade Level)?

Karen--

The research has not separated out second-graders who are on-level from those who are behind. Nevertheless, if my students had not developed basic decoding skills by second grade, i would definitely make that the priority -- which would not only involve heightened emphasis on explicit targeted phonemic awareness and phonics instruction but I would stay to texts that were decodable and those with controlled vocabulary. Dealing with other complexities of text would not be the major issue with such students.

tim

Glad I stumbled across this blog post. I recently attended a conference where text complexity was a major focus of improve outcomes for students, but the examples provided were all grade 3+ and I wondered what this meant for me as a 1st grade teacher. Thank you for including that we should be using complex text as a read aloud and for oral language development while still having a primary focus on decoding skills.