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33. Evidence-Based Assessment in the Science of Reading

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33. Evidence-Based Assessment in the Science of Reading

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Written by Una Malcolm, M.A., OCT
Introduction: Why Assess

Assessment for learning plays a critical role in informing and driving literacy instruction. Nearly all students are capable of learning to read; while specific numbers vary, estimates indicate that approximately 95% of students are capable of learning to read (Fletcher & Vaughn, 2009). Rigorous, systematic, and explicit instruction that addresses the essential components of literacy including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000), is key to allowing all children to reach their full potential. This instruction often referred to as structured literacy, must go hand-in-hand with a comprehensive assessment system to allow educators to adjust instruction to meet the specific needs of students (Spear-Swerling, 2018). Assessment is critical for students with learning disabilities (LDs) in terms of both the prevention of reading difficulties and intervention to remediate skill gaps.

Formative Assessment: Answering Questions

Assessment for learning plays a key role in meeting the needs of all students through the creation of equitable learning environments. Assessment for learning, "is used in making decisions that affect teaching and learning in the short-term future" (Growing Success, 2010, p. 30). Multiple research reviews and meta-analyses have identified that systematic formative assessment has consistent strong, positive effects on student learning (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1986; Black & Wiliam, 2005; Hattie, 2009) across a variety of factors including student age, measurement frequency, and disability status. In essence, assessment for learning allows educators to identify where students are and inform plans to get students where they need to be.

Even within assessment for learning, multiple types of assessments exist. Growing Success (2010) distinguishes between formative and diagnostic assessments but emphasizes that "what matters is how the information is used" (p. 31). Assessment answers questions; different types of assessment tools answer different types of questions. In a Response to Intervention model, assessment purposes include universal screening, diagnostic assessments, and progress monitoring; all three of these purposes for assessment answer key questions about shaping instructional environments to meet students' needs.

1. Screening - Assessment for Learning

The development of skilled reading is a complex process that hinges on the development and the integration of cognitive and language skills. Many of these skills can be observed and measured well before children receive any formal reading instruction (Catts, 2015). With data indicating that reading trajectories are established early and are very stable (Juel, 1988), it is critical to identify reading difficulties early on in a student's academic career to inform support. Since reading remediation at an earlier age is more effective than later intervention (Lovett et al., 2017), screening plays an important role in preventing early reading difficulties from being exacerbated over time.

All students should be screened with universal screening measures three times per year (Good et al., 2011). These assessments are very brief, standardized measures that quickly and efficiently identify which children are at risk. Standardized assessments are tests that have specific procedures for administration and scoring, perhaps with scripted directions and specific scoring guidelines (Farrall, 2012). Students are assessed on several indicators of early literacy skills appropriate for their age and grade. For example, Kindergarten and grade one students may be screened on phonemic awareness, phonics, and decoding, while older students may be screened on oral reading fluency (ORF) and retell for comprehension.

Universal screening measures are widely available and very accessible. Many of the universal screeners currently available are either low-cost or free. Often there can be a fee for training or optional computer data analysis systems, but many of the testing materials are very accessible.

These assessments are technically reliable and valid, and scores are interpreted in relation to a benchmark criterion. Benchmark cutscores are not determined arbitrarily but instead are derived from research; researchers use longitudinal studies to determine what threshold a child must reach to have a strong chance of meeting future reading goals. This means a child's score allows educators to predict future reading performance with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Students who fall at or below the cutscore are at risk and will likely need additional support to allow them to meet future goals. For example, a benchmark cutscore on Acadience Reading assessments is the score needed for a child to have an 80 - 90% probability of meeting successive reading goals (Good et al., 2011). In interpreting a child's score in comparison to a benchmark score, educators can quickly and efficiently assess the level of risk of future reading achievement or difficulty before difficulties emerge or worsen.

Screening allows educators to quickly and easily catch students who are at risk. Screening does not, however, give teachers a full understanding of what the underlying cause of a problem is. Screening is akin to a blood pressure or temperature check at a doctor's office; these are simple, efficient and cost-effective ways to find problems, but abnormalities on these screeners require additional diagnostic testing to decipher what exactly is wrong.

2. Diagnostic Assessment - Assessment for Learning

Diagnostic assessments allow educators to probe deeper into the learning profiles of students in question. For many students, universal screening three times per year provides all the assessment data necessary to ensure students are making sufficient progress. For students who are at risk, though, careful analysis of reading subskills must occur to differentiate instruction and plan intervention. These assessments allow educators to ascertain which specific skills or knowledge a student has mastered, and which skills or knowledge need to be taught.

If universal screeners are similar to a blood pressure or temperature check to identify problems in a brief and cost-effective manner, diagnostic assessments are similar to more comprehensive blood tests or diagnostic imaging to dig deeper into a problem. The information from these more investigative approaches directly informs treatment, similar to how diagnostic reading assessments allow teachers to differentiate classroom instruction or plan targeted interventions.

Diagnostic assessments are longer and more in-depth than screening assessments and are typically not standardized. While screeners are quick assessments of indicators of basic skills, diagnostic assessments can be thought of as inventories of skills that directly inform instruction. Can a child segment two, three, or four phoneme words? Can a child decode words with short vowels or consonant digraphs? Diagnostic assessments allow teachers to differentiate classroom instruction and plan intervention if necessary.

Diagnostic assessments should be selected strategically. The Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) indicates that reading comprehension, the end goal of reading, is a product of two sets of subskills, word recognition and language comprehension. When selecting diagnostic assessments, teachers can probe both areas of this model to clarify a student's specific patterns of strengths and needs. When weaknesses exist in reading comprehension, is this due to difficulties with word recognition, with language comprehension, or with both?

3. Progress Monitoring - Assessment for Learning

With screening and diagnostic data in hand, teachers can differentiate core instruction and/or provide targeted intervention through intervention supports. Progress monitoring assessments allow educators to quickly measure a student's response to instruction. Instead of waiting until the next benchmark assessment several months in the future, progress monitoring allows for more rapid adjustment of instruction. While universal screening measures students' skill level with grade-level material, progress monitoring is at an individual child's instructional level to directly measure response to instruction. A grade four child reading at a grade one level would be screened at the beginning, middle, and end of the year with grade four assessments. Progress monitoring assessment, though, would be at a grade one level in order to measure the child's response to intervention.

Many universal screeners also supply progress monitoring materials. These materials are often very similar to universal screening measures in that they are brief and standardized. When selecting an assessment for progress monitoring, it is important to consider practice effects. Progress monitoring assessments typically have multiple forms so students are not tested with the same material. Progress monitoring data are usually graphed so student growth can be compared visually to an aimline, or the line between a child's current score and the benchmark goal.

Progress monitoring assessments are purposefully brief. Depending on student age and needs, this assessment may take between one and three minutes. Struggling students need to catch up quickly; Torgesen (2004) describes the "devastating downward spiral" that occurs when students do not receive timely, evidence-based intervention. Struggling readers do not have time for a "wait and see" approach. Weekly or biweekly progress monitoring allows for enough data to quickly and clearly establish patterns. Educators can quickly judge if a child's rate of progress is strong enough to meet the goal. If not, there are several options that can be considered to intensify instruction:

Increasing frequency or length of support

Decreasing group size

Making groups more homogeneous

Increasing level of explicitness

Increasing opportunities for practice

To see an example of how the Thunder Bay Catholic DSB uses tier 1, 2 and 3 reading interventions, click here to view the LD@school video The Tiered Approach

In addition to informing instruction, progress monitoring data allow for insight into students learning profiles. Research indicates that data from a child's response to intervention can give important insight into whether a child may have a learning disability. Patterns of inadequate response to evidence-based instruction, established through progress monitoring data, are key factors to consider when evaluating for a learning disability (Miciak & Fletcher, 2020; Catts & Petscher, 2021).

4. Outcome Evaluation - Assessment of Learning

Outcome assessments measure student achievement. While progress monitoring assessments show if instruction is working, outcome assessments are assessments of learning and identify if instruction worked.

These assessments are typically comprehensive assessments that measure student mastery of provincial curriculum expectations or the specific learning goals outlined. Outcome assessments often occur at the end of a period of learning, including a unit of study, a term, or a school year, for example.
Evidence-Based Assessment in the Science of Reading: Cheat sheet - Comparing and Contrasting Assessment Purposes Click here to view and download the Evidence-Based Assessment in the Science of Reading: Cheat sheet
Assessment Data and Differentiating Tier 1 Instruction

Patterns in universal screening data can support teachers in differentiating classroom instruction. Instead of using student reading levels from a running record to group students for small group instruction, universal screening data allows educators to use reading skills to more specifically build homogeneous groups of students for instruction. A grade 2 teacher, for example, could split students into several groups based on their universal screening data:

Fluent and accurate readers needing continued content and vocabulary instruction to build comprehension

Students who read accurately but need fluency instruction

Students in need of word-level decoding and phonics instruction.

Data from screeners as well as diagnostic testing for deeper probing allows for more sophisticated and specific differentiation for intervention, instruction, or enrichment since it focuses on specific skills instead of generic reading levels.

Student vs. System Analysis to Strengthen Universal Instruction

One of the strengths of universal screening is it allows educators to analyze not only individual students' growth but also the strength of classroom core instruction. If more than 20% of students are below the benchmark on universal screening, it is a clear indication that efforts to strengthen core instruction should be made. Prioritizing intervention when a large proportion of the class is at risk misses out on a valuable opportunity to strengthen the universal tier of classroom instruction. With class-wide screening data, teachers are able to better differentiate instruction and potentially implement class-wide interventions, such as Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (McMaster & Fuchs, 2016). For example, a grade 3 teacher could implement a paired repeated reading instructional routine (Stevens et al., 2017) in response to weak fluency screening data. Instead of just problem-solving at individual student levels, teachers have the data necessary to develop action plans to strengthen core instruction for all students.

To learn more about Peer Assisted Learning, click here to access LD@school's article and video Peer-Mediated Learning Approaches.

Oral Reading Fluency and Running Records: Frequently Confused

Oral Reading Fluency assessments are commonly used in both screening and progress monitoring for developing readers. While individual assessments vary, generally Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) measures involve timed passage oral reading for one minute. Accuracy rates and words correct per minute scores are calculated and interpreted in relation to a benchmark score. ORF assessments are highly correlated with reading comprehension (Fuchs et al., 2001) and serve as a proxy for this critical outcome skill.

ORF assessments are often confused with running record assessments that are commonly used in literacy programs. While both assessments do involve the reading of connected passages, running records differ in that a text "level" is often indicated as a student's instructional or independent level based on the accuracy percentage. Fluency is typically assessed through teacher observation or rubrics. Running records do not meet desired characteristics for the selection of a screener. They do not act as brief, reliable and valid indicators of key early literacy skills, and they do not allow for interpretation of scores in relation to a benchmark criterion derived from predictive probabilities. In fact, Parker et al. (2015) found that a commonly used running record assessment had a .54 correlation with a district-provided criterion reading test. These data indicate that running records were only 54% accurate in predicting student reading performance, in comparison to the established technical validity and reliability of ORF measures.

Assessment for Learning: A Case Study
The following case study provides an example of how reading assessment can be used in the classroom to identify at-risk students, pinpoint the skills these students struggle with, and determine the appropriate intervention to get students back on track.
Maya is in grade two. As a part of the beginning-of-year screening process, her teacher administers a brief screening assessment that yields this data about Maya's reading:
Nonsense Word Fluency: Oral Reading Fluency:

Accuracy (passage reading accuracy): Below Benchmark

Words Correct (passage reading fluency): Well Below Benchmark

Maya's teacher, Ms. Kaur, recognizes that Maya is struggling and is not on track to meet future reading goals. Ms. Kaur realizes that Maya is having difficulty reading the ORF passage accurately and smoothly since she is not an accurate and fluent word reader. Based on these screening data, she decides to dig deeper with some diagnostic assessments to help her differentiate instruction. She decides to give Maya a decoding assessment to understand which specific phonics patterns she has mastered, and which patterns she needs to be taught. She learns that Maya hasn't yet mastered short vowel sounds. She also uses a phonemic awareness assessment to check her blending and segmenting, which shows skill gaps as well. Ms. Kaur realizes that Maya is having difficulty with word recognition skills. To check on her oral language skills, Ms. Kaur reads a story to Maya and asks her oral comprehension questions. Maya is easily able to answer questions about what she hears, indicating to Ms. Kaur that Maya's reading difficulties appear to be stemming from decoding and word recognition difficulties and not language comprehension difficulties.

Armed with this information, Ms. Kaur builds her small reading groups. Instead of using reading levels to group students, Ms. Kaur uses reading skills. She groups Maya with other students needing phonemic awareness and short vowel instruction.

As Ms. Kaur uses this screening and diagnostic data to plan her groups and instruction, she also continues to monitor Maya's progress using weekly Nonsense Word Fluency assessments. Since these progress monitoring assessments are one minute each, Ms. Kaur knows that this is a quick and efficient way to make sure Maya is responding to her instruction without having to wait until the mid-year screening time. If Maya is not making sufficient progress toward the benchmark score, she may need instruction to be intensified to allow her to reach the benchmark goal. Ms. Kaur graphs Maya's progress monitoring data, as well as the aimline which shows the path between Maya's current score and the benchmark. Ms. Kaur and her grade-level team can quickly and easily judge if Maya is progressing at a fast enough rate to close the gap.

About the author:

Una Malcolm is a doctoral student in Reading Science and also has a Master's degree in Child Study and Education. She is a member of the Ontario College of Teachers. Una has trained extensively in several evidence-based teaching methods, such as Direct Instruction, Phono-Graphix and Lindamood-Bell. She is an Acadience Reading K-6 (formerly DIBELS Next) Mentor.

References

Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7 - 74. doi: 10.1080/0969595980050102

Catts, H.W., Nielsen, D. C., Bridges, M. S., Liu, Y. S., & Bontempo, D. E. (2015). Early identification of reading disabilities within an RTI framework. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 48(3), 281-297.

Catts, H.W., Petscher, Y. (2021). A cumulative risk and resilience model of dyslexia. Journal of Learning Disabilities, doi.org/10.1177/00222194211037062

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups. U.S. Government Printing Office.

Farrall, M. L. (2012). Reading assessment: Linking language, literacy, and cognition. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118092668

Fuchs, L.S. & Fuchs, D. (1986). Effects of systematic formative evaluation: A meta-analysis. Exceptional Children, 53(3), 199 - 208.

Fuchs, L., Fuchs, D., Hosp, M. & Jenkins, J. (2001). Oral reading fluency as an indicator of reading competence. Scientific Studies of Reading, 5(3), 239 - 256.

Fletcher, J.M. & Vaughn, S. (2009). Response to intervention: Preventing and remediating academic difficulties. Child Development Perspectives, 3(1), 30 - 37. doi: 10.1111/j.1750-8606.2008.00072.x

Good, R.H., Kaminski, R.A., Cummings, K.D., Dufour-Martel, C., Petersen, K., Powell-Smith, K.A., Stollar, S. & Wallin, J. (2011). Acadience Reading K-6 Assessment Manual. Acadience Learning Inc.

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

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning. Routledge.

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to read and write: A longitudinal study of 54 children from first through fourth grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(4), 437 - 447. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.4.437

Lovett, M., Frijters, J.C., Wolf, M., Steinback, K.A., Sevcik, R.A., Morris, R.D. (2017). Early intervention for children at risk for reading disabilties: The impact of grade at intervention and individual differences on intervention outcomes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(7), 889 - 914. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000181

McMaster, K. L., & Fuchs, D. (2016). Classwide intervention using peer-assisted learning strategies. In S. R. Jimerson, M. K. Burns, & A. M. VanDerHeyden (Eds.), Handbook of response to intervention: The science and practice of multi-tiered systems of support (pp. 253-268). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7568-3_15

Miciak, J. & Fletcher, J.M. (2020). The critical role of instructional response for identifying dyslexia and other learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 53(5), 343 - 353. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420906801

Ontario Ministry of Education. ​​(2010). Growing Success: Assessment, evaluation and reporting in Ontario's schools: Covering grades 1 to 12. Ministry of Education.

Parker, D.C., Zaslofsky, A.F., Burns, M.K., Kanive, R., Hodgson, J., Scholin, S.E. & Klingbeil, D.A. (2015) A brief report of the diagnostic accuracy of oral reading fluency and reading inventory levels for reading failure risk among second and third grade students. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 31(1), 56 - 67. doi: 10.1080/10573569.2013.857970

Spear-Swerling, L. (2018). Structured literacy and typical literacy practices: Understanding differences to create instructional opportunities. Teaching Exceptional Children, 51(3), 201-211.

Stevens, E. A., Walker, M. A., & Vaughn, S. (2017). The effects of reading fluency interventions on the reading fluency and reading comprehension performance of elementary students with Learning Disabilities: A synthesis of the research from 2001 to 2014. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 50(5), 576-590. doi: 10.1177/0022219416638028

Torgesen, J.K. (2004). Avoiding the devastating downward spiral: The evidence that early intervention prevents reading failure. American Educator, 28, 6-19.

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Evidence-Based Assessment in the Science of Reading

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Written by Una Malcolm, M.A., OCT Introduction: Why Assess Assessment for learning plays a critical role in informing and driving literacy instruction. Nearly all students are capable of learning to read; while specific numbers vary, estimates indicate that approximately 95% of students are capable of learning to read (Fletcher & Vaughn, 2009).

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36 d. Empowering Literacy in BC- MTSS (workshop 4 of 4) 

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36 d. Empowering Literacy in BC- MTSS (workshop 4 of 4) 

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Empowering Literacy in British Columbia (Workshop 4 of 4)

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36 c. Empowering Literacy in BC- Universal Screening (workshop 3 of 4)

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36 c. Empowering Literacy in BC- Universal Screening (workshop 3 of 4)

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Empowering Literacy in British Columbia (Workshop 3 of 4)

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36 b. Empowering Literacy in BC - Structured Literacy (workshop 2 of 4)

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36 b. Empowering Literacy in BC - Structured Literacy (workshop 2 of 4)

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Empowering Literacy in British Columbia (Workshop 2 of 4)

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36 a. Empowering Literacy in BC- What is the Science of Reading? (workshop 1 of 4)

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36 a. Empowering Literacy in BC- What is the Science of Reading? (workshop 1 of 4)

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Empowering Literacy in British Columbia (Workshop 1 of 4)

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35. Iowa Reading Research Center - resources

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35. Iowa Reading Research Center - resources

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Iowa Reading Research Center - The University of Iowa

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It is an important part of our mission to provide evidence-based literacy resources for educators and families. These resources created by the Iowa Reading Research Center provide opportunities to teach and provide student practice opportunities for various reading and writing skills, as well as offering other guidance and information through a variety of literacy resources listed below.

These resources have been grouped into categories. Resources created by IRRC collaborators are tagged "Collaborator Contribution."

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Created by the IRRC, these literacy resources are useful for educators and caregivers for classroom and home literacy learning.

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61.  Reading Comprehension: Core Components and Processes

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61.  Reading Comprehension: Core Components and Processes

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Iowa Reading Research Center - The University of Iowa

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This blog post is the first post in our Research Article of the Month series. For this month, we highlight " Comprehension: Core Components and Processes ," a scientific review that was initially published in the journal Policy Insights From the Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2016. Important words related to research are bolded, and definitions of these terms are included at the end of the article in the "Terms to Know" section.

We picked this article because it offers deep insight into the core components and processes of reading comprehension. It provides an overview of the current knowledge on reading comprehension by emphasizing the importance of inferential processes and a reader's prior knowledge in facilitating comprehension. It is worth noting that the article presents valuable insights into research-based instructional techniques and assessments tailored for reading comprehension. Such information can be beneficial for educators who are seeking effective interventions and methods to track students' progress in reading comprehension.

This article reviews theoretical and empirical literature on inferential processes and prior knowledge and how these components contribute to reading comprehension, with the aim of guiding research, practice, and policy regarding comprehension instruction and assessment.

This article is a scientific review of previously published research; instead of presenting new findings, it synthesizes existing knowledge on the core components and processes of reading comprehension.

The authors stress that assessment needs to be able to determine whether low performance is due to lack of knowledge, lack of knowledge accessibility, or lack of knowledge integration (i.e., making inferences). Often, reading assessments control for prior knowledge by using topics and content that would likely be unique or unfamiliar to readers. However, the authors contend that there is value in explicitly designing tests that include content that relates to students' prior knowledge because integrating prior knowledge in reading assessment is consistent with the current definition of reading comprehension. For example, the Reading for Understanding IES initiative funds the development of the Global, Integrated Scenario-Based Assessment (GISA), which measures reading literacy ability. GISA takes prior knowledge into account by testing Tier-3 vocabulary words that have close ties to specific content knowledge.

Considering the article was published in 2016, some of the new interventions, curricula, and assessments that are available now were not reviewed or included in the paper. The authors of the study pointed out that "Instructional programs designed specifically to facilitate knowledge building are far less common; instead, knowledge building is often a subcomponent of reading comprehension instruction "(p. 66). Currently, there are several curricula focused on knowledge building.

When readers make Inferential processes: inferences, they make connections between their prior knowledge and knowledge gained from reading to fill in gaps in the text.

Rather than using observation or experimentation, Theoretical research: theoretical research uses existing knowledge to develop a theory about how something works. Often, the aim of theoretical research is to produce hypotheses that can be tested through empirical research.

A Scientific review: scientific review synthesizes existing research on a topic. By summarizing previous research on a topic, a review can identify gaps in existing studies and identify potential research areas to explore next. Additionally, by providing an overview of the current knowledge on a topic, a review can derive implications for policy and practice.

When researchers Control: control for a factor, they hold it constant to limit its influence on the effect they are measuring. For example, consider the task of measuring a reader's comprehension of a passage. It would be difficult to determine whether the knowledge demonstrated by the reader was gained through reading alone or whether it was based on their prior knowledge about the topic. In this case, the researchers could control for prior knowledge by making sure that the reader did not have prior knowledge about the topic in the passage.

Kendeou, P., McMaster, K. L., & Christ, T. J. (2016). Reading comprehension: Core components and processes. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 62-69. https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732215624707

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Research Article of the Month: October 2023

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We highlight the findings of the scientific review article "Reading Comprehension: Core Components and Processes."

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34. Book Recommendations About and for Children With Dyslexia and Their Caregivers

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34. Book Recommendations About and for Children With Dyslexia and Their Caregivers

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Iowa Reading Research Center - The University of Iowa

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Book Recommendations About and for Children With Dyslexia and Their Caregivers

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To celebrate Dyslexia Awareness Month, our assistive technology coordinators have curated a list of books by and about individuals with dyslexia.

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3 b.  A Meta-Analysis of Phonemic Awareness Instruction Provided to Children Suspected of Having a Reading Disability 

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3 b.  A Meta-Analysis of Phonemic Awareness Instruction Provided to Children Suspected of Having a Reading Disability 

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Iowa Reading Research Center - The University of Iowa

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This blog post is part of our Research Article of the Month series. For this month, we highlight " A Meta-Analysis of Phonemic Awareness Instruction Provided to Children Suspected of Having a Reading Disability," an article published in the journal Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools in 2022. Important words related to research are bolded, and definitions of these terms are included at the end of the article in the "Terms to Know" section.

Phonemic awareness is the understanding of, and the ability to manipulate, the individual sounds in words. This ability has been linked to word decoding skills and long-term reading achievement. Thus, in order to prevent future reading disabilities, understanding how children suspected of having a reading disability respond to phonemic awareness instruction is critical. This study sheds light on who benefits most from phonemic awareness instruction and which instructional conditions (e.g., group size, intervention provider, etc.) produce the greatest effects on student reading outcomes. This study is a large-scale meta-analysis; the researchers synthesized data from 138 studies, ensuring broad coverage of existing research and empirical evidence on the topic.

Report original data collected using an experimental or quasi-experimental design

Be published in a peer-reviewed journal or available as an accepted thesis or dissertation

The researchers searched seven databases to identify all studies that met these criteria. The researchers assessed all included studies for quality by identifying potential threats to validity.

By tracking these variables across 138 studies, the researchers were able to use a random effects model to examine the relationships between intervention characteristics and student outcomes. Estimates of the average effect size of the interventions on student outcomes were reported. In addition, the researchers calculated and reported statistical heterogeneity within the dataset through subgroup analyses.

Meta-analysis: Ameta-analysis synthesizes the results of separate studies addressing the same research question by systematically identifying and evaluating studies on a certain phenomenon, pooling their data and conducting statistical analyses, and interpreting the collective results.

Rehfeld, D. M., Kirkpatrick, M., O'Guinn, N., Renbarger, R. (2022). A meta-analysis of phonemic awareness instruction provided to children suspected of having a reading disability. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 53, 1177-1201. https://doi.org/10.1044/2022_LSHSS-21-00160

Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences. New York, NY: Routledge Academic.

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Research Article of the Month: November 2023

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This meta-analysis by Rehfeld et al. (2022) uncovers the effects of phonemic awareness instruction for students suspected of having a reading disability.

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23 b. Vocabulary graphic organizer - POSSUM

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23 b. Vocabulary graphic organizer - POSSUM

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Have you heard the buzz about Structured Word Inquiry (SWI)? Are you curious how Structured Word Inquiry answers the call for Structured Literacy for our students with dyslexia? No one can explain it better than Gina Cooke does in the following article, Is This OG?, from Linguist-Educator Exchange. But you must read it, and I mean read it carefully, with an open mind and an understanding that we do the best we can with the information we have at the time. So, what will you do with the new information you are about to acquire?
Many thanks to Gina Cooke for allowing us to repost her amazing article!
Is This OG?

by Gina Cooke, Ph.D. candidate and founder of LEX: Linguist~Educator Exchange

I first learned about Orton-Gillingham in 1999, at a college fair where I was staffing a booth for my alma mater. The woman at the table next to me was an OG tutor, and she described her work as "teaching English phonology to kids with dyslexia." As a teacher, I had never heard of OG, and had only heard the common myths about dyslexia. As a linguist, I had heard of phonology - the way a language organizes its sound system - and teaching it to help children who struggled with reading sounded like the perfect job for me. With a lot of serendipity and a little hard work, I soon found a highly reputable OG training program near my home, and signed up.

I was fortunate to study with two well-known Orton-Gillingham trainers, both of whom had long been active members of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA). Both were Fellows in the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators, and I could trace my OG "genealogy" back through them directly to both Dr. Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, the psychiatrist and psychologist who first developed the teaching approach. I still show this lineage to the tutors I train now, more than a decade later. I've always been proud to be part of a field with such a rich tradition of rigorous teacher training and the enormous rewards of helping struggling children to become more literate.

After a couple of years of teaching children with an OG approach, I also began to teach other teachers about it as a conference speaker and teacher trainer. I got involved with IDA, and began to understand the teaching approach as Multisensory Structured Language Education, a more comprehensive and descriptive term than Orton- Gillingham. Regardless of the name, I saw that the approach made a difference not only for children who were struggling with literacy, but also for teachers who were struggling to teach it. Whenever I trained teachers, whether in year-long clinical training programs, school in-services, or in conference presentations, I emphasized two central aspects of our joint work: the distinctive features of the approach, and the pattern-recognition strengths of the dyslexic brain.

According to the IDA's Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading, "Effective instruction employs instructional approaches . . . that are explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multisensory. They integrate the teaching of listening, speaking, reading, spelling, vocabulary, fluency, handwriting, and written expression. These approaches also emphasize the structure of language: phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax, and semantics" (http://www.interdys.org/standards.htm, my emphasis). In my own early Orton-Gillingham training course and in the training I provided for other teachers, phonology - the sound structure of a language - was always prioritized as the primary aspect of reading and spelling in English, just as it is in the IDA standards, and just as it had been by my college fair neighbor more than a decade ago. Phonology always gets first billing in the research and in the standards in the field, before orthography (the writing system) and morphology (the meaning structure of words).

Teaching English phonology goes a long way toward helping children become better readers, and the field of dyslexia remediation prides itself on its research foundation that highlights phonological awareness as a core factor in successful reading instruction. However, things aren't so clear when it comes to spelling; being able to read a word is no guarantee of being able to spell it, and spelling words based on the way they are pronounced can be disastrous for English. Over the years of working with dyslexic children, I noticed that their reading generally improved significantly, but their spelling continued to lag behind.

Teachers I trained also became much more confident about teaching reading, but struggled to help students understand why some words are spelled with, for example, an <ee> digraph, while others are spelled with an <ea>. Homophones like <feet> and <feat> or <heel> and <heal> were not difficult for reading, but children and teachers alike struggled to understand and explain their different spellings. I spent years training teachers to train children that there are just some words (a whole lot of words) that just have to be memorized. Some children were successful memorizing such words, but most of them were not, and their overall spelling skills remained relatively poor.

In 2008, however, I was introduced to WordWorks ( www.wordworkskingston.com) and Real Spelling ( www.realspelling.com) through one of my principle OG trainers, and began an ongoing correspondence with their respective authors (see WordWorks founder Pete Bowers's article in this same issue of The Examiner). Unlike the teachers and trainers I had worked with in OG, these two experts seemed to know a lot more about the linguistic structure of written English than I did. Because my graduate studies were in linguistics and not in education, I had grown used to having a deeper understanding of language structure than most of my colleagues, even those who had trained me. But this conversation was different in a few important ways.

First, dyslexia remediation and the research base in the field tend to start with reading and include spelling as a secondary piece (Moats 2009), but WordWorks and Real Spelling started with spelling. Second, my OG training had shaped my understanding of orthography as simply spelling rules and generalizations, like when to use a <ck> and when to use a <k>, but my new correspondents understood the orthography to be the whole of the writing system itself, "human thought made visible as text" (see Real Spelling Concept Model). Third, Orton-Gillingham typically reserved morphology as an advanced topic, one to approach with older or more proficient students, once the phonology had been mastered, but I was beginning to understand morphology as the "defining and delimiting principle" of English spelling (Real Spelling), without which the phonology cannot be properly understood. For example, the letters <ea> in <reach> behave differently than the letters <ea> in <react> - and that difference is governed by the morphology, by the two different morphological elements <re> + <act>.

The most important difference, however, between my dialogue with WordWorks and Real Spelling and my previous OG training lay in the way that my interlocutors supported their assertions about language. Whereas professionals in my field generally cited a few specific authors when it came to questions about morphology or phonology, WordWorks and Real Spelling laid out linguistic evidence to support their claims about how English writes its words. They showed me word sums and word matrices that made explicit the systematic structures of the written word - the very thing that OG claims to do.

That 2008 correspondence absolutely changed my life. It changed my understanding, and it certainly changed my practice as a teacher and as a trainer. The following spring, I traveled to France for a Real Spelling study week, and in the summer, I attended a three-day WordWorks seminar. In the fall, I began a PhD program, which is now nearing its completion with a dissertation on English spelling. This extended study continues to transform my understanding of and approach to the written word, and my ongoing research continues to change the way I teach children and train teachers about English. Whereas most OG practitioners have a bank of words for memorization - often called sight words, learned words, red words, or non-phonetic words - the teachers and students I work with investigate the internal structures of words to find an understanding and an explanation for the ways words are spelled. They look for the meaningful structures in words - the bases, the prefixes, and the suffixes - and for meaningful connections between words that share historical (or etymological) relationships. Not only does their spelling improve, but they are also better equipped to read for meaning, not just for pronunciation.

Consider the examples I gave earlier of <heel> and <heal>, <feet> and <feat>. Rather than teaching students to memorize these pairs of homophones, we show them that the <ea> digraph can be pronounced in different ways, highlighting the relationship between heal and health. The <ee> spelling doesn't work the same way; *<heelth> wouldn't work for the 'short-e' pronunciation of health. Likewise, a relationship with <foot> clarifies the choice of spelling for <feet> (not <feat>) - many words with the <ee> digraph are related to words with <oo> or <o>. Some of these relationships are obvious, as in feet and foot; others are less so, as in heel and hock, or deem and doom (both denote 'judgement'), or heed and hood (both denote 'cover'). On the whole, children and teachers enjoy engaging with the stories of language, and the ways in which it makes sense. Finding patterns and structures is a strength for many dyslexics; by teaching the patterns and structures that govern spelling choice, we can exploit this strength to remediate the weakness of poor spelling. In so doing, we not only teach the spelling of specific words, but we pursue a study of the orthography - the writing system - as a whole. Along the way, children have the opportunity not only to learn how words are spelled but why they are spelled that way, and to develop a deeper understanding of their meanings, whether for reading or for spelling.

These perspectives have sometimes been difficult for others in my field to swallow, and I've been questioned on more than one occasion about the changes in my understanding and in my practice. "Yes, but is this OG?" other practitioners have sometimes asked me. Teachers I train have struggled to explain to parents just what it is they do with word study, because a traditional understanding of Orton-Gillingham might not convey an accurate picture. I have had countless conversations with my OG colleagues about whether or not our approach can continue to be called OG, or multisensory structured language education, the "effective . . . instructional approaches" as laid out in IDA's Knowledge and Practice Standards above.

Over the course of these conversations through the past five years, I've begun to be able to articulate my understanding of why this emergent perspective on teaching the English writing system matters so much.

Science-based reading research has worked with a phonological emphasis for more than 50 years, but in the English writing system, morphology, etymology, and phonology share the role of organizing the language. I'm not suggesting that phonology doesn't matter; on the contrary, it matters a great deal, and that's why we need to know that for spelling and reading, phonology can only be properly understood within a morphological framework. The tools of the word sum and word matrix (see Bowers, this issue) lend themselves readily to the multisensory, synthetic, analytic, diagnostic, systematic, and explicit study of language structure (Bowers & Cooke 2012).

Dyslexia studies and multisensory structured language education are dynamic fields, based on ongoing scientific research. Any scientific understanding is always pending further evidence; being a scientist means that one must be willing to revise one's perspectives if a more elegant explanation can be found (see http:// wordworkskingston.com/WordWorks/Seeking_the_Elegant_Solution_files/elegance imperative.pdf). Emergent research indicates the literacy benefits of studying morphology for all students, especially the youngest and the most at-risk (Bowers & Kirby 2010, Bowers, Kirby & Deacon 2010, Carlisle 2010). Just as the research in the field continues, our understanding must also continue to evolve.

Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham were pioneers. In the early days of this field, they and their colleagues refused to accept the conventional wisdom of their day, which designated children who failed to acquire literacy as mentally retarded or ineducable. Instead, they put themselves to the task of figuring out how such children actually learned, and how the language itself worked. During her lifetime, Anna Gillingham revised her teaching manual and her teacher training multiple times in order to reflect the most current understanding of the English language (McClelland 1989). Like our predecessors, those of us working today owe it to the field and the people it serves to continually seek to refine our understanding and our teaching.

When people ask me "Is this OG?" I tell them that it depends on what they mean by OG. If what they mean is a stagnant approach that looks exactly the same now as it did 40, 50, or 60 years ago, then no, it isn't. If what they mean is an approach to teaching language structure that is informed by emergent research, then yes, it is. As a teacher of both children and teachers, I want to be an example of someone whose learning is not static, someone who rises to the challenge of new learning, even when it's not comfortable or familiar.

After all, as I mentioned, I've always been proud to be part of a field with such a rich tradition of rigorous teacher training and the enormous rewards of helping struggling children to become more literate.

References

Bowers, P. N., & Kirby, J. R. (2010). Effects of morphological instruction on vocabulary acquisition. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23, 515-537.

Bowers, P.N., Cooke, G. (2012, Fall). Morphology and the Common Core: Building students' understanding of the Written Word. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 31-35.

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, 144-179.

Carlisle, F. (2010). Effects of instruction on morphological awareness on literacy achievement: An integrative review. Reading Research Quarterly, 45, 464-487.

McClelland, J. (1989) "Gillingham: Contemporary After 76 Years." Annals of Dyslexia, 49, 3-49.

Moats, L.C. (2009) "Knowledge Foundations for Teaching Reading and Spelling." Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 22.4, 379-399.

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Have you heard the buzz about Structured Word Inquiry (SWI)? Are you curious how Structured Word Inquiry answers the call for Structured Literacy for our students with dyslexia? No one can explain it better than Gina Cooke does in the following article, Is This OG?, from Linguist-Educator Exchange.

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Resources for Empowering Your Dyslexia Child | Explaining Brains

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5 b. Play Roly - Free, at-home early reading activities

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5 b. Play Roly - Free, at-home early reading activities

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Fun, short videos to help young children develop early reading skills in just two minutes a day with our Play Roly videos.

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34. b. Equitable Education for Students with Reading Disabilities - A Systemic Investigation Report Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission

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34. b. Equitable Education for Students with Reading Disabilities - A Systemic Investigation Report Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission

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Equitable Education for Students with Reading Disabilities - Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission

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In June 2020, the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission received a group complaint on behalf of 29 families, all with children who have been professionally diagnosed with dyslexia. The families alleged that eight school divisions discriminated against their children on the basis of disability (dyslexia and other disabilities) and that the school divisions violated their children's right to fair and equitable access to education.

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Free Decodable Story Generator for the Science of Reading

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Generate a decodable story compatible with any Science of Reading-based phonics curriculum for free. Download a student-friendly PDF in seconds.

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32. Classroom Reading Groups: What Works and What Doesn’t

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32. Classroom Reading Groups: What Works and What Doesn’t

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Every year, early elementary teachers welcome students with a wide range of reading abilities into their classrooms. Some kindergarteners may be reading whole books, for example, while others don't know their letters.

For decades, a popular way to address this broad scope of student need has been leveled reading groups. Teachers group students at similar achievement levels to provide guided instruction in books deemed just right for their abilities, spending time with each group of students in their class every day.

But mounting evidence suggests that this practice doesn't improve struggling students' reading skills. Studies have shown that the tools powering popular leveling systems don't always accurately capture students' abilities-and that dividing up high- and low-performing students can actually widen achievement gaps.

These findings leave teachers and school leaders with a few big questions: Should they get rid of grouping altogether? If not, how do they group students if not by level? And how should they go about restructuring literacy blocks that have been designed around leveled group time for so long?

"Understanding the research base on this is a tricky endeavor," said Kristin Conradi Smith, an associate professor of reading education at the College of William & Mary's School of Education.

Leveled reading groups aren't an effective practice. But that doesn't mean that all grouping has to go, she said.

Researchers who study reading groups say that ability grouping can be effective under certain conditions-if the practice focuses on specific skills that students need work on rather than general reading levels, and if the groups are flexible enough so that students can move once they have mastered those skills.

They also point to the benefits of other types of small group instruction, like mixed-ability grouping and partner work.

Grouping students can be "extremely powerful," said Matt Burns, a professor of special education at the University of Missouri's College of Education & Human Development. "It's especially effective for [lower-performing] kids; we see more growth."

Critiques of leveled reading groups

Leveled reading groups are a component of some of the most popular early literacy curricula. In a 2020 EdWeek Research Center survey, 61 percent of K-2 teachers said that they use leveled texts in small group work.

To determine their reading "level," teachers give students an assessment, usually listening to them read and recording the number and type of errors that they make. This level is designed to measure overall reading comprehension ability, rather than component skills like decoding or fluency.

The goal with leveled reading groups is to meet students where they are, giving them enough challenge to grow their abilities, but not so much that the lesson becomes too difficult.

But research from Burns and his colleagues has shown that the leveling system doesn't actually achieve that goal.

"If the test says they're at a particular level, we don't really know if that's true or not," he said.

In part, that's because "kids who are supposedly at the same level actually have very different skill profiles," Burns said.

Levels only offer a determination of general comprehension ability, which can mask differences in students' underlying challenges. For example, two students could both be at the same low reading level, but one might have trouble with decoding, while the other struggles with vocabulary, requiring different kinds of support.

Educators and researchers alike have also long criticized leveling as a kind of tracking that makes it difficult for lower-performing students to ever catch up.

An evidence-backed option: skill-based groups

Still, there is a type of differentiation that can help struggling students make progress, researchers say: skill-based grouping.

Instead of assigning students a general comprehension level, skill-based grouping seeks to pinpoint, and address, the specific challenges that students have.

Imagine a teacher has five students who need support around segmenting and blending sounds, but the other students in the class have already mastered that skill, said Sharon Vaughn, a professor in the department of special education at the University of Texas at Austin's College of Education.

"We don't need to reteach that lesson to the whole class," Vaughn said. "We can deliberately put our instruction on the point of need for students."

Putting together skill-based groups requires different assessments than those teachers would use for leveled reading, Burns said. Teachers should use tests that can identify specific skill deficits-such as decoding inventories or fluency screeners, he said.

But informal observations can also play a role here, said Stephanie Al Otaiba, a professor of teaching and learning at Southern Methodist University's Simmons School of Education & Human Development. Teachers can incorporate information they've collected about students' understanding of academic language, for example.

These targeted small groups allow teachers to provide extra modeling and give students immediate feedback on the skills they struggle with the most, Burns said.

When students start mastering skills, then it's time to retool group composition, said Burns, suggesting that teachers could reshape groups every other week based on assessment data.

These assessments can be short, he said-for example, having students read 10 words that feature sound patterns that were just taught.

When mixed-ability groups can be useful

Some instructional goals are best met in skill-based groups, researchers said.

Students should only practice specific, discrete skills-such as the /oi/ sound, for example-if they haven't mastered those skills yet. If they have, "that additional practice might not be as beneficial," said Vaughn.

But other activities might be better executed in mixed-ability groups, Vaughn said. Take, for instance, small group discussions after listening to a read-aloud together as a whole class. Having students of varying abilities can be beneficial in this context, she said, because they bring different perspectives to the table.

"A range of knowledge about a word enhances everyone's understanding of that word," said Vaughn. "A range of knowledge of language use enhances everyone's knowledge about language use."

Discussing text in heterogeneous groups can also ensure that all students get access to grade-level material, said Tiffany Young, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at Doane University in Crete, Neb.

Young taught elementary reading for a decade before she entered academia. She used leveled reading groups as part of her practice with students at the time.

"The more I taught, the more I realized, they can't move to higher levels if they're not being taught at that level," Young said. "Students can't learn something they're not exposed to."

Experimental studies suggest that weaker readers can benefit from reading complex texts, in part because it helps them further develop subject-matter knowledge-knowledge that can then, in turn, support their comprehension of future texts. Pairing weaker and stronger readers to read together as partners, specifically, is supported by studies, too.

"Instead, we need to think this way: How do we differentiate our teaching so that we bridge the gap for each student between what they know and can do and what they need to know and do in order to access the text that is at their grade level, or above?" she said.

Vaughn raised a final benefit to mixed-ability groups: opportunities for kids to form connections with more of their peers.

"These fixed-ability groups also fix, in a way, friendship groups," she said.

Addressing logistical challenges

"Not in terms of money," they write, "but in terms of management and planning."

For skill-based small groups to work well, teachers need to spend time analyzing assessment data and organizing other activities for the rest of the class to do during a group rotation. There are ways to tackle these challenges, though.

In most early elementary classrooms, Conradi Smith said, the group work portion of a literacy block can take anywhere from one to two hours, with the teachers spending about 20 minutes with every group. She would recommend less time-up to an hour total, with the teacher spending about 15 minutes with each group. Burns suggests something similar, with 10 to 15 minutes per group.

These are just recommendations, Conradi Smith said, as the research base on grouping provides "surprisingly little detail or guidelines."

Figuring out timing is a delicate operation, she said. Teachers want to allot enough time to each group to provide individualized feedback. But when the teacher is with one small group, the rest of the students in the class are on their own. Small group time shouldn't be so long that students are working independently for the majority of the literacy period, Conradi Smith said.

Some schools are getting creative with scheduling, planning for small group time to occur when another adult can also be in the room-a reading specialist, or an English learner teacher, for example, she said. Districts could also use trained volunteers, she added.

In elementary schools near Virginia's William & Mary, where Conradi Smith works, college students drop in to help during small group time. "Whether they're college students or other volunteers, I think we're going to need to look beyond just the reading specialist to think through, how can we have some other adults in the classroom who can support?" Conradi Smith said.

If there aren't other adults available, students should be given assignments to work on by themselves or with peers that come with clear directions and some modeling, she said.

Finally, these activities should align with what teachers are providing in whole group instruction. "Whatever students are doing, it needs to be activities that allow them to apply the knowledge and skills that they have learned," said Young.

If students are independently reading, for example, they should be encouraged to apply their decoding skills-rather than relying on the pictures in the book to infer the story's meaning, she said.

Planning and executing small group time while considering all of these factors is difficult, Conradi Smith said. But she thinks that schools could lose an important opportunity if they toss out all types of grouping in a rush to get rid of leveled reading.

"I think we always want to be sure that we're meeting the needs of our students," she said. "It could become a problem if we're not able to help some of our students catch up."

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Classroom Reading Groups: What Works and What Doesn't

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Studies show that leveled reading groups don't support struggling students. So what should grouping look like in the reading classroom?

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57 b. Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction - A Toolkit for Educators

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57 b. Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction - A Toolkit for Educators

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6 b. Core Phonics Survey - progress monitoring (6 forms)

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6 b. Core Phonics Survey - progress monitoring (6 forms)

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For the past two years I have been working at an international school. It is wonderful to work with and teach learners from such diverse backgrounds and cultures. The new challenge for me has been working with many learners whose first language is not English, and I have embraced this opportunity to work on an area that I wasn't exposed to as much while teaching in the UK.

I recently took an 8 week BML (bilingual and multilingual learners) course. There were some useful strategies that I picked up and started implementing in my classes. While flicking through the book of strategies, this one on Greek and Latin roots immediately caught my attention.

In Science so many of the words that we use in our lessons are derived from Greek and Latin roots, and while I sometimes make a point of linking to words we have used before (for example when discussing protostars, I make the link to prototype), I really wanted to start going deeper into root words with my classes.

As with many strategies, what is recommended for a specific group of learners is usually also good to use with other learners as well. I will not be restricting the usage of root word exploration to my English as a second language learners, but I will be using it in all of my classes across all year groups.

To that end, I started making root word cards which I will place around my teaching lab. I have made 55 cards so far, but this is a work in progress and I will be adding more as I think of them.

SET 1. You can access the pdf of the first 26 cards here:

SET 2. You can access the pdf of the next 14 cards here:

Update: October 28th 2022. SET 3. You can access the pdf of cards 41-55 here:

Update: November 20th 2022. SET 4. You can access the pdf of cards 56-70 here:

Update: December 17th 2022. SET 5. You can access the pdf of cards 71-85 here:

I will continue working on these cards as I think of some new words to include, and I am sure I have forgotten some very obvious ones in the process! I am always open to feedback, so do let me know what you think.

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For the past two years I have been working at an international school. It is wonderful to work with and teach learners from such diverse backgrounds and cultures. The new challenge for me has been working with many learners whose first language is not English, and I have embraced this opportunity to work on an...

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95 c. UFLI Blending Board and Word Work Mat

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95 c. UFLI Blending Board and Word Work Mat

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Virtual Blending Board

The Virtual Blending Board should be used in most lessons during Step 4: Blending Drill. The Virtual Blending Board is designed for the teacher to project and manipulate, while students build their decoding automaticity by reading the words the teacher forms. To set up the Virtual Blending Board for a lesson, use the grapheme grid provided in the lesson plan to identify the letters you'll need. Then, use the word chain provided to build words for your students to decode. The tutorial video provides more detailed information for how to set up and use the Virtual Blending Board.

Virtual Blending Board

Virtual Blending Board Tutorial

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The Virtual Blending Board should be used in most lessons during Step 4: Blending Drill. The Virtual Blending Board is designed for the teacher to project and manipulate, while students build their decoding automaticity by reading the words the teacher forms. To set up the Virtual Blending Board for a lesson, use the grapheme grid provided in the lesson plan to identify the letters you'll need.

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3. A Brief History of Reading Instruction

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3. A Brief History of Reading Instruction

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Updated: Dec 23, 2021

For more than a century, reading instruction has been involved in a high-stakes battle between supporters of two opposing methods for teaching a child to read. While this battle is often characterized as "Phonics" versus "Whole Word," I think it's more accurate to describe the two methodologies as "Bottom-Up" versus "Top-Down." (Alternatively, "Parts-to-Whole" versus "Whole-to-Parts").

Top-down methods start instruction with whole words - typically called "sight words." The child rote-memorizes a cache of such words based on their visual characteristics rather than on the sound value of their individual letters. The reason I don't like calling this battle "Phonics" versus "Whole Word" is there are several types of phonics that are top-down in their orientation. Analogy phonics, analytic phonics, and onset-rime phonics all require that the child memorize a large collection of sight words before such phonics can commence. (For a more complete description of all these types of phonics, see this blog.)

The only bottom-up method that exists is a specific type of phonics called Synthetic Phonics. Here instruction starts, not with whole words, but with the most basic sounds in English, called phonemes. These phonemes are connected to the letters ( graphemes) that symbolize them in our alphabetic system. Whole words are then built (bottom-up) by blending these individual sounds. (For more on Synthetic Phonics, see here.) (For a more thorough definition of phoneme and grapheme, see here.)

The two methods are not compatible. One starts with the final product (a whole word) and then may (or may not) eventually get down to the phoneme-grapheme level; the other starts with phonemes and graphemes and then builds up to a whole word. Top-down methods stress "meaning" from the start; the bottom-up method stresses knowledge of the code as a necessary condition for reading comprehension. (See the Simple View of Reading here.)

It may surprise some readers to find out that the battle between various top-down methods and synthetic phonics has been going on since the mid-nineteenth century. Here, then, is a short history of reading instruction from the viewpoint of one (somewhat biased) observer. (Spoiler: synthetic phonics - the bottom-up method - has been losing this battle for a long time.)

McGuffey then reveals his bias against a strict Word approach:

1900 - 1930: A transitional period. The Beacon Readers, an improved phonics series, gradually supplants the McGuffey Readers. In the Beacon Readers, the sound of individual letters (phonics) is taught from the start, as well as memorization of whole words:

"It should be clearly understood that at first there must be two distinct lines of teaching carried on side by side: (1) the drill upon phonetic lists for the purpose of developing phonetic power in the child; (2) the reading of simple lessons [stories], mainly by the Word method, until the child's power in phonetics is far enough advanced to enable him to apply it in his reading." [2]

"Even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page, provided that those express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has been real... The shock that such a statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of the hold that a false ideal has taken of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is upon the page, instead of to think, each in his own way, the meaning that the page suggests...It may even be necessary, if the reader is to really tell what the page suggests, to tell it in words that are somewhat variant; for reading is always in the nature of translation and, to be truthful, it must be free." [3] (emphasis mine)

"That it will be the part of wisdom to curtail phonetic instruction in the first grade very greatly is strongly implied; indeed, it is not improbable that it should be eliminated entirely." [4]

By 1930, phonics - meaning explicit teaching of the code - has been abandoned in most of the nation's classrooms.

Logically enough, this Whole Word method becomes known as Look/Say. Once children learn 30-50 sight words in this manner, they are given repetitive readers consisting largely of these exact words. An unknown word in these readers is accompanied by a picture to allow its identification. The most famous basal reader of this period is the beautifully illustrated Dick and Jane series. See above for a sampling from a "story" from this series, whose main purpose is to drill sight words.

"Memorizing or guessing the meaning of whole words is not reading; on the contrary, it is an acquired bad habit that stands in the way of your child's ever learning to read properly... My advice is, teach your child yourself how to read." [5]

Unfortunately, the phonics program offered by Flesch, taking up the final third of his book, is inadequate. There are only two pages of instructions, followed by page after page of nothing but word lists. The publication of this book ignites the "Reading Wars," a battle over how to teach beginning reading that, to this day, remains unresolved.

"The results are better, not only in terms of the mechanical aspect of literacy alone, but also in terms of the ultimate goals of reading instruction - comprehension and possibly even speed of reading. The long-existing fear that an initial code emphasis produces readers who do not read for meaning, or with enjoyment, is unfounded. On the contrary, the evidence indicates that better results in terms of reading for meaning are achieved with the programs that emphasize code right at the start..." [6]

"The pronunciation of a visually presented word involves assigning to a sequence of letters some kind of acoustic or articulatory coding. There are presumably two alternative ways in which this coding can be assigned. First, the pronunciation could be computed by application of a set of grapheme-phoneme rules, or letter-sound correspondence rules. This coding can be carried out independently of any consideration of the meaning or familiarity of the letter sequence, as in the pronunciation of previously unencountered sequences, such as ﬂitch, mantiness and streep. Alternatively, the pronunciation may be determined by searching long-term memory for stored information about how to pronounce familiar letter sequences, obtaining the necessary information by a direct dictionary look-up, instead of rule application. Obviously, this procedure would work only for familiar words."

Note: In the 80s, 90s, and 00s, this theory will be further refined by reading researchers Max Coltheart, Mark Seidenberg, and James McClelland, leading (by 2005) to general acceptance of Coltheart's Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model of word recognition.

1981: Rudolf Flesch publishes Why Johnny Still Can't Read, again condemning the Whole Word method, as well as the analytic phonics that it now includes. Looking back over the 26 years since he published his first book, he criticizes analytic phonics as being "a minimum of phonics, served up in a look-and-say sauce of context clues and guesswork." [7]

"That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties in which they threw out phonics and went to word recognition, as if you're reading Chinese pictographs instead of blending sounds of different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country."

"It would seem that many of the characteristics of direct phonics, such as teaching letter sounds directly, separating the letter sounds from the words, giving practice in blending the sounds, and so forth, are more effective than the less direct procedures used in current analytic phonics programs." [9]

Developed by Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith in the 1970's, Whole Language differs from Look/Say in some fundamental ways. First, it rejects the boring, artificial, and repetitive readers of the Look/Say era, claiming to replace those readers with real children's stories. (Those stories, however, are read to the children. What the children read initially are repetitive "little books" whose main function is to drill sight words.) Second, phonics, understood as explicit, systematic teaching of the full code, is outright rejected. According to Goodman, "matching letters with sounds (decoding) is a flat-earth view of the world, since it rejects modern science about reading and writing and how they develop." [10] Frank Smith is just as adamant: "Reliance on phonics - or spelling-to-sound correspondence - is dysfunctional in fluent reading and interferes with learning to read." [11]

Third, writing is emphasized at the earliest stages of learning to read, even if it requires, as it must, "invented spelling." Fourth, learning to read is to be as easy and natural as learning to speak. Children will discover the necessary letter/sound relationships as they read books and express themselves in writing, using their invented spellings. Finally, an unfamiliar word is to be identified, not by sounding it out, but by "asking somebody what the word is" - or by guessing what the word might be using context or "similarity to words that are already known." [12]

Despite its differences with Look/Say, Whole Language is another top-down approach for teaching reading. In the first couple years of instruction, reading consists largely of memorizing sight words and guessing - with some incidental phonics taught on an as-needed basis. Ken Goodman is famous for his characterization of reading as "a psycholinguistic guessing game." [13] For Frank Smith, guessing - in the sense of making predictions and thus eliminating unlikely alternatives - "is the most efficient manner in which to read and learn to read." [14] Whole Language spreads throughout the US at an unprecedented pace, even though there is no research whatever for its effectiveness.

1983: Reading researchers David Share and Anthony Jorm propose their Self-Teaching Hypothesis (further elaborated in 1995 by Share). Recognizing that skilled, educated readers have a sight word vocabulary of 60,000 or more words, and that such a feat would be impossible via rote-memorization or via guessing based on context, Jorm and Share propose that only the independent decoding of unknown words could explain the ability of skilled readers. Such decoding depends on only two factors: knowledge of letter/sound (phoneme/grapheme) relationships and the ability to blend an unknown word's individual sounds (phonemes) into a recognizable pronunciation. Share calls these twin co-requisites the sine qua non of reading acquisition [15]. This places Share and Jorm in direct opposition to Whole Language methodology.

1986: Reading researchers Philip Gough and William Tunmer propose their Simple View of Reading. Under the Simple View, reading comprehension (RC) is the product of two independent factors: word recognition (WR) and language comprehension (LC). The model states succinctly: RC = WR x LC. Word recognition, made possible by decoding, thus takes its rightful place as a necessary (though by itself, insufficient) condition for reading comprehension to occur. This places Gough and Tunmer in direct opposition to Whole Language methodology. [ Note: my separate blog on the Simple View can be found here.]

1998: Reading researcher Linnea Ehri proposes four phases of sight word learning [18]. Her studies reveal that it is only when beginning readers can form "complete connections" between all the letters (graphemes) seen in a word's written form and all the sounds (phonemes) heard in its spoken form, that sight word learning becomes unconscious and automatic - a process she calls orthographic mapping. This re-emphasizes the importance of knowing grapheme/phoneme correspondences and being able to blend (decode) unknown words by sounding them out. Share's Self-Teaching Hypothesis and Ehri's complement each other. Both theories are in direct opposition to Whole Language.

Because this report is such a thorough rejection of 25 years of Whole Language methodology, I think it best to allow the Panel members to speak for themselves. The numbers after the quote use the pagination found in the Final Report, available online here.

"Systematic phonics instruction makes a bigger contribution to children's growth in reading than alternative programs providing unsystematic or no phonics instruction." (2-92)

"The hallmark of systematic phonics programs is that they delineate a planned, sequential set of phonic elements [letter-sound correspondences] and that they teach these elements explicitly... A key feature that distinguishes systematic phonics instruction from nonsystematic phonics is in the identification of a full array of letter-sound correspondences to be taught. The array includes not only the major correspondences between consonant letters and sounds but also short and long-vowel letters and sounds, and vowel and consonant digraphs (e.g., oi, ea, ou, sh, ch, th)... Learning vowel and digraph spelling patterns is harder for children; therefore, special attention is devoted to learning these relations." (2-99)

"Phonics instruction, taught early, proved much more effective than phonics instruction introduced after first grade... Phonics instruction produces the biggest impact on growth in reading when it begins in kindergarten or 1st grade, before children have learned to read independently." (2-93)

Stating that it is "not sufficient" simply to teach the code, the Panel offers three specific ways to apply code knowledge to reading and writing:

"Programs provide practice in various ways. Phonics programs may teach children decoding strategies that involve sounding out and blending individual letters and digraphs... Programs may provide children with text whose words can be decoded using the letter-sound relations already taught. Programs may have children write their own text using the letter-sounds relations already taught and then have children read their own and others' stories." (2-99) [emphasis added]

Stressing the importance of phonemic awareness (PA), the Panel strongly endorses two types of PA exercises: blending and segmenting. Both are to be done "with letters." The Panel does not endorse any type of "advanced" oral-only PA exercises such as phoneme deletion or phoneme substitution.

"PA training is more effective when it is taught by having children manipulate letters than when manipulation is limited to speech." (2-26)

"Teaching children to manipulate phonemes using letters produced bigger effects than teaching without letters. Blending and segmenting instruction showed a much larger effect size on reading than multiple-skill instruction did." (2-29)

"In the rush to teach phonemic awareness, it is important not to overlook the need to teach letters as well. The NRP analysis showed that PA instruction was more effective when it was taught with letters. Using letters to manipulate phonemes helps children make the transfer to reading and writing." (2-33)

The Panel goes out of its way to counter the notion that phonemic awareness training is something new, or something that should be done apart from phonics:

"It is important to note that when PA is taught with letters, it qualifies as phonics instruction. When PA training involves teaching students to pronounce the sounds associated with letters and to blend the sounds to form words, it qualifies as synthetic phonics. When PA training involves teaching students to segment words into phonemes and to select letters for those phonemes, it is the equivalent of teaching students to spell words phonemically, which is another form of phonics instruction. These methods of teaching phonics existed long before they became identified as forms of phonemic awareness training. Although teaching children to manipulate sounds in spoken words may be new, phonemic awareness training that involves segmenting and blending with letters is not. Only the label is new." (2-34)

Contrasted with the above approval of systematic phonics, blending (with letters), and segmenting (with letters), the Panel presents a strong critique of Whole Language:

"Beginning reading programs that do not teach phonics explicitly and systematically may be of several types. In Whole Language programs, the emphasis is upon meaning-based reading and writing activities. Phonics instruction is integrated into these activities but taught incidentally as teachers decide it is needed." (2-90)

"Whole Language teachers typically provide some instruction in phonics, usually as part of invented spelling activities or through the use of grapheme-to-phoneme prompts during reading. However, their approach is to teach it unsystematically and incidentally in context as the need arises... Whole language teachers believe that phonics instruction should be integrated into meaningful reading, writing, listening, and speaking activities and taught incidentally when they perceive it is needed. As children attempt to use written Language for communication, they will discover naturally what they need to know about letter-sound relationships and how letters function in reading and writing." (2-102)

"The conclusion drawn is that growth in word-reading skills is strongly enhanced by systematic phonics instruction when compared to non-phonics instruction for kindergartners and 1st graders as well as for older struggling readers. Growth in reading comprehension is also boosted by systematic phonics instruction for younger students and reading disabled students. These findings should dispel any belief that teaching phonics systematically to young children interferes with their ability to read and comprehend text. Quite the opposite is the case." (2-94)

Unfortunately, the Panel's 14 experts are themselves divided on many matters of importance in reading instruction. One Panel member goes so far as to publish her own Minority Review, calling the work of her fellow Panel members "unbalanced and, to some extent, irrelevant." The disagreements result in a final report with a soothing call for "systematic" phonics (a planned, sequential set of letter-sound correspondences taught explicitly) and with an explicit approval of all types of phonics: the bottom-up method that is synthetic phonics, or top-down methods like analytic phonics, analogy phonics, and onset-rime phonics. (2-99) This makes it easy (and utterly predictable) for what happens next: supporters of Whole Language agree to embrace some ineffective top-down phonics, and they change the name of their method to Balanced Literacy.

Note: Balanced Literacy is described in detail in another blog on this site. Balanced Literacy is Whole Language, but now with a veneer of top-down phonics: analytic phonics and/or analogy phonics.

At the end of the 16-week program, the group taught by synthetic phonics were:

(a) reading words seven months ahead of the other two groups

(b) reading seven months ahead for their chronological age

(c) spelling eight to nine months ahead of the other groups

(d) spelling seven months ahead for their chronological age.

The synthetic-phonics-taught group also read irregular words better than the other groups and was the only group that could read unfamiliar words by analogy.

These 300 children were then followed for 7 additional years to see if these gains persisted. They not only persisted, they accelerated. By the end of the children's seventh year of primary schooling, the gains made in reading achievement by the children who had been taught synthetic phonics during their ﬁrst year had increased six-fold, increasing from seven months to three years and six months ahead of chronological age. The gain in spelling was 4.5-fold, improving from seven months to one year and nine months ahead of chronological age. (The full study can be found here.)

2005: Australia publishes its own national inquiry into the teaching of reading, available online here. The study closely follows the lead of the US National Reading Panel in that it rejects Whole Language and, in its place, recommends systematic phonics. Like the NRP, it also recommends an "integrated" approach to reading instruction that includes the Big Five: phonemic awareness, phonics, ﬂuency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

"Essentially, the whole-language approach to teaching and learning reﬂects a constructivist philosophy of learning in which children are viewed as inherently active, self-regulating learners who construct knowledge for themselves, with little or no explicit decoding instruction." (p28)

"Constructivism is a mixture of Piagetian stage theory with postmodernist ideology that is devoid of evidence-based justiﬁcation for its adoption as an effective method of teaching... Too many faculties and schools of education in Australian higher education institutions currently providing pre-service teacher education base their programs on constructivist views of teaching." (pp29-30)

"At the same time as constructivist approaches have been promoted, direct teaching methods have been overtly or covertly criticized and dismissed as inappropriate, with the suggestion that they simply don't work and are dull and boring for learners. The message that most teachers appear to have absorbed is that all direct teaching is old-fashioned and should be abandoned in favor of student-centered enquiry and activity-based learning." (p37)

My favorite quote from the Report, however, is this:

"In sum, the incontrovertible ﬁnding from the extensive body of local and international evidence-based literacy research is that for children during the early years of schooling to be able to link their knowledge of spoken language to their knowledge of written language, they must ﬁrst master the alphabetic code - the system of grapheme-phoneme correspondences that link written words to their pronunciations. Because these are both foundational and essential skills for the development of competence in reading, writing and spelling, they must be taught explicitly, systematically, early and well."

2006: Yet another national inquiry, the Rose Report, is published in England, available online here. Unlike the national reports published in the US and Australia, the Rose Report singles out and fully embraces only bottom-up synthetic phonics rather than the more inclusive umbrella term, "systematic" phonics:

"Synthetic phonics is the form of systematic phonics that offers the vast majority of beginners the best route to becoming skilled readers. Among other strengths, this is because it teaches children directly what they need to know, i.e. the four principles set out below, whereas other approaches, such as 'analytic' phonics, expect children to deduce them." (section 47)

The Rose Report is quite specific about what these four principles of synthetic phonics are: "Having considered a wide range of evidence, the review has concluded that the case for systematic phonic work is overwhelming and much strengthened by a synthetic approach, the key features of which are to teach beginner readers:

1) grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences (the alphabetic principle) in a clearly defined, incremental sequence

2) to apply the highly important skill of blending (synthesizing) phonemes in order, all through a word to read it

3) to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell

4) that blending and segmenting are reversible processes." (section 51)

The Rose Report also devotes an entire section (Appendix 1) to a discussion of the , a topic inexplicably missing from the national reports of the US and Australia.

The Rose Report is a game-changer for England. From this point on, reading instruction in England starts to diverge from that of the rest of the English-speaking world. The main reason is that the Rose Report avoids two pitfalls:

1) It opts specifically for the only bottom-up approach to reading instruction that exists: synthetic phonics. The reports from the US and Australia, in recommending only systematic phonics, left the door wide open for top-down forms of phonics (analytic and analogy phonics) to be grafted onto Whole Language. The result: Balanced Literacy.

2) It avoids making the anodyne call for the Big Five (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension), focusing attention instead on the . Those who understand the Simple View understand reading comprehension correctly: it's the product of both Word Recognition and Language Comprehension. Recognizing that, for most children, Language Comprehension is already age-appropriate, Synthetic Phonics teachers place an early emphasis on decoding - the skill that makes Word Recognition possible.

"Two information processing pathways coexist and supplement each other when we read. When words are regular, rare, or novel, we preferentially process them using a 'phonological route,' in which we first convert the letter string into a pronunciation, and then attempt to access the meaning of the sound pattern (if any). Conversely, when we are confronted with words that are frequent, or whose pronunciation is exceptional, our reading takes a direct route that first recovers the meaning of the word and then uses the lexical information to recover its pronunciation... Both routes are in constant collaboration and each contributes to the specification of word pronunciation." (p38)

"The goal of reading instruction is clear. It must aim to lay down an efficient neuronal hierarchy, so that the child can recognize letters and graphemes and easily turn them into speech sounds. All other aspects of the literate mind depend on this crucial step. There is no point in describing the delights of reading to children if they are not provided with the means to get there... Considerable research converges on the fact that grapheme-phoneme conversion radically transforms the child's brain. This [decoding] process must be taught explicitly. It does not develop spontaneously; it must be acquired. Reading via the direct route, which leads straight from letter strings to their meaning, only works after many years of practice using the phonological decoding route." (p219)

"Only the teaching of letter-to-sound conversion allows children to blossom, because only this method gives them the freedom to read novel words in any domain they choose. It is therefore misguided to pit the intellectual freedom of a child against rigorous drill. If a child is to learn quickly and well, he must be given well-structured grapheme-phoneme instruction. The effort is real, but the payoff in independence is immediate when children discover, often with awe, that they can decode words they never learned in class." (p227)

"Performance is best when children are, from the beginning, directly taught the mapping of letters onto speech sounds. Regardless of their social background, children who do not learn this suffer from reading delays." (p227)

The bottom line for Dehaene is this:

"The punch line is quite simple: we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal: the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby each letter or grapheme represents a phoneme... Children need to understand that only the analysis of letters one by one will allow them to discover a word's identity." (p228)

Last, Dehaene is adamant about using only decodable text in the early stages:

"At each step, the words and sentences introduced in class must only include graphemes and phonemes that have already been explicitly taught. Reading lessons provide little room for improvisation... The words given to beginning readers must be analyzed letter by letter in order to ensure that they do not contain spelling problems that are beyond the child's current knowledge." If teachers do not follow this advice, "it can make children think that reading is arbitrary and not worth studying." (p230)

With the single exception of England, the landscape for beginning reading instruction worldwide is disheartening: Balanced Literacy, lists of sight words to be memorized, three-cueing, guessing from pictures, guessing from a word's first letter, guessing what might make sense, invented spellings, reading levels, learning styles, "predictable" books, and, of course, "discovery" learning. Many of the teachers using these techniques know little of reading science because they were not exposed to it during their teacher training.

Reading teachers are far more likely to be familiar with Constructivist authors like Ken Goodman, Frank Smith, Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell, and Jennifer Serravallo than they are to be with serious researchers like Jeanne Chall, David Share, Philip Gough, Linnea Ehri, Max Coltheart, and Stanislas Dehaene. Few reading teachers are conversant about such essential topics as the Simple View of Reading, Dual-Route Theory, the Self-Teaching Hypothesis, and Orthographic Mapping.

Reading researcher Mark Seidenberg, in Language at the Speed of Sight, states "there is a profound disconnect between the science of reading and educational practice. Very little of what we've learned about reading as scientists has had any impact on what happens in schools because the cultures of science and education are so different." (p11) And, of course, big money is involved. "Education is a multi-billion-dollar industry involving multiple stakeholders - governments, business, educators, parents, children, taxpayers, unions, interest groups - whose perspectives and interests often conflict." (p11).

Take a look at the cost in the picture below (copied from an internet advertisement) for a single grade school to outfit a single grade 1 classroom with Balanced Literacy reading materials from Heinemann Publishing. Similar materials are marketed by Heinemann for each of grades K through 6. [Taxpayers: this is your money.]

In an interview with NPR, Seidenberg adds: "The Reading Wars are over, and science lost." I think, however, this statement may be a bit of hyperbole. Science has not lost in England where, with synthetic phonics and decodable books mandated, reading outcomes continue to improve. Many reformers, myself included, are not ready to concede defeat in this century-old battle between top-down and bottom-up instruction. Given the resources available online, any reading teacher or parent wishing to educate themself can, with some effort, do so.

According to the US Nation's Report Card, nearly two out of every three students in grades 4 and 8 do not read at a proficient level. Instead, they read at a "basic" level or they're functionally illiterate. Needless, easily avoidable suffering should be an affront to everyone. In primary schools around the English-speaking world, this type of suffering is endemic, due in large part to the top-down manner in which so many children are forced to learn the vital skill of reading. The Reading Wars cannot, and should not, be over. Reading Science, with more clarity now than it has ever had regarding reading instruction, can't afford to lose this battle; far too much is at stake.

Reading Teachers and Parents - My bottom-up Synthetic Phonics books are available, absolutely FREE (with no strings attached) right here. I invite you to download an appropriate copy for yourself and to help me spread the word. You can also find me on Twitter @ParkerPhonics. Thank you.

[1] William McGuffey, The Eclectic Manual of Methods (New York: Van Antwerp, Bragg, & Co, 1885), 24-26.

[7] Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Still Can't Read (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 5.

[8] Chall, Learning to Read, 43.

[15] Share, D.L. (1995) "Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition," Cognition, 55, 151-218.

[16] U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading

For more than a century, reading instruction has been involved in a high-stakes battle between supporters of two opposing methods for teaching a child to read. While this battle is often characterized as "Phonics" versus "Whole Word," I think it's more accurate to describe the two methodologies as "Bottom-Up" versus "Top-Down." (Alternatively, "Parts-to-Whole" versus "Whole-to-Parts").

Top-down methods start instruction with whole words - typically called "sight words." The child rote-memorizes a cache of such words based on their visual characteristics rather than on the sound value of their individual letters. The reason I don't like calling this battle "Phonics" versus "Whole Word" is there are several types of phonics that are top-down in their orientation. Analogy phonics, analytic phonics, and onset-rime phonics all require that the child memorize a large collection of sight words before such phonics can commence. (For a more complete description of all these types of phonics, see this blog.)

The only bottom-up method that exists is a specific type of phonics called Synthetic Phonics. Here instruction starts, not with whole words, but with the most basic sounds in English, called phonemes. These phonemes are connected to the letters ( graphemes) that symbolize them in our alphabetic system. Whole words are then built (bottom-up) by blending these individual sounds. (For more on Synthetic Phonics, see here.) (For a more thorough definition of phoneme and grapheme, see here.)

The two methods are not compatible. One starts with the final product (a whole word) and then may (or may not) eventually get down to the phoneme-grapheme level; the other starts with phonemes and graphemes and then builds up to a whole word. Top-down methods stress "meaning" from the start; the bottom-up method stresses knowledge of the code as a necessary condition for reading comprehension. (See the Simple View of Reading here.)

It may surprise some readers to find out that the battle between various top-down methods and synthetic phonics has been going on since the mid-nineteenth century. Here, then, is a short history of reading instruction from the viewpoint of one (somewhat biased) observer. (Spoiler: synthetic phonics - the bottom-up method - has been losing this battle for a long time.)

McGuffey then reveals his bias against a strict Word approach:

1900 - 1930: A transitional period. The Beacon Readers, an improved phonics series, gradually supplants the McGuffey Readers. In the Beacon Readers, the sound of individual letters (phonics) is taught from the start, as well as memorization of whole words:

"It should be clearly understood that at first there must be two distinct lines of teaching carried on side by side: (1) the drill upon phonetic lists for the purpose of developing phonetic power in the child; (2) the reading of simple lessons [stories], mainly by the Word method, until the child's power in phonetics is far enough advanced to enable him to apply it in his reading." [2]

"Even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page, provided that those express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has been real... The shock that such a statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of the hold that a false ideal has taken of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is upon the page, instead of to think, each in his own way, the meaning that the page suggests...It may even be necessary, if the reader is to really tell what the page suggests, to tell it in words that are somewhat variant; for reading is always in the nature of translation and, to be truthful, it must be free." [3] (emphasis mine)

"That it will be the part of wisdom to curtail phonetic instruction in the first grade very greatly is strongly implied; indeed, it is not improbable that it should be eliminated entirely." [4]

By 1930, phonics - meaning explicit teaching of the code - has been abandoned in most of the nation's classrooms.

Logically enough, this Whole Word method becomes known as Look/Say. Once children learn 30-50 sight words in this manner, they are given repetitive readers consisting largely of these exact words. An unknown word in these readers is accompanied by a picture to allow its identification. The most famous basal reader of this period is the beautifully illustrated Dick and Jane series. See above for a sampling from a "story" from this series, whose main purpose is to drill sight words.

"Memorizing or guessing the meaning of whole words is not reading; on the contrary, it is an acquired bad habit that stands in the way of your child's ever learning to read properly... My advice is, teach your child yourself how to read." [5]

Unfortunately, the phonics program offered by Flesch, taking up the final third of his book, is inadequate. There are only two pages of instructions, followed by page after page of nothing but word lists. The publication of this book ignites the "Reading Wars," a battle over how to teach beginning reading that, to this day, remains unresolved.

"The results are better, not only in terms of the mechanical aspect of literacy alone, but also in terms of the ultimate goals of reading instruction - comprehension and possibly even speed of reading. The long-existing fear that an initial code emphasis produces readers who do not read for meaning, or with enjoyment, is unfounded. On the contrary, the evidence indicates that better results in terms of reading for meaning are achieved with the programs that emphasize code right at the start..." [6]

"The pronunciation of a visually presented word involves assigning to a sequence of letters some kind of acoustic or articulatory coding. There are presumably two alternative ways in which this coding can be assigned. First, the pronunciation could be computed by application of a set of grapheme-phoneme rules, or letter-sound correspondence rules. This coding can be carried out independently of any consideration of the meaning or familiarity of the letter sequence, as in the pronunciation of previously unencountered sequences, such as ﬂitch, mantiness and streep. Alternatively, the pronunciation may be determined by searching long-term memory for stored information about how to pronounce familiar letter sequences, obtaining the necessary information by a direct dictionary look-up, instead of rule application. Obviously, this procedure would work only for familiar words."

Note: In the 80s, 90s, and 00s, this theory will be further refined by reading researchers Max Coltheart, Mark Seidenberg, and James McClelland, leading (by 2005) to general acceptance of Coltheart's Dual-Route Cascaded (DRC) model of word recognition.

1981: Rudolf Flesch publishes Why Johnny Still Can't Read, again condemning the Whole Word method, as well as the analytic phonics that it now includes. Looking back over the 26 years since he published his first book, he criticizes analytic phonics as being "a minimum of phonics, served up in a look-and-say sauce of context clues and guesswork." [7]

"That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties in which they threw out phonics and went to word recognition, as if you're reading Chinese pictographs instead of blending sounds of different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country."

"It would seem that many of the characteristics of direct phonics, such as teaching letter sounds directly, separating the letter sounds from the words, giving practice in blending the sounds, and so forth, are more effective than the less direct procedures used in current analytic phonics programs." [9]

Developed by Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith in the 1970's, Whole Language differs from Look/Say in some fundamental ways. First, it rejects the boring, artificial, and repetitive readers of the Look/Say era, claiming to replace those readers with real children's stories. (Those stories, however, are read to the children. What the children read initially are repetitive "little books" whose main function is to drill sight words.) Second, phonics, understood as explicit, systematic teaching of the full code, is outright rejected. According to Goodman, "matching letters with sounds (decoding) is a flat-earth view of the world, since it rejects modern science about reading and writing and how they develop." [10] Frank Smith is just as adamant: "Reliance on phonics - or spelling-to-sound correspondence - is dysfunctional in fluent reading and interferes with learning to read." [11]

Third, writing is emphasized at the earliest stages of learning to read, even if it requires, as it must, "invented spelling." Fourth, learning to read is to be as easy and natural as learning to speak. Children will discover the necessary letter/sound relationships as they read books and express themselves in writing, using their invented spellings. Finally, an unfamiliar word is to be identified, not by sounding it out, but by "asking somebody what the word is" - or by guessing what the word might be using context or "similarity to words that are already known." [12]

Despite its differences with Look/Say, Whole Language is another top-down approach for teaching reading. In the first couple years of instruction, reading consists largely of memorizing sight words and guessing - with some incidental phonics taught on an as-needed basis. Ken Goodman is famous for his characterization of reading as "a psycholinguistic guessing game." [13] For Frank Smith, guessing - in the sense of making predictions and thus eliminating unlikely alternatives - "is the most efficient manner in which to read and learn to read." [14] Whole Language spreads throughout the US at an unprecedented pace, even though there is no research whatever for its effectiveness.

1983: Reading researchers David Share and Anthony Jorm propose their Self-Teaching Hypothesis (further elaborated in 1995 by Share). Recognizing that skilled, educated readers have a sight word vocabulary of 60,000 or more words, and that such a feat would be impossible via rote-memorization or via guessing based on context, Jorm and Share propose that only the independent decoding of unknown words could explain the ability of skilled readers. Such decoding depends on only two factors: knowledge of letter/sound (phoneme/grapheme) relationships and the ability to blend an unknown word's individual sounds (phonemes) into a recognizable pronunciation. Share calls these twin co-requisites the sine qua non of reading acquisition [15]. This places Share and Jorm in direct opposition to Whole Language methodology.

1986: Reading researchers Philip Gough and William Tunmer propose their Simple View of Reading. Under the Simple View, reading comprehension (RC) is the product of two independent factors: word recognition (WR) and language comprehension (LC). The model states succinctly: RC = WR x LC. Word recognition, made possible by decoding, thus takes its rightful place as a necessary (though by itself, insufficient) condition for reading comprehension to occur. This places Gough and Tunmer in direct opposition to Whole Language methodology. [ Note: my separate blog on the Simple View can be found here.]

1998: Reading researcher Linnea Ehri proposes four phases of sight word learning [18]. Her studies reveal that it is only when beginning readers can form "complete connections" between all the letters (graphemes) seen in a word's written form and all the sounds (phonemes) heard in its spoken form, that sight word learning becomes unconscious and automatic - a process she calls orthographic mapping. This re-emphasizes the importance of knowing grapheme/phoneme correspondences and being able to blend (decode) unknown words by sounding them out. Share's Self-Teaching Hypothesis and Ehri's complement each other. Both theories are in direct opposition to Whole Language.

Because this report is such a thorough rejection of 25 years of Whole Language methodology, I think it best to allow the Panel members to speak for themselves. The numbers after the quote use the pagination found in the Final Report, available online here.

"Systematic phonics instruction makes a bigger contribution to children's growth in reading than alternative programs providing unsystematic or no phonics instruction." (2-92)

"The hallmark of systematic phonics programs is that they delineate a planned, sequential set of phonic elements [letter-sound correspondences] and that they teach these elements explicitly... A key feature that distinguishes systematic phonics instruction from nonsystematic phonics is in the identification of a full array of letter-sound correspondences to be taught. The array includes not only the major correspondences between consonant letters and sounds but also short and long-vowel letters and sounds, and vowel and consonant digraphs (e.g., oi, ea, ou, sh, ch, th)... Learning vowel and digraph spelling patterns is harder for children; therefore, special attention is devoted to learning these relations." (2-99)

"Phonics instruction, taught early, proved much more effective than phonics instruction introduced after first grade... Phonics instruction produces the biggest impact on growth in reading when it begins in kindergarten or 1st grade, before children have learned to read independently." (2-93)

Stating that it is "not sufficient" simply to teach the code, the Panel offers three specific ways to apply code knowledge to reading and writing:

"Programs provide practice in various ways. Phonics programs may teach children decoding strategies that involve sounding out and blending individual letters and digraphs... Programs may provide children with text whose words can be decoded using the letter-sound relations already taught. Programs may have children write their own text using the letter-sounds relations already taught and then have children read their own and others' stories." (2-99) [emphasis added]

Stressing the importance of phonemic awareness (PA), the Panel strongly endorses two types of PA exercises: blending and segmenting. Both are to be done "with letters." The Panel does not endorse any type of "advanced" oral-only PA exercises such as phoneme deletion or phoneme substitution.

"PA training is more effective when it is taught by having children manipulate letters than when manipulation is limited to speech." (2-26)

"Teaching children to manipulate phonemes using letters produced bigger effects than teaching without letters. Blending and segmenting instruction showed a much larger effect size on reading than multiple-skill instruction did." (2-29)

"In the rush to teach phonemic awareness, it is important not to overlook the need to teach letters as well. The NRP analysis showed that PA instruction was more effective when it was taught with letters. Using letters to manipulate phonemes helps children make the transfer to reading and writing." (2-33)

The Panel goes out of its way to counter the notion that phonemic awareness training is something new, or something that should be done apart from phonics:

"It is important to note that when PA is taught with letters, it qualifies as phonics instruction. When PA training involves teaching students to pronounce the sounds associated with letters and to blend the sounds to form words, it qualifies as synthetic phonics. When PA training involves teaching students to segment words into phonemes and to select letters for those phonemes, it is the equivalent of teaching students to spell words phonemically, which is another form of phonics instruction. These methods of teaching phonics existed long before they became identified as forms of phonemic awareness training. Although teaching children to manipulate sounds in spoken words may be new, phonemic awareness training that involves segmenting and blending with letters is not. Only the label is new." (2-34)

Contrasted with the above approval of systematic phonics, blending (with letters), and segmenting (with letters), the Panel presents a strong critique of Whole Language:

"Beginning reading programs that do not teach phonics explicitly and systematically may be of several types. In Whole Language programs, the emphasis is upon meaning-based reading and writing activities. Phonics instruction is integrated into these activities but taught incidentally as teachers decide it is needed." (2-90)

"Whole Language teachers typically provide some instruction in phonics, usually as part of invented spelling activities or through the use of grapheme-to-phoneme prompts during reading. However, their approach is to teach it unsystematically and incidentally in context as the need arises... Whole language teachers believe that phonics instruction should be integrated into meaningful reading, writing, listening, and speaking activities and taught incidentally when they perceive it is needed. As children attempt to use written Language for communication, they will discover naturally what they need to know about letter-sound relationships and how letters function in reading and writing." (2-102)

"The conclusion drawn is that growth in word-reading skills is strongly enhanced by systematic phonics instruction when compared to non-phonics instruction for kindergartners and 1st graders as well as for older struggling readers. Growth in reading comprehension is also boosted by systematic phonics instruction for younger students and reading disabled students. These findings should dispel any belief that teaching phonics systematically to young children interferes with their ability to read and comprehend text. Quite the opposite is the case." (2-94)

Unfortunately, the Panel's 14 experts are themselves divided on many matters of importance in reading instruction. One Panel member goes so far as to publish her own Minority Review, calling the work of her fellow Panel members "unbalanced and, to some extent, irrelevant." The disagreements result in a final report with a soothing call for "systematic" phonics (a planned, sequential set of letter-sound correspondences taught explicitly) and with an explicit approval of all types of phonics: the bottom-up method that is synthetic phonics, or top-down methods like analytic phonics, analogy phonics, and onset-rime phonics. (2-99) This makes it easy (and utterly predictable) for what happens next: supporters of Whole Language agree to embrace some ineffective top-down phonics, and they change the name of their method to Balanced Literacy.

Note: Balanced Literacy is described in detail in another blog on this site. Balanced Literacy is Whole Language, but now with a veneer of top-down phonics: analytic phonics and/or analogy phonics.

At the end of the 16-week program, the group taught by synthetic phonics were:

(a) reading words seven months ahead of the other two groups

(b) reading seven months ahead for their chronological age

(c) spelling eight to nine months ahead of the other groups

(d) spelling seven months ahead for their chronological age.

The synthetic-phonics-taught group also read irregular words better than the other groups and was the only group that could read unfamiliar words by analogy.

These 300 children were then followed for 7 additional years to see if these gains persisted. They not only persisted, they accelerated. By the end of the children's seventh year of primary schooling, the gains made in reading achievement by the children who had been taught synthetic phonics during their ﬁrst year had increased six-fold, increasing from seven months to three years and six months ahead of chronological age. The gain in spelling was 4.5-fold, improving from seven months to one year and nine months ahead of chronological age. (The full study can be found here.)

2005: Australia publishes its own national inquiry into the teaching of reading, available online here. The study closely follows the lead of the US National Reading Panel in that it rejects Whole Language and, in its place, recommends systematic phonics. Like the NRP, it also recommends an "integrated" approach to reading instruction that includes the Big Five: phonemic awareness, phonics, ﬂuency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

"Essentially, the whole-language approach to teaching and learning reﬂects a constructivist philosophy of learning in which children are viewed as inherently active, self-regulating learners who construct knowledge for themselves, with little or no explicit decoding instruction." (p28)

"Constructivism is a mixture of Piagetian stage theory with postmodernist ideology that is devoid of evidence-based justiﬁcation for its adoption as an effective method of teaching... Too many faculties and schools of education in Australian higher education institutions currently providing pre-service teacher education base their programs on constructivist views of teaching." (pp29-30)

"At the same time as constructivist approaches have been promoted, direct teaching methods have been overtly or covertly criticized and dismissed as inappropriate, with the suggestion that they simply don't work and are dull and boring for learners. The message that most teachers appear to have absorbed is that all direct teaching is old-fashioned and should be abandoned in favor of student-centered enquiry and activity-based learning." (p37)

My favorite quote from the Report, however, is this:

"In sum, the incontrovertible ﬁnding from the extensive body of local and international evidence-based literacy research is that for children during the early years of schooling to be able to link their knowledge of spoken language to their knowledge of written language, they must ﬁrst master the alphabetic code - the system of grapheme-phoneme correspondences that link written words to their pronunciations. Because these are both foundational and essential skills for the development of competence in reading, writing and spelling, they must be taught explicitly, systematically, early and well."

2006: Yet another national inquiry, the Rose Report, is published in England, available online here. Unlike the national reports published in the US and Australia, the Rose Report singles out and fully embraces only bottom-up synthetic phonics rather than the more inclusive umbrella term, "systematic" phonics:

"Synthetic phonics is the form of systematic phonics that offers the vast majority of beginners the best route to becoming skilled readers. Among other strengths, this is because it teaches children directly what they need to know, i.e. the four principles set out below, whereas other approaches, such as 'analytic' phonics, expect children to deduce them." (section 47)

The Rose Report is quite specific about what these four principles of synthetic phonics are: "Having considered a wide range of evidence, the review has concluded that the case for systematic phonic work is overwhelming and much strengthened by a synthetic approach, the key features of which are to teach beginner readers:

1) grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences (the alphabetic principle) in a clearly defined, incremental sequence

2) to apply the highly important skill of blending (synthesizing) phonemes in order, all through a word to read it

3) to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell

4) that blending and segmenting are reversible processes." (section 51)

The Rose Report also devotes an entire section (Appendix 1) to a discussion of the , a topic inexplicably missing from the national reports of the US and Australia.

The Rose Report is a game-changer for England. From this point on, reading instruction in England starts to diverge from that of the rest of the English-speaking world. The main reason is that the Rose Report avoids two pitfalls:

1) It opts specifically for the only bottom-up approach to reading instruction that exists: synthetic phonics. The reports from the US and Australia, in recommending only systematic phonics, left the door wide open for top-down forms of phonics (analytic and analogy phonics) to be grafted onto Whole Language. The result: Balanced Literacy.

2) It avoids making the anodyne call for the Big Five (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension), focusing attention instead on the . Those who understand the Simple View understand reading comprehension correctly: it's the product of both Word Recognition and Language Comprehension. Recognizing that, for most children, Language Comprehension is already age-appropriate, Synthetic Phonics teachers place an early emphasis on decoding - the skill that makes Word Recognition possible.

"Two information processing pathways coexist and supplement each other when we read. When words are regular, rare, or novel, we preferentially process them using a 'phonological route,' in which we first convert the letter string into a pronunciation, and then attempt to access the meaning of the sound pattern (if any). Conversely, when we are confronted with words that are frequent, or whose pronunciation is exceptional, our reading takes a direct route that first recovers the meaning of the word and then uses the lexical information to recover its pronunciation... Both routes are in constant collaboration and each contributes to the specification of word pronunciation." (p38)

"The goal of reading instruction is clear. It must aim to lay down an efficient neuronal hierarchy, so that the child can recognize letters and graphemes and easily turn them into speech sounds. All other aspects of the literate mind depend on this crucial step. There is no point in describing the delights of reading to children if they are not provided with the means to get there... Considerable research converges on the fact that grapheme-phoneme conversion radically transforms the child's brain. This [decoding] process must be taught explicitly. It does not develop spontaneously; it must be acquired. Reading via the direct route, which leads straight from letter strings to their meaning, only works after many years of practice using the phonological decoding route." (p219)

"Only the teaching of letter-to-sound conversion allows children to blossom, because only this method gives them the freedom to read novel words in any domain they choose. It is therefore misguided to pit the intellectual freedom of a child against rigorous drill. If a child is to learn quickly and well, he must be given well-structured grapheme-phoneme instruction. The effort is real, but the payoff in independence is immediate when children discover, often with awe, that they can decode words they never learned in class." (p227)

"Performance is best when children are, from the beginning, directly taught the mapping of letters onto speech sounds. Regardless of their social background, children who do not learn this suffer from reading delays." (p227)

The bottom line for Dehaene is this:

"The punch line is quite simple: we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal: the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby each letter or grapheme represents a phoneme... Children need to understand that only the analysis of letters one by one will allow them to discover a word's identity." (p228)

Last, Dehaene is adamant about using only decodable text in the early stages:

"At each step, the words and sentences introduced in class must only include graphemes and phonemes that have already been explicitly taught. Reading lessons provide little room for improvisation... The words given to beginning readers must be analyzed letter by letter in order to ensure that they do not contain spelling problems that are beyond the child's current knowledge." If teachers do not follow this advice, "it can make children think that reading is arbitrary and not worth studying." (p230)

With the single exception of England, the landscape for beginning reading instruction worldwide is disheartening: Balanced Literacy, lists of sight words to be memorized, three-cueing, guessing from pictures, guessing from a word's first letter, guessing what might make sense, invented spellings, reading levels, learning styles, "predictable" books, and, of course, "discovery" learning. Many of the teachers using these techniques know little of reading science because they were not exposed to it during their teacher training.

Reading teachers are far more likely to be familiar with Constructivist authors like Ken Goodman, Frank Smith, Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell, and Jennifer Serravallo than they are to be with serious researchers like Jeanne Chall, David Share, Philip Gough, Linnea Ehri, Max Coltheart, and Stanislas Dehaene. Few reading teachers are conversant about such essential topics as the Simple View of Reading, Dual-Route Theory, the Self-Teaching Hypothesis, and Orthographic Mapping.

Reading researcher Mark Seidenberg, in Language at the Speed of Sight, states "there is a profound disconnect between the science of reading and educational practice. Very little of what we've learned about reading as scientists has had any impact on what happens in schools because the cultures of science and education are so different." (p11) And, of course, big money is involved. "Education is a multi-billion-dollar industry involving multiple stakeholders - governments, business, educators, parents, children, taxpayers, unions, interest groups - whose perspectives and interests often conflict." (p11).

Take a look at the cost in the picture below (copied from an internet advertisement) for a single grade school to outfit a single grade 1 classroom with Balanced Literacy reading materials from Heinemann Publishing. Similar materials are marketed by Heinemann for each of grades K through 6. [Taxpayers: this is your money.]

In an interview with NPR, Seidenberg adds: "The Reading Wars are over, and science lost." I think, however, this statement may be a bit of hyperbole. Science has not lost in England where, with synthetic phonics and decodable books mandated, reading outcomes continue to improve. Many reformers, myself included, are not ready to concede defeat in this century-old battle between top-down and bottom-up instruction. Given the resources available online, any reading teacher or parent wishing to educate themself can, with some effort, do so.

According to the US Nation's Report Card, nearly two out of every three students in grades 4 and 8 do not read at a proficient level. Instead, they read at a "basic" level or they're functionally illiterate. Needless, easily avoidable suffering should be an affront to everyone. In primary schools around the English-speaking world, this type of suffering is endemic, due in large part to the top-down manner in which so many children are forced to learn the vital skill of reading. The Reading Wars cannot, and should not, be over. Reading Science, with more clarity now than it has ever had regarding reading instruction, can't afford to lose this battle; far too much is at stake.

Reading Teachers and Parents - My bottom-up Synthetic Phonics books are available, absolutely FREE (with no strings attached) right here. I invite you to download an appropriate copy for yourself and to help me spread the word. You can also find me on Twitter @ParkerPhonics. Thank you.

[1] William McGuffey, The Eclectic Manual of Methods (New York: Van Antwerp, Bragg, & Co, 1885), 24-26.

[7] Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Still Can't Read (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 5.

[8] Chall, Learning to Read, 43.

[15] Share, D.L. (1995) "Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition," Cognition, 55, 151-218.

[16] U.S. Department of Education. Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading

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Introduction For more than a century, reading instruction has been involved in a high-stakes battle between supporters of two opposing methods for teaching a child to read. While this battle is often characterized as "Phonics" versus "Whole Word," I think it's more accurate to describe the two methodologies as "Bottom-Up" versus "Top-Down."

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97 b. Word Study: Learning Word Patterns

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97 b. Word Study: Learning Word Patterns

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"Word study" is an alternative to traditional spelling instruction. It is based on learning word patterns rather than memorizing unconnected words. This article describes the word study approach.

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97 c. Word Study Instruction in the K-2 Classroom

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97 c. Word Study Instruction in the K-2 Classroom

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Bear, D.R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2000). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bear, D.R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2008). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bear, D.R., & Templeton, S. (1998). Explorations in developmental spelling: Foundations for learning and teaching phonics, spelling, and vocabulary. The Reading Teacher, 52(3), 222-242.

Beckham-Hungler, D., & Williams, C. (2003). Teaching words that students misspell: Spelling instruction and young children's writing. Language Arts, 80(4), 299-309.

Brand, M. (2004). Word savvy: Integrated vocabulary, spelling and word study, grades 3-6. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Brown, G.D.A., & Ellis, N.C. (Eds.). (1994). Handbook of spelling: Theory, process, and intervention. Chichester, England: Wiley.

Cambourne, B. (1995). Toward an educationally relevant theory of literacy learning: Twenty years of inquiry. The Reading Teacher, 49(3), 182-190.

Clay, M. (1997). An observation survey. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Clay, M. (2001). Change over time in children's literacy development. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Cunningham, P.M. (1995). Phonics they use: Words for reading and writing (2nd ed.). New York: HarperCollins.

Cunningham, P.M., & Hall, D.P. (1996). Making words: Multilevel, hands on, developmentally appropriate spelling and phonics activities. Carthage, IL: Good Apple.

Dudley-Marling, C. (1997). Living with uncertainty: The messy reality of classroom practice. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Ehri, L.C. (1992). Review and commentary: Stages of spelling development. In S. Templeton & D. Bear (Eds.), Development of orthographic knowledge and the foundation of literacy: A memorial Festschrift for Edmund H. Henderson (pp. 307-332). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Fountas, I.C., & Pinnell, G.S. (1996). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Gee, J.P. (2001). A sociocultural perspective on early literacydevelopment. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (pp. 30-42). New York: Guilford.

Goswami, U.C., & Bryant, P. (1990). Phonological skills and learning to read. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Hughes, M., & Searle, D. (1997). The violent "e" and other tricky sounds: Learning to spell from kindergarten through grade 6. York, ME: Stenhouse.

Invernizzi, M., & Hayes, L. (2004). Developmental-spelling research: A systematic imperative. Reading Research Quarterly, 39(2), 216-228.

Joseph, L.M. (2000). Developing first graders' phonemic awareness, word identification and spelling: A comparison of two contemporary phonic instructional approaches. Reading Research and Instruction, 39(2), 160-169.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McCarrier, A., Fountas, I.C., & Pinnell, G.S. (2000). Interactive writing: How language and literacy come together, K-2. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Pinnell, G.S., & Fountas, I.C. (1998). Word matters: Teaching phonics and spelling in the reading/writing classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Richgels, D.J. (1995). Invented spelling ability and printed word learning in kindergarten. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(1), 96-109.

Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. New York: Oxford University Press.

Schulman, M.B., & Payne, C.D. (2000). Guided reading: Making it work. New York: Scholastic.

Snowball, D., & Bolton, F. (1999). Spelling K-8: Planning and teaching. York, ME: Stenhouse.

Templeton, S. (2003). Spelling. In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J. Squire, & J. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (2nd ed., pp. 738-751). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Treiman, R., & Cassar, M. (1997). Spelling acquisition in English. In C.A. Perfetti, L. Rieben, & M. Fayol (Eds.), Learning to spell: Research, theory, and practice across languages (pp. 61-80). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds. & Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wertsch, J.V. (1998). Mind as action. New York: Oxford University Press.

Williams, C., & Hufnagel, K. (2005). The impact of word study instruction on kindergarten children's journal writing. Research in the Teaching of English, 39(3), 233-270.

Williams, C., & Lundstrom, R. (2007). Strategy instruction during word study and interactive writing activities. The Reading Teacher, 61(3), 204-212.

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Word Study Instruction in the K-2 Classroom

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Word study is an approach to spelling instruction that moves away from a focus on memorization. The approach reflects what researchers have discovered about the alphabetic, pattern, and meaning layers of English orthography. This article describes nine tips for implementing a word study program in your classroom.

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99. (Vulnerable) Students Need Explicit Spelling Instruction

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99. (Vulnerable) Students Need Explicit Spelling Instruction

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Spelling knowledge is essential for the brain's reading architecture. To connect the alphabet code the reader sees on the page to circuitry enabling reading comprehension, the reader must use knowledge of spelling. (Ehri, 2022) As a skilled reader you see the word on the page, recognize it automatically, and connect to the word's sound and meaning already in your brain. See, recognize, and connect to meaning in your spoken language. That's the process.

Reading researcher Dr. Louisa Moats, a long-time proponent of spelling books and a leader in the science of reading movement, doesn't mince words when stating the equity problem in reading education, a challenge directly addressed by explicit spelling instruction:

Students who are African American, Hispanic, learning English, and/or from impoverished homes fall behind and stay behind in far greater proportion than students who are white and middle class. Moats goes on to give the statistics: The rate of weak reading skills in these groups is 60-70 percent, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (Moats, 2020, p. 42-43)

While reasons for reading failure in America among these vulnerable populations are complex, the lack of a spelling curriculum is a visible, affordable, fixable first step supported by cognitive science and neuroscience. In schools where ESLs and others don't have a spelling book, here's what English spelling often looks like in fourth grade:

These two writing samples were gleaned from two fourth graders, one African American and one a Hispanic student who is learning English. You can see samples like these in every school or district in America where English learners and vulnerable populations are struggling with literacy in districts that are short changing spelling instruction. Too often, students who produce samples like these don't have a spelling book-a tangible signal that spelling is being neglected-or access to systematic, explicit spelling instruction. Too often the teacher doesn't have a grade-by-grade English spelling curriculum. Many desperately search for something on the internet or do the best they can but the results are haphazard with no consistency across the grades.

5 Achievable and Desirable Instructional Goals for Explicit Spelling Instruction

Here are five achievable and desirable instructional goals for both regular and ESL classroom teachers who have a spelling book in each child's book bag.

1. Teach English spelling 20 minutes a day in grades 1-8 (Moats, 2005/2006, p. 42-43). Recognize that spelling instruction and practice transfer to reading improvement and benefits word reading throughout elementary school (Graham & Hebert, 2011; Graham & Santangelo, 2014 ). Think of those 20 minutes a day as a wise investment of time enabling the teacher to integrate essential components of reading in every weekly spelling lesson such as phonological awareness, a deeper level of phonics knowledge, sentence building and grammar, plus sight word and vocabulary building. The integration of these skills as opposed to teaching each of these components as separate subjects saves valuable teaching time in the reading and language arts schedule.

2. Use spelling books and weekly posttest assessments to gather data and monitor each child's individual progress. A child's spelling is a window into the mind of how the child is internalizing spoken and printed English. Use a spelling book curriculum as a resource for providing early identification of students including ESLs who may be having problems and be in need of early intervention. Beyond assessment, modern spelling books come in both print and digital formats with options for long distance learning and student self-pacing-a boon for ESLs and others.

3. Use each child's spelling to explicitly show what word study, including phonics and pronunciation awareness, she or he needs to be taught in English. At each grade level kindergarten through high school, there's a common thread in the spelling of students: the spelling reveals foundational English word knowledge the student already knows or will need to learn for continual development as a fluent reader, writer, and even speaker of English.

Cognitive science and neuroscience have clarified the critical role of spelling for reading. For example knowledge of spelling patterns is the best differentiator of good and poor readers (Adams, 1990). Neuroscientists report that neuroimaging studies show "atypically low activity in a part of the brain that processes the spelling of words." (Seidenberg, p.10) Explicit spelling instruction enables teachers to connect this science into solid classroom practices.

4. Recognize that the history of reading education in America backs the current cognitive science and neuroscience by providing strong evidence of the value of spelling books for literacy success. From Noah Webster's Blue-Backed Speller which taught over 80 million Americans to read in the 1800s, to the emergence of Ernest Horn's research-based spelling books considered essential for reading instruction in the early 20th century, the spelling book was front and center in reading education. Yet spelling books and explicit word study anchored in spelling instruction are absent from curricula used in four of the current most popular reading programs across America. (Gentry, 2022: Swartz, 2019). These programs need to be supplemented with explicit spelling instruction.

5. Know that investment in spelling books and explicit word study for spelling is money well spent. You don't have to wait. These resources are available and ready-to-use to supplement any reading program.

Integrated spelling instruction is a powerful teaching tool for enabling ESLs and other venerable populations to learn, correctly spell, automatically read, and speak new English vocabulary; this intense word study activates automatic word reading fluency and connects to comprehension. For example, note how a third grade spelling lesson on single syllable homophones such as role, roll, cent, sent, way, weigh, grate, great, sail, cell, and sell enables immediate gains in spoken vocabulary and reading fluency in just one weekly lesson. The words become brain words for automatic use.

A Five-Step Science-Based Spelling Pretest for Your Toolkit (For All Grades)

On the Monday pretest take the student through these five steps with each word: Hear It, Say It, Write It, Read It (and Self-Correct), Use It.

Celebrate a comeback in explicit spelling instruction to revitalize equity in reading education for children vulnerable for reading failure.

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Vulnerable Students Need Explicit Spelling Instruction

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Spelling knowledge is essential for the brain's reading architecture. To connect the alphabet code the reader sees on the page to circuitry enabling reading comprehension, the reader must use knowledge of spelling. (Ehri, 2022) As a skilled reader you see the word on the page, recognize it automatically, and connect to the word's sound and meaning already in your brain.

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98. Current Research on Spelling Instruction

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98. Current Research on Spelling Instruction

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97 d. 3 Steps to Effective Word Study Instruction & Word Study in Upper Intermediate Grades

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97 d. 3 Steps to Effective Word Study Instruction & Word Study in Upper Intermediate Grades

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If your school is working on implementing teaching practices that align with the science of reading, then chances are you are probably going to be giving a lot more instructional time to word study.

If you are a third, fourth, or fifth-grade teacher, then you have probably been told that you need to make word study a priority this year, but maybe you're wondering what exactly word study is.
Simply put, word study is the study of words.
It is the part of our instructional day that teaches students how words work.

Word study is the process of learning everything about words: spelling, meaning, pronunciation, historical origin, and connection to other words.

When you think of word study instruction in upper elementary, you want to keep a big picture perspective. We want to make sure that we are giving students tools that will make them skilled readers.

Word study lessons can help our students make progress towards that goal.

Why is word study important in upper elementary?

If we want our students to be skilled readers, they have to have a foundation that allows them to actually read and understand the words they see on a page, and your word study instruction will help with that.

In upper elementary, students start to see more multisyllabic words. Many students who are fluent or proficient readers in the primary grades start to struggle when they see big words. It's possible they were fine reading single syllable words, and they might have a strong phonics foundation, but with the introduction of multisyllabic words, they start to struggle. Word study instruction can help students read multisyllabic words.

Word study lessons also support both reading and writing.

Finally, it is estimated that over 60% of English words have meanings that can be predicted from their word parts. This means we definitely want to be giving enough focus on word study to give students the tools to help them understand the meaning of most words they encounter.

What does effective word study instruction look like in upper elementary?

There are three steps you can take to create an effective word study block in upper elementary.

You need to provide systematic and explicit instruction.

You need to provide students with opportunities to play with, manipulate, and explore words.

You need to provide opportunities for students to transfer their word study understanding to the texts they read.

Let's break each step down.

Step 1: Provide Explicit and Systematic Instruction:

When we are teaching word study concepts, we want our instruction to be both explicit and systematic.
Systematic refers to the order in which you teach the concepts.
You want to teach your words study lessons in an order that makes sense. You want to start with simple concepts and progress to more complex or challenging ones.

For example. If you are teaching your students about word parts and how each part of a word has a meaning that can help readers figure out the meaning of the whole word, then you might follow a progression like this:

Start by introducing compound words.

Move into prefixes.

Introduce suffixes

Explain that some suffixes are inflectional, and some are derivational.

Show students examples of words that have both prefixes and suffixes.

Then you might introduce common Latin roots.

Then you probably move on to explain Greek roots and combining forms.

So rather than just jumping straight into your instruction about roots (which is a key standard in upper elementary), you start by teaching the more simple and basic concepts and build on the knowledge your students have as you progress to the more advanced concepts.
Explicit instruction refers to how you teach your lessons.
Whether you are teaching whole group or small group, you can provide explicit instruction. Explicit instruction means you are being specific and intentional with how you explain and model word study concepts.

You want to introduce word study concepts one at a time (small bite-sized chunks).

Define terms and use academic language.

Model using concrete examples.

Show students examples of words that are the exception to the rule.

For example, if you are teaching suffixes to your students, you wouldn't just explain that adding a suffix can change the meaning of the word, but you would explain that suffixes can change the spelling, meaning, pronunciation, and even the part of speech.

When we introduce and teach a word study concept, we want our students to have a full understanding of that specific topic.

Step 2: Give Students Opportunities to Explore and Play With Words

Before students can fully master and apply their word study knowledge to their independent reading and writing, they need an opportunity to play with words in a hands-on way.

This is often the missing link in word study instruction. We don't always give our students an opportunity to play with words but instead expect that after one whole group lesson, they have mastered the concept.

When students get to play with and explore words, not only do they develop a much deeper understanding of the concept, but they start to feel much more confident in their ability to notice word study generalizations. They also get a chance to apply what they are learning in a fun and engaging way.

One of my favorite activities f or wordplay is word of the week.

Word of the week is a super simple word study routine that can be modified or adapted to address a variety of word study concepts like context clues, prefixes, suffixes, and roots.
Here are some other ideas for activities that you could incorporate into your word study lessons:
Word play activities word great in literacy work stations or are part of any independent practice routine.

Step 3: Help students transfer their word study understanding to the texts they read.

The ultimate goal of our word study instruction is to help students become more fluent readers (automatically reading a text with comprehension) and strong writers. So we don't want their word study knowledge to only be present during word study lessons.

This means we need to actively provide opportunities and reminders to help students transfer what you have taught them during word study lessons to their actual reading and writing.

Once you have explicitly taught a concept, you want to regularly review, discuss, and spiral it into your literacy instruction to support automaticity and fluency.

This can be done with any and all teaching experiences.

Anytime you are encountering words, take a minute to find a word that includes a word study concept and point it out to your students. Do a short little mini-lesson on that word and show students how the word study lessons you've been teaching are helping them read, spell, pronounce, or understand the words they read.
Consider bringing word study into the following parts of your instructional day:

Read Alouds

Other Content Areas

Small Group Lessons

Morning meetings

Literacy Workstations

Basically, anytime you are reading or writing something, you have the opportunity to reinforce word study concepts.

One of the really cool things about word study is that your word study instruction doesn't have to be long.

Your explicit and introduction lessons might take 5-10 minutes, but once you've introduced a word study concept, you're giving your students permission to notice that word study concept in anything they are reading and writing.

Put it into practice...

If you are ready to take action and start to give more focus to your word study lessons, here are three things you can do.

Grab my Word of the Week freebie and introduce that routine to your students.

Listen to episode #94 of the podcast, where I share four word study concepts every upper elementary teacher should be teaching.

Come join us inside The Stellar Teacher Reading Membership to get access to a ton of word study resources and support so you know how to incorporate them into your classroom.

Happy Teaching!

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3 Steps to Effective Word Study Lessons in Upper Elementary

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If your school is working on implementing teaching practices that align with the science of reading, then chances are you are probably going to be giving a lot more instructional time to word study.

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97 a. Word Study, Word Work, and Spelling: What’s the difference?

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97 a. Word Study, Word Work, and Spelling: What’s the difference?

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Word Study, Word Work, and Spelling: What's the difference? - Tarheelstate Teacher

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Word study, word work, and spelling...confused about the difference and why it matters in your upper elementary classroom?! These three types of word learning structures often get thrown around interchangeably in the upper elementary teaching world, but they have important differences in approach an

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1b. How Your Brain Learns to Read - books for students grades 1 and up

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1b. How Your Brain Learns to Read - books for students grades 1 and up

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Here are 2 Great Children's Books to Help You Explain the Science of Reading to Your Students:
Download a printable version of this book list of Children's Books to Explain SOR!

How My Brain Learns to Read by Dr. Duncan Milne is best for younger children, those in kindergarten and 1st grade. It is a very short story that uses simple language. It offers children a little bit of an idea of what happens in their brains when they are reading. There is not a lot of text on each page, but the visuals are really very well done. On each page, you'll find a nice big visual at the top with some text at the bottom.

This book covers what happens when kids come to a word they don't know and it has a really nice way of explaining that to children.

How Your Brain Learns to Read by Denise Eide spans a wider range of grades. It's great for 1st grade and up. Denise Eide also wrote The Logic of English. If you're familiar with that book, you know that it's a great reference book for you to give some great explanations about the writing language.

In this book, children will explore how their brains process sounds, letters, phonograms, and words. It explains how reading works with colorful illustrations.

I was most impressed with the layout of this book. There's text you can read as part of a read-aloud, wonderful illustrations, and then side-bars with brain facts that really explain what is happening in the brain when we read! These facts are in-depth and can even be helpful for adults. You'll even find suggestions for little games and activities that you can do with your child or your class!

This book offers a much more in-depth explanation of the Science of Reading for children. Even adults will benefit from reading this fabulous picture book!
Looking for even more resources to help teach about the brain? Read Top Resources for Teaching Kids About the Brain!
If you're looking to build a Science of Reading display in your library or classroom, or if you want to explain the Science of Reading to your own children at home, these are two great books that I recommend picking up.

Are you looking for professional development that will help you become a more effective structured literacy educator? The Literacy Nest has a membership for that...

Building Readers for Life Academy is a monthly membership program that empowers educators AND families by diving into structured literacy and strategies for ALL learners. With BRFL Academy, you'll learn what it takes to help EVERY student become a reader for life.

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Children's Books to Explain the Science of Reading

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Download a printable version of this book list of Children's Books to Explain SOR! How My Brain Learns to Read by Dr. Duncan Milne is best for younger children, those in kindergarten and 1st grade. It is a very short story that uses simple language.

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40. What's the Difference? Harmful vs. Helpful Word Strategies

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40. What's the Difference? Harmful vs. Helpful Word Strategies

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What's the Difference? Harmful vs. Helpful Word Strategies

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15 e. Building vocabulary through morphological study

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15 e. Building vocabulary through morphological study

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31d. How to organize daily instruction? (part IV)

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31d. How to organize daily instruction? (part IV)

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My school requires that we all teach reading at the same time (in a 90 minute block at the beginning of the day), so I can't do this.

You could use the required block and add additional time later in your school day. However, I'm not a big fan of your school's approach. It makes it more difficult to provide intervention services to the struggling readers (if everyone teaches reading at the same time, then if a student is pulled out during that time he/she gets less reading instruction).

I'm a secondary teacher and we don't have a reading class. I don't see how this can work?

Many secondary schools have taken this plan on successfully. It requires cooperation among the various departments, however. Typically, we work on a weekly basis. That would mean that we need to provide 10 hours per week of literacy work (2.5 hours of vocabulary, 2.5 hours of reading comprehension, 2.5 hours of writing, and up to 2.5 hours of oral reading fluency-depending on the students' fluency levels). Each department agrees to provide some portion of this weekly experience and then some horse-trading is done to ensure that there is sufficient time for everything.

My school requires that we all teach reading at the same time (in a 90 minute block at the beginning of the day), so I can't do this.

You could use the required block and add additional time later in your school day. However, I'm not a big fan of your school's approach. It makes it more difficult to provide intervention services to the struggling readers (if everyone teaches reading at the same time, then if a student is pulled out during that time he/she gets less reading instruction).

I'm a secondary teacher and we don't have a reading class. I don't see how this can work?

Many secondary schools have taken this plan on successfully. It requires cooperation among the various departments, however. Typically, we work on a weekly basis. That would mean that we need to provide 10 hours per week of literacy work (2.5 hours of vocabulary, 2.5 hours of reading comprehension, 2.5 hours of writing, and up to 2.5 hours of oral reading fluency-depending on the students' fluency levels). Each department agrees to provide some portion of this weekly experience and then some horse-trading is done to ensure that there is sufficient time for everything.

We are required to implement our core program with fidelity. I don't see how I can do that if I follow this scheme.

I very much like the idea of following core programs with some kind of fidelity, but this isn't always possible because of time considerations. Typically, core programs offer more instructional activity than fits in a 90 minute block or (even in a 2 hour space). Teachers, in such cases, may follow with fidelity the parts of the program that they teach, but what about the parts they have to omit? This plan helps teachers to make the decisions of what to keep and what to drop. If there is too little instruction, of course, then the teacher could follow that with fidelity, but then would need to supplement.
I find myself agreeing with your approach, but I still love the activities that my students have been doing through Daily 5. Isn't there a way to compromise?
Like you, there are particular activities that I want to have in my classroom. For example, as a primary grade teacher, I read to my students every day. I did this, not to teach them to read, but as a tone setter for my classroom and as a way of exposing students to particular cultural artifacts (I loved reading Charlotte's Web to them, for instance). If I were teaching in the primary grades today, I would still read to my students, I just wouldn't count it as reading instruction and wouldn't let it take the place of instruction in decoding, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, or writing. Isabel Beck and Moddy McKeown have certainly shown how I could translate that kind of teacher read aloud into an effective vocabulary lesson for the younger kids, so I could perhaps count it that way, but I might not make that choice either. That's the real benefit of this approach-it keeps you focused on learning outcomes and it keeps you in control of the choices.
What about Common Core?
Common Core sets the learning goals; the goals that your instruction should focus on. All that I have done is to categorize these goals, and matched them with time expenditures. For example, many primary grade teachers look at the CCSS and conclude that they are suppose to teach more comprehension than decoding. My plan allows the teacher to protect sufficient amounts of time to make it possible for students to learn to decode. Review the CCSS standards (including the detailed items including in the appendices) and distribute them across the categories that I have emphasized.
I'm a pull-out reading teacher. Should I use this plan in my teaching?
I expect interventions to either be especially targeted (like a pull out fluency program only for students lagging in fluency) or individualized. My scheme requires the teacher to balance literacy instruction in his/her classroom, but an intervention teacher should be aimed at balancing the child. If Hector is strong in decoding and fluency, then the intervention teacher should aim at comprehension. If Sylvia is weak at decoding, then the intervention should be aimed at strengthening this weakness. This plan makes sense if a student is low in everything, but if there are stronger and weaker patterns of skills, try to even the child out by building the weak spots up (that isn't a good way to go in a classroom, because the teacher simply has too many kids with different needs-thus, addressing all of the needs equally is the surest way to higher achievement).

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How to Organize Daily Literacy Instruction, Part IV

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My school requires that we all teach reading at the same time (in a 90 minute block at the beginning of the day), so I can't do this. You could use the required block and add additional time later in your school day. However, I'm not a big fan of your school's approach.

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31c. How to organize daily instruction? (part III)

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31c. How to organize daily instruction? (part III)

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Blast from the Past: This entry was first published on June 1, 2014, and is being re-posted on March 30, 2019. The reason for the re-posting? In the last two weeks I have received several questions and several requests for speaking engagements focused specifically on what the literacy school day should look like. This entry doesn't propose a particular schedule, but it does provide the key tenets on which to plan a day's lessons.

Man, I hate to see so many frustrated teachers.

For the past couple weeks, I've been hearing from teachers who use Daily 5. They're mad because I criticized the idea of organizing their day around activities instead of outcomes. Many have been surprised that I said there isn't any research on Daily 5 or the activities it promotes. Some complain that I just haven't seen it well implemented. But that really isn't the problem.

The fact is teachers find it difficult to stay focused on learning. They become consumed by classroom activities and daily routines. And because of that, any scheme that encourages them focus on activities over outcome is a really bad idea.

The point of Daily 5 is a good one: teachers should routinize the use of classroom time. Reducing the sheer number of daily scheduling decisions for teachers is smart.

But routinizing a day is not the same thing as ensuring learning. Especially when the activities you are including aren't certain to instill learning. There has to be a better way.

Let's take it a step at a time.

First, decide how much time will be devoted to literacy. In many schools, 90 minutes is the standard, but I'd argue for 2-3 hours per day. Provide more literacy work when kids are especially challenged, and less otherwise.

Second, decide which learning categories require attention? Put the time into aspects of literacy prove to help kids become better readers and writers. There is substantial research showing that if you teach young children to hear the sounds within words (phonemic awareness), then they end up doing better with decoding and comprehension. I would definitely teach that. There is similar evidence concerning the systematic teaching of letters and sounds, so phonics is in, too. And, there is a substantial body of work indicating the value of teaching word meaning (vocabulary), oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. They all deserve some time within your schedule.

You can be a bit arbitrary in dividing the time across these categories. For instance, I group all the word skills-phonics, phonological awareness, sight vocabulary, meaning vocabulary-into a single set, and they share 25% of my ELA teaching time. That means kids would get a lot of decoding instruction early on, and less vocabulary support; but as they went through the grades they would get less and less phonics, and more and more focus on word meaning. Fluency, comprehension, and writing, would get the other portions of time.

Third, these categorical divisions then need to be expressed in terms of specific learning goals. Let's say 15 minutes per day of the word time in my kindergarten this semester is focused on letter names and phonological awareness. My goal for the kids is to make sure they can recognize all the alphabet letters and can fully segment words (that is divide spoken words into all of their separate phonemes). Or, perhaps, the fluency goal this report-card-marking in second grade is to make sure students can read texts at 75 words correct per minute, with pausing that reflects the punctuation and meaning.

In reading comprehension my goal may be for students to be able to read and summarize 3 text pages without teacher input or support. Or perhaps I'd want them to be able to read a social studies chapter and explain the connections among the subsections.

Such goals do not have to be singular or simple. Either or both of these comprehension goals could be a point of focus of my lessons, or the teacher could emphasize additional-and very different-goals, like wanting students to develop a rich knowledge of their literary heritage. That means I could teach the above goals, and simultaneously expect kids to gain an understanding of the significance of a particular cast of characters or plot elements from fairy tales or Shakespeare.

None of these are activities. They are all measurable learning outcomes and my days should be organized around these kinds of goals.

Fourth, once I know what I am trying to accomplish, then I must select activities and texts consistent with those learning goals. Sometimes these choices will be highly constrained by the goal itself: if you want students to know the characters and plot of Romeo and Juliet, it is probably wise to focus heavily on that play. If you want kids to distinguish Little Red Riding Hood from the Wicked Stepmother, and the Wolf in the Three Little Pigs from the one who devours Grandma, then this probably dictates a Fairy Tales Unit.

In other cases, there are choices. Should the student read the selection in parts or all the way through? Will the teacher ask questions or will the students take over this role as in Book Club? Will the analysis be through discussion or writing? Will the phonics practice be synthetic (focusing on the individual sounds within words) or analytic (using known words as analogies)? Will students reread a fluency text a set number of times or until a particular performance criterion is met?

Such decisions should be shaped by research considerations and learning considerations-not routine. Research is pretty clear that students do better in decoding when taught systematically from a sequential program than when teachers try to be diagnostic and individualized. That likely means the phonics portion of primary grade reading instruction is best spent delivering lessons from a high quality phonics program. Or, studies show that oral reading fluency practice leads to the most learning when the texts are at students' frustration levels. That means that having students read texts aloud to each other (partner reading) might be a good choice (though so is echo reading), but teachers should assign frustration level texts to either of these activities.

Last point: the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) require the teaching of all of the topics that I have mentioned in this entry. But CCSS does not specify how to organize time around that instruction. The plan put forth here should help teachers to consider the whole set of standards, not just particular activities (e.g., close reading).

Similarly, core reading programs (e.g., basal readers, literature anthologies), provide teachers with lots of texts and activities; usually more than can be delivered in a typical school schedule. This plan can help teachers to decide what to include and what to delete. Many teachers that I know routinely omit the writing activities. If writing outcomes were their focus 25% of the time, many of them would not make this bad decision. Or, teachers often complain that there are just too many decoding lessons. That may or may not be true, but if I had decided to devote 30 minutes a day to phonics teaching, I could determine pretty quickly what to omit and what to teach.

Next time I'll explore issues of flexibility and the applicability of this scheme in upper grade levels, including high school.

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How to Organize Daily Literacy Instruction Part III | Shanahan on Literacy

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Blast from the Past: This entry was first published on June 1, 2014, and is being re-posted on March 30, 2019. The reason for the re-posting? In the last two weeks I have received several questions and several requests for speaking engagements focused specifically on what the literacy school day should look like.

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31b. How to organize daily instruction? (part II)

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31b. How to organize daily instruction? (part II)

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Last week I explained that it makes sense to organize instruction in ways that allots time to learning goals-rather than to instructional activities. It is not that teachers don't need activities, just that activities don't have a one-to-one relationship with instructional outcomes. That's why approaches like Daily 5 and CAFE are simplistic and don't have an especially powerful relationship with learning. Those approaches get teachers aimed at particular classroom activities, without sufficient attention to the outcomes.

How should teachers determine which activities to use towards these essential ends? Research.

For example, imagine you required 30 minutes per day for paired reading (an activity). Research indicates that paired reading can be an effective way of teaching fluency so that sounds pretty good. But it is not the only way to teach it: radio reading, echo reading, reading while listening, and repeated reading are all good, too. As are related activities that can help with some aspects of fluency such as sight vocabulary review or reading parsed text (helps with prosody). Wouldn't it be better to devote the time to developing oral reading fluency and leave the activity choices to the teacher?

I indicated that I would devote slices of time to word learning (not word study-that's an activity), oral reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. Why those? Because for every one of those there is research showing that such instruction can improve overall reading achievement. There is also research showing that at least some struggling readers may have a specific learning problem in one of those areas (but not the others). Later, I'll be more specific about these categories as goals, but for now the categories are enough.

Increasingly, research is suggesting that oral language development is implicated in reading development. Not yet any studies showing that oral language instruction improves overall reading achievement-but getting closer. Some educators might want to divide classroom literacy instruction by 5, to accommodate that additional goal.

Another possibility: many of my colleagues believe it is essential for teachers to motivate; to teach kids to love reading. Again, no research showing much of an impact on overall reading achievement but if you are committed to that outcome, building it into the time structure would be appropriate.

I wouldn't add either of those goals at this time, as I'd wait for the research to make the case. However, whether I stayed to the goals already mentioned or added these, I would still structure the time around the goals and not the activities. It doesn't make sense to set a self-selected reading time, because this alone is not a very robust response to the motivation goal.

I would also stress that this approach calls for set amounts of time devoted to particular goals-not set periods of time. What I mean by that is that it would be okay for a teacher to spend 30 minutes per day teaching vocabulary, but that it wouldn't have to be done from 9:00-9:30. The point isn't to fit instruction into boxes, but to ensure students get sufficient amounts of teaching. Thus, a teacher might include a 5-minute vocabulary review at the beginning of the day, a 10-minute vocabulary discussion focusing on connotation during close reading, and a 15-minute direct instruction period with new words in the afternoon. Not as simplistic as CAFÉ or the Daily 5, but sensible in terms of what it takes to successfully teach students to read.

My next entry will explain how this time-based approach can work with a core reading program or with Common Core. Until then, keep your eyes on the prize; emphasize learning goals, not instructional activities, and use research to set those goals and to identify activities worth spending time on (in other words activities found to accomplish particular goals).

My next entry will explain how this time-based approach can work with a core reading program or with Common Core. Until then, keep your eyes on the prize; emphasize learning goals, not instructional activities, and use research to set those goals and to identify activities worth spending time on (in other words activities found to accomplish particular goals).

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How to Organize Daily Instruction Part II | Shanahan on Literacy

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Last week I explained that it makes sense to organize instruction in ways that allots time to learning goals-rather than to instructional activities. It is not that teachers don't need activities, just that activities don't have a one-to-one relationship with instructional outcomes.

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31a. How to organize daily instruction? (part I)

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31a. How to organize daily instruction? (part I)

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Blast from the Past: First issued May 18, 2014 and reposted on September 24, 2022. These days I'm often asked how I would organize my reading instruction. In this blog entry I provided that kind of description (and I followed it with two more over the subsequent weeks to expand upon those ideas). You can find those blogs by typing How to Organize Daily Instruction into the search function of my site. I think these entries provide some valuable guidance in how to make sure that you are successfully addressing educational standards and meeting students needs in ways consistent with relevant research. However, there are issues not throughly addressed in these entries dealing with differentiation. Those issues don't fit neatly into any scheme such as the one described here because classrooms differ greatly. As Rebecca Barr showed, the specific mix of children in terms of reading ability will dictate how much group work will be done, the size of groups, and so on. Teachers should never group for the sake of grouping, but only in response to student needs. The are other blog entries on this site that discuss some of the issues of differentiation. However, varying instruction on the basis of student needs should take place within some overall structure, and it is that that these three blogs address.
Twice this week I've been asked how to organize instructional time for literacy. Both inquiries noted my earlier objections to Daily 5 and CAFE.

They were right I am not a big fan of those approaches.

My reason (with these any similar, but less popular schemes): they distract teachers from an intense focus on what they are trying to teach students. Teachers must be focused on learning-not activities.

Of course, many teachers would point out that the idea is for kids to learn, and teachers address learning through those activities. I don't disagree about the need for instructional activities as the means for increasing student knowledge and skills, but that doesn't mean we should fetishize the activities.

There are many ways to accomplish learning goals and teachers should select among these as they help students to meet the required outcomes. Locking oneself into a particular daily activity is foolish.

Research has shown that teachers struggle to keep focused on kids' learning; that they get so wrapped up in the activities that they often lose sight of their purpose. What do they say about alligators and swamp draining?

That's why so many teachers and principals measure success in terms of how smoothly an activity went rather than on what it enabled kids to do.

Any scheme that focuses teachers on activities rather than outcomes is a non-starter for me.

However, I appreciate that teachers embrace such schemes because of their manageability. Some of the most onerous decisions for teachers concern how to parcel out their valuable instructional time, and schemes that help teachers to do that have some value.

The framework that I have long used is both like-and wildly different from-these schemes that I'm criticizing. My framework also gives teachers guidance with time use, but its emphasis is on the outcomes rather than the methods.

I start from the premise that students are going to need to spend a lot of time with literacy to become literate. Given that, I think kids should spend at least 2-3 hours per day dealing with literacy.

A second premise is that we have multiple goals in literacy and that they all compete for instructional time. I believe that it makes sense to divide the available instructional time among these different goals.

What are these goals? My reading of the research says that students need to learn words and word parts (to read them, to interpret them), they need to be able to read text fluently (with sufficient accuracy, speed, and prosody), they need to be able to understand and interpret the ideas in text, and they need to convey their own ideas through text (writing). These are all critically important goals, and each of them has many sub goals.

I would argue teachers should provide students with explicit instruction and lots of practice time in each of these four learning areas daily. Rather than focusing on four or five activities that kids should be engaged in everyday, I'd rather have teachers thinking about what activities they should encourage based on the learning goals in each of these areas. Thus, it would be very reasonable to spend 30 minutes on words, 30 minutes on fluency, 30 minutes on reading comprehension, and 30 minutes on writing everyday (on average)-even though the actual activities would vary.

A daily organizing plan that is focused on these outcomes makes greater sense than one based on activities such as read to self or read to someone.

And such a plan makes sense even when using "core reading programs" or "basal readers" because they help teachers to choose among the many options that such programs provide.

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How to Organize Daily Instruction Part I

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Blast from the Past: First issued May 18, 2014 and reposted on September 24, 2022. These days I'm often asked how I would organize my reading instruction. In this blog entry I provided that kind of description (and I followed it with two more over the subsequent weeks to expand upon those ideas).

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30. What's the Role of Amount of Reading Instruction?

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30. What's the Role of Amount of Reading Instruction?

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John Carroll (1963/1989) proposed an innovative model of academic learning. According to Carroll, learning was a function of five variables: student aptitude, opportunity to learn, perseverance, quality of teaching, and ability to understand.

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

He operationalized all those in terms of instructional time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are 7 key ideas about instructional time that every reading educator should know.
1. There's a difference between allotted time and academic learning time.
When scholars first looked at the amount of teaching, they were surprised to discover that there was not much connection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But mismanagement is not always an issue of poor discipline. Some kids lose out to inattention, daydreaming, and obeying but not engaging... the kids who sit politely and quietly but who fail to engage with the lesson. The page turners who don't read.
2. Time is a value, not a variable.
Allocated time is not the important issue, ALT is!

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

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

An example here may help.

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

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

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

Unfortunately, we tend to say things like, "phonics works," or "research supports comprehension strategies."
3. Think components, not overall time.
What we should be saying is, "kids benefited from 30 minutes of daily phonics instruction for a school year," or "we had measurable comprehension improvement from 8 weeks of strategy teaching."

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

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

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

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

None of that makes any sense.
4. Aim at learning goals not instructional activities.
In Chicago, we overcame that problem by portioning the literacy instruction time among word learning, text reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing. That meant kids got a lot of attention to all the key components of reading development.

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

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

Some time-based instructional schemes prescribe specific daily activities: student reading time, small group instruction time, writing, teacher read alouds, ABC Reading Program), etc.
5. Rate and time are not the same thing.
Those schemes help teachers to fill their days.

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

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

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

Time has to do with the numbers of minutes or hours that we devote to a subject. Rate is more bound up in what happens within that time allotment.
6. Not all learning time is equivalent.
For instance, research suggests that the number of interactions that take place between students and teachers (like how many questions they get to answer) makes a difference in learning (Allen, Gregory, Mikami, Lun, Hamre, & Pianta, 2013; Folmer-Annevelink, Doolaard, Mascareño, & Bosker, 2010). Often the amount of interaction is limited. The teacher asks a few questions and calls on a couple kids to answer them. No one must think about the information because they aren't likely to be called upon.

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

In decoding lessons, I'm often concerned about how many words kids get to segment, or sound out, or spell. Some teachers move those lessons along better, getting everyone to do those kinds of things multiple times in a lesson.
7. Time and Tier 2 success.
And what about the amount of writing that occurs in a writing lesson or the amount of reading in a comprehension lesson? (How many words are written or read in the time provided?)

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

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

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

Or, think about a phonics lesson. There is likely to be more learning payoff from a highly interactive lesson that provides opportunities to hear sounds matched to letters and words, and to sound out words with teacher guidance than would accrue from having students completing worksheets quietly at their desks. Kids need to learn to connect phonology (sounds) with orthography (spellings) and that is best done with audible lessons.
References
I understand that at times teachers need time fillers, but instructional planning should always be a quest for what kind of lesson is most likely to foster the learning that we're aiming for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shanahan, T. (2022, February 12). Why don't you encourage reading practice? Shanahan on Literacy. https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/why-dont-you-encourage-reading-practice#sthash.TNmCBysu.dpbs

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

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

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

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It’s About Time We Paid Attention to the Amount of Reading Instruction That We Provide | Shanahan on Literacy

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This blog explains the importance of amount of reading instruction, time on task, amount of interaction in the effective teaching of reading.

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33. Five From Five - snippets on reading instruction from phonological awareness to comprehension

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33. Five From Five - snippets on reading instruction from phonological awareness to comprehension

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The Five from Five website contains information for teachers, support teachers, and school leaders on effective reading instruction informed by the 'Science of Reading'. It is structured around the five 'keys' to reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Phonemic Awareness Read More Phonics Read More Fluency Read More Vocabulary Read More Comprehension Read [...]

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16. What’s So Important About the Alphabetic Principle?

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16. What’s So Important About the Alphabetic Principle?

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8b. Oregon Response to Instruction & Intervention 2022 Annual Conference Session Recordings

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8b. Oregon Response to Instruction & Intervention 2022 Annual Conference Session Recordings

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2022 Annual Conference Session Recordings

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Syllable division rules show us how to break up a multi-syllable word into its syllable parts. There are six main syllable division "rules " to guide us.

How is Syllable Division done?

It all starts with the vowels. Find the vowels in the word. It helps to underline or highlight them.

Find the patten of the consonants and vowels (VCV, VCCV, VCCCV, VCCCCV, C+le, VV).

Use the syllable division rule (shown below) to divide the word into its syllable parts.

Why Should we Teach Syllable Division?

Learning the rules of syllable division provides our students with an effective strategy for chunking up those bigger words into more manageable parts. I see it as another "tool" for their "tool belt" that leads to more accuracy while reading.

Understanding syllable division also helps students to determine what the vowel sound will be. As I learn more, I see this works best when incorporated with morphology (think prefixes, suffixes, and roots). When I first learned syllable division, I only learned syllable division without the consideration of morphemes (which are the smallest units of meaning in our language). I now teach my students to look for familiar prefixes, suffixes, and even roots (for older kids) first. If there aren't any, then begin syllable division.

To get to that point though, we need to teach them those syllable division rules and give them enough practice with them so that it becomes more automatic. All the while, I'm teaching new prefixes and suffixes to them so those can also become more familiar. I think the two actually go together well. But I digress! Back to syllable division!

The first thing to know is that every syllable must have a written vowel. The very definition of a syllable is an uninterrupted unit of speech with one vowel sound.

Syllable Division "Rules"

Here are the syllable division rules on one page:

Here is a picture from my classroom:

As I mentioned above, first thing to know about syllable division is that it's all about vowels!

Every syllable needs a vowel, so we can determine (usually) how many syllables there are based on the number of vowels.

Vowel teams and diphthongs count as one syllable even if there are two vowels because they work together to make one sound.

Same with silent e. The e doesn't make a sound so it doesn't get it's own syllable.
The exception of course is the syllable type consonant -le. This syllable is found in words like little, bubble, table. You cannot hear the e, but it does get its own syllable. It buddies with the l before it and the consonant before the l. More about that later, though!

Syllable Division Rules

The following slides show the main syllable division rules.

Rule #1: Two consonants between the vowels: VCCV Pattern

The first syllable division rule is VC/VC, which stands for vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel. Train your students to find the vowels in the word. They are our starting point. In words with the VCCV pattern, there are two consonants between the two vowels. Usually, we split between those consonants.

See the step by step directions with blue and yellow letters below. (Before teaching this, you should teach your students about open and closed syllable types. For the word basket, split between the s and k. The first syllable is bas and the second syllable is ket. Each syllable has a vowel.

Of course there are always exceptions.

One exception is when there are R or L blends, like in the word secret. We keep R and L blends together, so instead of splitting between those consonants, we keep them together and move them to the second syllable.

We also keep digraphs and units (ing, ink, ang, ank, ost, olt, ind, ild, olt) together. Never split those!

Rule #2 & 3: One Consonant between the Vowels: VCV Pattern

There are two options here! This slide shows both ways.

More commonly, you would split VCV syllables the before that consonant. This leaves your first syllable open, so the vowel would be long.

In the word silent, the letter l is the middle consonant between the vowels. We move that to be with the 2nd syllable: si-lent.

In the word bonus, the letter n is the middle consonant between the vowels. We move that to be with the second syllable, leaving the first syllable open (because it ends with a vowel) bo-nus

Sometimes though, we do the opposite. Sometimes, we split VCV syllables after the consonant. In this case, we close that first syllable, leaving that vowel short.

In the word robin, the middle consonant b moves with the 1st syllable making rob-in. The first syllable rob is closed by the b.

In the word visit, the middle consonant s moves with the 1st syllable making vis-it. The first syllable vis is closed by the v.

Rule #4: Three consonants between the vowels.

In the case of three consonants between the vowels, we usually split after the first consonant.

In the word conflict, the letter nfl are between the vowels. The first consonant n goes with the first syllable and the other two (fl) go to the 2nd syllable: con-flict.

See below that there are the usual exceptions.

We never split digraphs, blends, or units.

Also, a word this big can often be a compound word. Instead, you would split between the two words.

Rule #5: Four Consonants Between the Vowels

This is super similar to the last one. Split after the first consonant, unless it is a compound word. There are not as many of these words, and honestly when you're getting into words this big, I tend to shift my focus to morphology.

Rule #6: Consonant -le

On paper, I've always had this as #6, but I actually found myself teaching this one after #3 because it came up earlier since it is so common. A great example is the word little.

Following this rule, we see the -le at the end and count one back to make lit-tle. Consonant +le in this word is t+le.

This is the syllable type where there is no vowel sound. You only hear the consonant and the /l/ or /ul/.

Rule #7: V/V

When there are two vowels next to each other, but they are not vowel teams or diphthongs (more than one letter making one sound together), then you split between the vowels. These two vowels do not share a sound. I think this is the hardest for my students to decode usually. I wait to teach this one because it can be very confusing!

That first vowel is always long and that second one usually sounds like a schwa.

Compound Words

I've already mentioned this a few times as an exception to the other rules, but it's really a rule all on its own. If the word is a compound words, don't worry about the other rules, just split between those two words.

Affixes: Prefixes and Suffixes

I almost put this one first because it's so important, but I didn't want to confuse. It is super helpful for students to get in the habit of always looking for prefixes and suffixes. This starts in kindergarten with the suffix -s!

I teach my students to always "chunk out" the prefixes and suffixes and to focus on the base word first. This requires direct instruction with all the different prefixes and suffixes.

In first grade, they commonly will see -s, -es, -ing, -ed, -er, -est, re and un. 2nd graders regularly see -ly, -ment, -ful, -less, -able, pre-, dis-, mis-, and so many more!

In some cases, suffixes like -ed don't necessarily make a new syllable (jumped, camped, etc), while in others (rented, busted) it does make another syllable. But that's even more reason to teach them about prefixes and suffixes! Our students will cover the -ed in jumped, then see only one vowel and one syllable. After reading jump, they will then uncover -ed and decide how to pronounce it "jumpt, jump-ed, or jumpd".

You can learn more about this HERE.

3 Syllable Words:

When dividing a word with more than two syllables, first check for affixes (prefixes and suffixes). Then start at the left with the first two vowels, divide those syllables, then move to the right.

If you're interested in just these syllable division posters and some practice pages with all syllable types, you can find them HERE. The practice pages come in two formats: tabbed notebook (shown below) and also regular full-page worksheets.

Resources for Syllable Division

Here is a sneak peak of a few of the practice pages.

And because I'm so indecisive and have created and recreated so many posters over the years, I included all sets of visuals shown in this post. You can just choose your favorite and print!

However, if you already own my S yllable Division with Open and Closed Syllables, I also added these posters to that pack! You can find that HERE.

(If you're wondering what the difference is, this pack above has a lot more practice pages, but just focuses on open and closed syllables because it is part of my systematic units and has detailed lesson plans. The new, smaller pack above that has just the posters and 40 practice pages for all syllable division rules. It includes open and closed syllables then has another section with all the other syllable types. It is not part of the systematic units and does not have the detailed lesson plans.)

Here are a couple of syllable activities that I've done:

For these two, I put the first syllable in one color and the 2nd on another color. Students read the syllables and matched them to make real words.

This next activity was a review activity after learning all syllable types. I wrote words on note cards. I gave each student one at a time. They read the card to the group and then together we determined which pattern it followed. (Students would copy the word on their white board first and do the syllable division individually.) We sorted them into the correct column. The next day I used colored transparencies to chunk a certain syllable. For each word, I would ask for the first or second syllable. Students would say the syllable and then we would highlight that part.

What are Syllable Types?

This post is all about the syllable division rules. But you also will want to know the syllable types. As I mentioned above, I have a pack that focuses on syllable division with only open and closed syllables, which are two of the 7 syllable types. Want to read about the other syllable types? Click HERE to read more about syllable types.

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Syllable Division Rules - Sarah's Teaching Snippets

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Syllable division rules show us how to break up a multi-syllable word into its syllable parts. There are six main syllable division "rules" to guide us.

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2. The brain dictionary - semantic clusters

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2. The brain dictionary - semantic clusters

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72a. Teaching Morphology to Improve Literacy

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72a. Teaching Morphology to Improve Literacy

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74. What Should Morphology Instruction Look Like?

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74. What Should Morphology Instruction Look Like?

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Teacher question:
Are there any resources that provide a list of morphemes to teach at each K-5 grade level? I have been looking for a definitive list of morphemes that is organized by grade level like the Fry sight word list. I often come across research about how L1 and L2 students acquire morphemes, but I am looking for a list that represents the morphemes that students will most likely see in print at each K-5 grade level. Does anything like that exist? Thank you for your time.
Shanahan's response:

The short answer to this question is, "No, I don't know of such a list."

But when have I ever been satisfied with the short answer to anything?

Let's make sure we're all in agreement as to what constitutes a morpheme? Basically, a morpheme is the "smallest grammatical unit." It isn't the same thing as a word, and yet many words are morphemes. The distinction turns on whether the unit (the morpheme or word) can stand on its own. Words have to have that kind of independence, while morphemes don't require it.

Thus, bags, trucked, running, and redirect are all words in the English language while bag, s, truck, ed, run, ing, re, and direct are all morphemes. Each morphemic unit carries meaning, but sometimes morphemes can do that independently (bag, truck, run, direct), and sometimes they need to be combined with other morphemes to be considered a word (s, ed, ing, re).

I admitted ignorance on this issue, and I've tried to turn that ignorance to your advantage. I contacted Jeffrey and Peter Bowers. Both are outstanding scholars (Jeff at the University of Bristol in the UK, and Peter at WordWorks Literacy Centre, in Ontario) who are particularly knowledgeable about teaching morphology to improve literacy. They've both published widely on the issue, and both have chided me when they felt I wasn't paying sufficient attention to how words work morphologically. These days I know no one better able to provide you with a thoughtful answer to your question, and boy was I right!

Word Matrix: a map of a word family

Word Sums: reveal underlying structure of any complex word (a word with more than just a base)

un + help + ful + ness > unhelpfulness

Here is Peter Bower's response (with my light editing)

I have no knowledge of such a list, but I wouldn't recommend one anyway.

My recommendation based on theory not direct research evidence - is that the main value comes from teaching all or many members of a morphological family at one time with the matrix and word sums (see the attached figure illustrating a matrix and word sum). In the younger grades I start with free bases [those morphemes that stand alone as words], but once that is established, I have no trouble introducing bound bases [the units that can't stand alone]. This relates to the research we cite about the value of studying meaningfully related items at one time rather than disconnected items.

Instead of a "scope and sequence" of morphemes to teach, what I recommend is starting with words in the children's vocabulary, analyzing such words to find their bases, then looking for other members of that family.

The point is not that there is a "scope and sequence" of morphemes to teach. Rather there is a kind of a "scope" of orthographic concepts that we want students to learn, and teachers can address those concepts based on whatever words are central to the readings they are introducing to the students.

A brief list of those concepts that should be taught would include:

Every word is a base or a base with something else (another base or affix)

Bases and affixes (morphemes) are the meaningful building blocks that construct words.

We can analyze complex words into constituent morphemes with word sums and show their interrelationship with a matrix.

English spelling prioritizes consistent spelling of morphemes over consistent pronunciation of morphemes. (This is why we refer to morphemes by their spelling not their pronunciation. The base of the word action is not referred to by the pronunciation of the word act. Instead it is referred to by its spelling. The base "a - c - t". This is the same as the fact that we don't refer to the <-ed> suffix by one or all of its three pronunciation, we call it by it's spelling "e-d suffix.")

Thus, we need to understand grapheme-phoneme correspondences from within the context of morphological families. (e.g. we learn the phonology of the grapheme by studying morphological families).

There are reliable conventions for the three suffixing conventions.

Studying and understanding the suffixing conventions is not primarily about improving spelling accuracy, it is about being able to analyze hypotheses about connections between words. We can test the hypothesis that has a base only if we know vowel suffixes replace final, non-syllabic s (image/ + ine -> imagine).

The "structure and meaning test": To determine that two words share a base, we need evidence from both structure (word sum) and meaning (etymology). So with the earlier example of words related to (play, playing, playful, replay, playhouse), we can prove all of those words can be analyzed with word sums with coherent affixes and bases. But we can also show that they all go back to an Old English root plegan, plegian for "frolic, move rapidly". However, the word which can be analyzed structurally turns out not to be related. It does not belong in the morphological family with the others because it goes back to a Latin root plac(ere) for "fold". So to "display" is to "unfold".

If we are going to teach children how their writing system works, we need to teach them the interrelation of morphology, phonology, and etymology. As we have pointed out, this is why Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) is not about "adding" morphological instruction to phonics instruction - its about teaching how the system works.

This is why I argue that SWI teaches grapheme-phoneme correspondences more explicitly and accurately than phonics. Phonics instruction (under the definition of associations of pronunciations and letters without reference to morphology or etymology) cannot explain the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in countless words like does or rough or every or homophones, and so on. So many people miss the absolute detail into orthographic phonology that comes with SWI.

Here are some videos to illustrate my point.

Grade 2 Morphology

A teacher showing investigations from his class.

Grade 1 Morphology

Investigating grapheme-phoneme correspondences - with the context of morphological word sums.

Kindergarten Morphology

A kindergarten lesson I taught introducing the word sum and matrix that touches on grapheme-phoneme correspondences like the pronunciation of the <-s> suffix for /z/ and /s/.

It's as simple as starting with the "known" and then expanding from that. Even if kids know all the words in a morphological family (e.g. play, playing, playful, replay, playhouse) the lesson is not about new vocabulary, but learning how word structure links words. That concept can then be applied anywhere.

The other thing I keep in mind when choosing morphological families to investigate is the orthographic concepts a family has to offer. If I've established the fact that words that share a base share a spelling and a meaning connection, then I can introduce a base like with words like actor, acting, react, and action as a way to introduce the fact that the pronunciation of morpheme might change but keep the spelling. In that way we learn the phonology of t is not the "t sound", but that the grapheme can write /t/ when that is the appropriate sound. I've attached an example of a lesson I've used for that before.

I also draw on the <-ed> suffix from early on to highlight this same concept that morphemes do not have pronunciations until they are in a word. The pronunciation of a word like is another useful one to get rid of this idea of a "t sound" since this very common pronunciation of a very common suffix is what is typically thought of the "t sound," but their ain't no /t/!

And then you also encounter words that give rise to the need to teach all the suffixing changes.

These are concepts teachers need to learn and they can bring into work with their class as they investigate words."

Shanahan again

I don't disagree with Peter on any of this, except I'm not as dismissive of the kind of list that you are requesting. I don't see it as mutually exclusive from the curriculum goals that he specified or contradictory of the kind of instruction he described.

Many teachers, when referring to morphology or "structural analysis", actually are talking about affixes alone, and not the bases. If that is the case here, there are some lists like that which present the most common prefixes and suffixes from textbooks in grades 3-9 (White, Sowell, & Yanagihara, 1989). You can easily find those lists on line and you could definitely make use of those lists to make sure that you are hitting all the notes if you do the word sums and matrixes that Peter recommends.

Otherwise, I haven't been able to come up with a graded list of bases for you to use. But I have passed your letter along to my friends at MetaMetrics (the Lexile people) and have asked if they could produce such a list from their language corpus of more than 1 billion words. Stay tuned!
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What Should Morphology Instruction Look Like?

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Are there any resources that provide a list of morphemes to teach at each K-5 grade level? I have been looking for a definitive list of morphemes that is organized by grade level like the Fry sight word list.

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43b. Why Your Students May Not Be Learning to Comprehend 

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43b. Why Your Students May Not Be Learning to Comprehend 

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information on strategies included

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Teacher question: My district is trying to shift literacy instruction to be in line with the science of reading. We are wondering where comprehension strategies fit into Scarborough's Reading Rope? Inferences and making connections are part of Verbal Reasoning, but what about other skills my students still need to be taught, like understanding and using text structure, summarizing, visualizing, questioning? There is much research to support explicit instruction in comprehension strategies, so where do they fit? Also, even when our teachers do a good job of scaffolding students' comprehension of complex text, our at-risk students struggle to independently process texts on tests and with grade-level classroom assignments. What else should we be doing?
Shanahan's response:
Any model is a simplification and what gets emphasized may shift over time. Hollis Scarborough's rope (2001) is no exception.

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

However, don't despair.

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

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

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

What do I make of executive functioning?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

Cutting, L.E., & Scarborough, H.S. (2012). Multiple bases for comprehension difficulties: The potential of cognition and neurobiological profiling for validation of subtypes and development of assessments. In J.P. Sabatini, T. O'Reilly, & E.R. Albro (Eds.), Reaching an understanding: Innovations in how we view reading assessment. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Education.
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Why Your Students May Not Be Learning to Comprehend | Reading Rockets

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Teacher question: My district is trying to shift literacy instruction to be in line with the science of reading. We are wondering where comprehension strategies fit into Scarborough's Reading Rope? Inferences and making connections are part of Verbal Reasoning, but what about other skills my students still need to be taught, like understanding and using text structure, summarizing, visualizing, questioning?

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15c. Ideas and strategies for dual coding  

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15c. Ideas and strategies for dual coding  

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15 d. Semantic Reasoning: Building Vocabulary With Critical Thinking Skills

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15 d. Semantic Reasoning: Building Vocabulary With Critical Thinking Skills

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60c. Dual Coding or Cognitive Load? Exploring the Effect of Multimodal Input on English as a Foreign Language Learners’ Vocabulary Learning

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60c. Dual Coding or Cognitive Load? Exploring the Effect of Multimodal Input on English as a Foreign Language Learners’ Vocabulary Learning

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School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China

In the era of eLearning 4.0, many researchers have suggested that multimodal input helps to enhance second language (L2) vocabulary learning. However, previous studies on the effects of multimodal teaching have failed to yield definitive conclusions. Furthermore, only few studies on the multimodal input of vocabulary learning have aimed at junior high school students and have focused on explicit vocabulary instruction in class. To explore the effects of multimodal input on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' vocabulary learning and summarize effective methods, this study adopts a mixed-method approach. Based on dual coding theory and cognitive load theory, the teaching materials in this study were designed using the resources provided by the multimodal corpus iWeb and other websites. A total of 60 junior high school students who learned EFL and had a similar English proficiency level were divided into an experimental group (EG) and a control group (CG). Target words were selected through questionnaire I. During the experiment, the CG learned from monomodal materials while the EG received multimodal input, and an immediate post-test was delivered to the two groups. Questionnaire II was distributed in the EG, and five students of the EG were randomly selected for an interview. One week later, a delayed post-test was conducted on the EG and CG. The results showed that the EG performed better in the post-test but did worse than the CG in the delayed post-test. The results of the questionnaire and the interview suggest that students held both positive and negative attitudes toward the multimodal input approach in vocabulary learning. The study concludes with some implications for choosing a multimodal input approach in vocabulary learning, along with a number of suggestions on how to optimize its positive influence and minimize its negative effects.

Introduction

The importance of learning vocabulary has become widely recognized ( Schmitt, 2000; Nation, 2001; Barcroft, 2004; Smidt and Hegelheimer, 2004). However, it is difficult for foreign language learners to obtain the meaning of vocabulary items and relative meanings acquired in a given context of use. It is also difficult for these learners to compensate for this difficulty, as they generally do not have the opportunity to get recurring interaction in the target language that can facilitate retention ( Zandieh and Jafarigohar, 2012). Therefore, it is necessary for teachers to offer students an alternative that can improve efficiency and deepen vocabulary learning as well as learning in context.

Under the context of eLearning 4.0, new media and new technology expand the possibilities for vocabulary learning. The emergence of multimodal corpora and application of multimodality theory in vocabulary teaching have been gradually recognized and popularized. However, previous studies on the effects of multimodal teaching have drawn inconsistent conclusions. Although some studies have proved the superiority of the multimodal approach over single-mode ( Chun and Plass, 1996a, b; Al-Seghayer, 2001; Ramezanali and Faez, 2019), some other studies ( Boers et al., 2017) have reported no benefit of additional modes and no significant difference in L2 vocabulary learning.

Therefore, exploring the effects of multimodal input on junior high school students' vocabulary learning and summarizing an effective vocabulary teaching method are a promising research direction. The primary purpose of this article is to explore the effects of multimodal input used in explicit instruction in EFL classes by employing the multimodal corpus iWeb. In addition, this study investigates students' perceptions of multimodal input on English vocabulary instruction. By adopting a mixed-method approach to verify the effects of the multimodal input approach on EFL vocabulary learning in high school, this study provides some referential value for high school EFL vocabulary learning and helps to improve vocabulary teaching approaches.

Literature Review

Multimodal Input and English as a Second Language Vocabulary Learning

Dual coding theory, concerned at a fundamental level with the nature of symbolic systems, assumes that memory and cognition are served by two separate systems, one specialized for dealing with verbal information and the other for non-verbal information ( Paivio, 1990). From the perspective of dual coding theory, multimodal input plays an important role in English as a second language (ESL) vocabulary teaching and learning.

Supported by modern technology, multimodal input has become available for vocabulary instruction and has gained great attention in eLearning 4.0 ( Bujang et al., 2020; Abdelghani et al., 2021). As multimodal materials convey different types of information through both of the two channels, many empirical studies based on multimodal input have employed not only language and still pictures but also audio clips and animations to explore their effects on vocabulary teaching and learning ( Bisson et al., 2015; Khezrlou et al., 2017; Alzahrani and Roberts, 2021; Muñoz et al., 2021; Perez, 2022). Lin and Yu (2017) compared the effects on vocabulary learning of eighth grade students under four input conditions: text only, text plus picture, text plus sound, and text and sound plus picture. Their findings showed that the input of text and sound achieved the best scores in the immediate post-test, and that the input of text and sound plus picture achieved the best scores in the delayed post-test. Ramezanali and Faez (2019) compared the effects of monomodal annotation and multimodal annotation on word acquisition. This study designed three experimental groups and one control group, and its outcome testified that multimodal input outperformed monomodal input, and that multimodality of translation and video produced better results than multimodality of translation and audio.

Although the above studies have proved that multimodal input is better than monomodal input in terms of vocabulary acquisition, there are also many studies that have resulted in opposite outcome, showing that adding another modality, such as pictures, audio pronunciation, video, and L2 definition, cannot guarantee better score in learners' vocabulary acquisition (e.g., Acha, 2009; Boers et al., 2017). One possible reason is suggested by cognitive load theory: low-ability learners might have to allocate more of their cognitive resources to processing visual and verbal information than high-ability learners ( Plass et al., 2003). Yeh and Wang (2003), for instance, used a between-participants design, and designed three input conditions, which were text only, text plus picture, and text plus picture and audio pronunciation of the word. Vocabulary learning was examined through a mixture of word association and multiple choice and cloze tests. The authors concluded from the overall post-test scores that the text plus picture input was the most effective. However, they also pointed out that this result might be misleading, as there was no significant difference with the scores obtained under the text-only input. Furthermore, the input enhanced with audio pronunciation yielded the poorest post-test scores, arguably indicating that more is not always better. This may be because both text and audio pronunciation are types of verbal information, and presenting two inputs of the same mode caused extra processing load. Yeh and Wang (2003) stressed that the combination of verbal and pictorial glosses can increase target vocabulary retention more than integrating the three gloss types of word, picture, sound, and only one gloss type of text.

Multimodal Corpus and Vocabulary Learning

The iWeb ("Intelligent Web") corpus was created by Mark Davies in mid-2018. It contains about 14 billion words including advanced searches of the top 60,000 words that are not available in other large corpora ( Davies and Kim, 2019). Learners can search for a wealth of information on each of these words including its definitions, links to images and audio, translations, related topics, word clusters, collocates, and much more. Khan (2019) used iWeb to improve advanced non-native students' ability in using four-word lexical bundles in academic writing. In this study, students were asked to focus on four-word clusters and the actual usage of these sequences under the section Concordance Lines. The study concluded that it was possible to help students speak and write like expert users of the English language using the iWeb corpus.

Previous studies on multimodal input in vocabulary learning have mainly focused on college students ( Wang and Chen (2018); Diao and Hu (2021), adult learners ( Boers et al., 2017), and primary school students ( Tragant et al., 2016). Only few studies have worked with junior high school students ( Lin and Yu, 2017). Furthermore, majority of studies on multimodal input in vocabulary instruction available so far are focused on incidental vocabulary acquisition, in which the recalling of vocabulary meaning is a by-product of reading or listening, with only two exceptions ( Lin and Yu, 2017; Diao and Hu, 2021). It is, therefore, important to verify the effectiveness of multimodal input in explicit vocabulary instruction in class. The materials previous authors used were mostly textbooks, documentaries, or videos; only few studies have used multimodal online corpora (e.g., iWeb) This attests to a certain distance between these studies and the reality of current-day language learning, since online corpora are one of the main information sources for generation Z when it comes to eLearning 4.0. The goal of this study is to address this gap. The study aims to examine the effects of multimodal input and monomodal input on vocabulary learning based on evidence from post-tests, questionnaires, and interviews.

Materials and Methods

This Study

This study examined the effectiveness of a multimodal input approach compared with a monomodal input approach in L2 learners' vocabulary learning and retention. The following research questions guided the study:

RQ1: Which teaching approach, multimodal input of verbal and visual materials, or monomodal input of only verbal materials is more likely to promote students' acquisition of meaning of target vocabulary?

RQ2: In which aspects does the multimodal input of verbal and visual materials affect students' acquisition of meaning of target vocabulary?

RQ3: What are L2 learners' attitudes toward the multimodal input approach?

A mixed-method approach was adopted to answer the research questions. The independent variable was the mode of vocabulary input, including monomodal and multimodal inputs. The dependent variable was students' scores on vocabulary meaning retrieval tests. The participants were divided into two groups: The control group (CG) and the experimental group (EG). The CG received monomodal input containing only verbal materials, while the EG received multimodal input that comprised of verbal and visual materials selected from iWeb. Vocabulary meaning retrieval tests were distributed to explore students' learning effects, while questionnaire II and interview were conducted to investigate their attitudes toward multimodal input.

Participants

The research participants of this study, whose native language was Chinese, were Grade Nine students from two self-paced classes in a junior high school in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. Based on final examination scores of grade eight and the level test conducted at the beginning of grade nine, students whose scores were on the top eight of each class were selected for the two self-paced classes, so students of the two classes had relatively good performance in their study. To ensure that the two groups had similar levels of English proficiency, their midterm examination in English of that semester was analyzed. The English midterm exam was organized by the school, and all students had to participate in it. The exam included listening, reading, and writing items that tested students' English proficiency. There were multiple-choice questions that tested listening and reading comprehension, fill-in-the-blank questions that examined grammar knowledge, and a writing item that required students to write an English essay. Results of an independent samples t-test showed no significant difference between the English proficiency of the two groups ( t = −0.091, p = 0.928 > 0.05). The participants were naturally classified into the control group (CG) and the experimental group (EG) based on their class unit. A total of 32 students were treated as CG, and 28 students were regarded as EG according to their familiarity with the target words, as they declared that they did not learn after they filled out questionnaire I, which was designed by the authors to see the participants' knowledge of the test items. Table 1 shows information about the participants.

Table 1. Information about the participants.

Teaching Materials

Target words were sorted out using questionnaire I. A total of 48 words were initially chosen from TEENS Junior ( teens.i21st.cn), which was specifically designed for junior high school students as a complementary material to the textbook in use and was chosen by the English teacher of the two classes. After questionnaire I was distributed, eight words were picked out on the basis that all the participants declared that they had never encountered these words.

Microsoft PowerPoint was used to design the courseware consisting of one slide per target word. To illustrate the interface of the slide, Figure 1 presents a labeled screenshot of the target word peak shown in the slide that includes all multimodal verbal and visual representations. The verbal information of the target words is the shared information shown to both the CG and the EG (i.e., L1 translation, L2 definition, written form, and audio pronunciation). The picture and video are visual information designed only for the EG.

Figure 1. The two experimental treatments in this study illustrated with the target word peak.

The pictures and videos that explain the meaning of the target words were selected by searching iWeb. Then, the multimodal materials were organized and presented in slides. During classroom teaching, the written form of the target words, audios, L2 translations, L1 definitions, pictures, and videos were presented contiguously to the EG; and the written form of the target words, audios, L2 translations, and L1 definitions were presented contiguously to the CG.

Instruments

Questionnaire I

To assess participants' receptive knowledge of the words, a questionnaire was adapted from the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale developed by Wesche and Paribakht (1996). The initial assessment of learner's knowledge of the test items with a total of 48 words consisted of a receptive recall test in the form of English to Chinese translation. For each word, the English written form of the word was given, and the learners were required to declare if they have encountered that word before. If yes, its Chinese translation was asked.

Immediate and Delayed Post-tests

To evaluate participants' performance after the treatment, an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test were developed by the researchers. In learning new vocabulary, establishing a memory link between the word form and its meaning is important ( Nation, 2001; Laufer and Goldstein, 2004; Schmitt, 2000; Webb, 2015). Accordingly, the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test in this study assessed the creation of this form-meaning link. The written form of the target words was given on the left side of the test paper. The students were required to give the Chinese translation of these eight English words on the right side of the test paper within 2 min. The delayed post-test on word meaning was similar to the immediate post-test on word meaning, with the only difference being the target words were presented in an order different from that in the immediate post-test.

Questionnaire II and Interview

To address RQ3, questionnaire II and a semi-structured interview were developed. Questionnaire II was designed to investigate participants' perceptions and attitudes toward the multimodal input method in vocabulary learning, which might help answer RQ 3. It is composed of 8 questions. This questionnaire was compiled with reference to Sydorenko (2010). Items 1-7 were measured in the form of a five-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). Item 1 asked whether the multimodal input method motivated their interest in vocabulary learning. Items 2 to probed into which mode of the audios, videos, pictures, L1 translations, or combination of those modes helped most in retrieving the meaning of the target words in the immediate post-test. Question No. 7 explored students' overall feelings toward the multimodal input method in vocabulary learning. Question No. 8 is an open question that queried participants' suggestions on vocabulary learning. However, since none of the participants gave relevant feedback, the answers will not be analyzed and discussed in this study.

The interview in this study was designed to explore further what students think about the multimodal input method in vocabulary learning. This study adopted a semi-structured interview. Before conducting the interview, 5 questions were organized to collect students' perceptions and attitudes toward the multimodal input approach. The five questions of this interview are as follows: (1) What methods do you usually use to learn vocabulary? (2) What do you think of learning vocabulary through its L2 translation, L1 definition, and audio pronunciation? (3) What do you think of learning vocabulary through its L2 translation, L1 definition, audio pronunciation, and pictures and videos? (4) Of these two methods, which one do you prefer? (5) Did the integration of L2 translation, L1 definition, audio pronunciation, and pictures and videos help you in this vocabulary meaning test? If yes, how? If not, why?

This interview started with the easiest question, as question 1 asked for information that is closely related to the students' learning experience. Questions 2, 3, and 4 asked about interviewees' attitudes toward the multimodal input approach and the monomodal input approach. Question 5 asked for interviewees' perceptions toward the multimodal input approach. This interview was conducted by the researchers on the same day of the teaching phase when the time was convenient for the interviewees according to the interview outline. Responses on the interview were recorded, transcribed, and summarized for analysis.

It should be noted that both questionnaire II and the interview used students' native language to ensure comprehensibility, and that the interview was conducted in the teachers' office which was quiet and suitable for communication.

Research Procedures

This study took about 2 weeks to conduct and consisted of six phases. One week before the experiment, questionnaire I was handed out with the purpose of sorting out the target words. Following questionnaire I was the teaching phase, which was conducted 1 week later. Both groups learned word meanings through PowerPoint slides for a total of 8 min, with 1 min for each word and with the CG receiving monomodal input information (e.g., written form, L1 translation, L2 definition, and audio pronunciation) and the EG receiving multimodal input information (e.g., written form, L1 translation, L2 definition, audio pronunciation, and picture, video). After the teaching intervention, both groups were required to finish the immediate post-test within 2 min using a pen and paper. In addition, questionnaire II was distributed and the interview was conducted on the EG. One week later, a delayed post-test was conducted for both groups. Figure 2 shows the research procedures used.

Figure 2. Experimental procedures.

Data Collection and Analyses

In tackling RQ1, both immediate and delayed post-test scores were considered. In scoring the post-test and delayed post-test results for data analysis purposes, for each word, a learner received either 1 point or 0 points. A point was given for responses that were identical to its Chinese translation given on the slides. Responses with wrong Chinese translation and no response were counted as incorrect and received 0 points. Thus, the highest score is 8 and the lowest is 0. Both the immediate and delayed post-tests were marked by the same researcher, and the criterion of marking was the same. The scores were recorded by the researcher for data analysis.

The statistical data collected in this study are as follows: (1) mid-term scores of these two classes; (2) scores in the immediate post-test and those in the delayed post-test; (3) participants' answers on questionnaire II. Besides, interviewees' answers were recorded and transcribed with their permission, and were then summarized and analyzed to support statistical data and answer RQ 3.

An alpha level of p < 0.05 was set for all the tests. Effect size estimates were obtained by calculating r for the non-parametric tests and the independent samples t-test. Following Plonsky and Oswald (2014), r-values of 0.25, 0.40, and 0.60 were considered as small, medium, and large, respectively.

Results

Midterm Test of All Students From the Two Classes

At the very beginning of this study, in order to make sure that students in the two classes had the same level of English proficiency, an independent samples t-test was performed on the students' mid-term English scores. Before conducting the t-test, the homogeneity of variance was checked by Levene's test, and this assumption was met.

Table 2 presents the descriptive statistics of midterm test scores of students in the two classes.

As shown in Table 2, the mean score of the CG is 90.85 and the mean score of the EG is 91.32. Table 2 shows that the significance of the mean score is 0.61, which is much greater than 0.05 and indicates no significant difference between the scores of the two groups. It is safe to say that the students in the two classes have the same level of English proficiency. This would presume that all the learners have an equal ability to learn L2 vocabulary and that, when given adequate instruction, they will all perform at the same level.

Midterm Test of Students in the Experimental Group and the Control Group

In questionnaire I, eight target words were fixed, and the 28 students in the EG and 32 students in the CG declared their lack of knowledge of these eight target words. To once again render certain that the EG and the CG have the same level of English proficiency, another independent samples t-test was performed on the students' mid-term English scores.

As shown in Table 3, the significance of the mean score is 0.928, which is much greater than.05 and indicates that there is no significant difference between the scores of the two classes. This shows that students in the EG and the CG have the same level of English proficiency.

Immediate Post-test on Word Meaning

Regarding the effect of input, Table 4 displays the results of the immediate post-test of the 60 participants of the experiment. Each learner studied 8 words.

Shapiro-Wilk tests were first conducted to determine the normality of the test scores of the EG and the CG. It showed that p CG, immediate-post = 0 < 0.05, and that p EG, immediate-post = 0 < 0.05, which meant that the immediate-test scores of the CG and the EG had a non-normal distribution. Thus, a Mann-Whitney U-test was performed.

Table 4 shows that learners in the CG obtained an average score of 7.25 out of 8 in the immediate post-test, which corresponds to a mean vocabulary learning rate of 90.6%, whereas the learners in the EG obtained an average score of 7.14 out of 8 in the immediate post-test, which corresponds to a mean vocabulary learning rate of 89.3%. As shown in Table 4, there is no significant difference in the mean score between the CG and the EG, with z = 0.033, p = 0.974 > 0.05, even though the mean score of the CG is slightly higher than that of the EG in the immediate post-test. The effect size for this difference was in the small range ( r = 0.004).

Delayed Post-test on Word Meaning

To explore the effectiveness of multimodal input in retaining the meaning of words compared with monomodal input, Shapiro-Wilk tests were first conducted to determine the normality of the score data of the EG and the CG. It showed that p CG, delayed-post = 0.167, and that p EG, delayed-post = 0.075, which meant that the delayed post-test scores of the CG and the EG had a normal distribution. An independent samples t-test was performed on delayed the post-test between the EG and the CG; the result of which is shown in Table 5.

As shown in Table 5, learners in the CG obtained an average score of 4.09 out of 8 in the delayed post-test, which corresponds to a mean vocabulary learning rate of 51.1%, whereas learners in the EG obtained an average score of 3.57 out of 8 in the delayed post-test, which corresponds to a mean vocabulary learning rate of 44.6%. Table 5 shows that there is no significant difference in the mean score on delayed post-tests between the EG and the CG, with t = 0.954, p = 0.344 > 0.05. Still, the mean score of the CG is slightly higher than that of the EG in the delayed post-test, and the effect size r = 0.123 falls into the small range.

Looking into the retention effect of multimodal input on learning of vocabulary meaning and its retention effect in comparison with the monomodal input method, Wilcoxon signed rank tests were then conducted. The results are shown in Table 6 below.

Table 6. Wilcoxon signed rank test comparison between the immediate and delayed post-tests.

Table 6 shows that there is a drop in the mean score of the EG and the CG from 7.14 in the immediate post-test to 3.57 in the delayed post-test and from 7.24 in the immediate post-test to 4.09 in the delayed post-test, respectively. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test of the EG shows a significant difference between the two post-tests, with a close-to-large effect size ( z = 4.481, p = 0 < 0.05, r = 0.599). With regard to the CG, a significant difference between the two post-tests also emerged, with a close-to-large effect size ( z = 4.639, p = 0 < 0.05, r = 0.58).

Questionnaire II

Research question 3 in this study probed into participants' attitudes toward the multimodal input method for learning vocabulary meaning. To address this question, students in the EG were required to respond to questionnaire II. Cronbach's alpha of this questionnaire is 0.927, which means that the reliability of this questionnaire is sound.

As shown in Table 7, 57.1% of the participants strongly agreed and 28.6% of them agreed that the multimodal input method motivated their interest in learning vocabulary. Only 14.3% of the participants answered not sure, and none of them disagreed or strongly disagreed. It is noteworthy that majority of the students declared that the multimodality (the integration of AP, V, P, and L1L2) helped them most in retrieving the meaning of the target words in the immediate post-test. It is also worth mentioning that one student disagreed that pictures helped him or her in recalling the meaning of the target words in the immediate post-test. Based on question no. 7, 92.9% showed a positive attitude toward this teaching method.

Table 7. Results of questionnaire II.

Interview

In order to support statistical data and to answer RQ 3, a semi-structured interview was conducted. The following is part of the interview in which 5 students (students A, B, C, D, and E) were selected randomly to participate after the immediate post-test, and shows some detailed information about students' perceptions and attitudes toward the multimodal input method in learning vocabulary.

First, with regard to methods used by students to learn vocabulary, most of the students reported that they used applications to learn vocabulary, as they provided not only definitions and translations but also example sentences and audio. This indicates that the students generally show a favorable attitude toward online applications in vocabulary learning. What is more, student A took a negative attitude toward traditional paper dictionaries because he thought it was too dull. However, student D mentioned that he used the application Leci (a smart-phone app for English vocabulary learning) as it provides L2 translations, L1 definitions, example sentences, and audio pronunciation, pictures, and videos, but he usually does not watch videos because it takes too much time, which implied one of the shortcomings of the multimodal instructional materials during vocabulary learning. Second, as to opinions about the monomodal input method, most of the students said that it's dull to learn vocabulary by this method, because it is unappealing and cannot leave a deep impression. This demonstrated the unique advantages of multimodal over unimodal learning materials, with the latter being judged to be too dull because they could leave only information of a single mode, the verbal one, in learners' sensory memory. Third, with regard to opinions about the multimodal input method, most of the students commented on it rather favorably because videos attract them a lot. suggesting that the videos could be a little bit longer. Student E mentioned that with using video it's easier to memorize a word because it helps by visualizing. However, one student showed a negative attitude toward the multimodal input method in vocabulary learning. He thought that videos in class interrupt the learning process. He did, however, show a positive attitude toward using pictures. Fourth, as to their preference between the multimodal input method and the monomodal input method, one student said that he liked the multimodal input method, and another student reported that both of them are nice. The other three students did not give any comment. Lastly, when asked which modes (L2 translation, L1 definition, audio pronunciation, and picture and video) helped them in retrieving words, two students answered "pictures," because vivid pictures could attract their attention. One student answered pictures and audio because pictures deepened his memory of the word's meaning, and audio helped him to learn the pronunciation, thus reinforcing memorization of the word. The other two students did not make any comment.

Discussion

Effects of Multimodal Input Method on Learning Vocabulary

Research question 1 of this study concerns the immediate and delayed effects of the multimodal input method on learning vocabulary and the method's effect in comparison with that of the monomodal input method. First, by means of comparing self-reports on questionnaire I and the immediate post-test, the results indicate that the multimodal input method is effective and beneficial to students' vocabulary learning. Second, compared with the monomodal input method, the statistic results of this study show that it is slightly less effective. As for the first result, it is in accordance with the findings of many previous studies that the multimodal input method is beneficial for vocabulary learning ( Khezrlou et al., 2017; Peters, 2019; Puimège and Peters, 2019; Puimège and Peters, 2020). As for the second result, however, it seems inconsistent with the findings claimed by some previous studies, which concluded that students who learned with the multimodal input method either outperformed or showed no significant difference with those who did not ( Sydorenko, 2010; Ramezanali and Faez, 2019; Alzahrani and Roberts, 2021). But the result is compatible with the finding of Acha's (2009) in that children who process visual materials can be exposed to a higher cognitive load than those who only process the word and that children's learning processes are hindered by limited working memory. The result is also in line with Boers et al.'s (2017) in that the provision of visual materials alongside textual information to elucidate the meaning of new words may reduce the amount of attention that L2 learners give to the words proper.

How Does Multimodal Input Affect the Acquisition of Target Vocabulary

Research question 2 of this study probes into possible reasons that affected students' immediate and delayed vocabulary learning and retention results in the EG. In this study, students in the EG were able to have sound vocabulary recall after being taught with the multimodal input method. as shown by immediate post-test. The results can be explained by referring to the advantages of multimodal input.

To begin with, multimodal materials used for the EG provided two retrieving cues for students. The materials for EG consisted of target words, L2 translations, L1 definitions, and audios. Besides, pictures and videos were utilized to illustrate the meaning of target words. Therefore, visual information and verbal information would enter sensory memory through the eyes and ears. Sensory memory allows for pictures, video, written forms of words, L2 translations, and L1 definitions to be held as visual images for a very brief time period in visual sensory memory and audio to be held as auditory images for a very brief time period in auditory sensory memory. Based on dual coding theory ( Paivio, 1990), working memory temporally holds and manipulates knowledge in active consciousness, enabling students to construct referential connections between the two forms of mental representation ( Mayer and Sims, 1994). As one student reported in the interview, the multimodal input method made it easier to memorize a word as it helped to visualize. Thus, in the post-tests, students in the EG had two retrieving cues for the meaning of target words and had sound vocabulary recall. Besides, the verbal and visual materials in this study were presented in an order of written form of word, audio, L2 translation, L1 definition, picture, and video, which means that these materials were presented contiguously, as referential connections are more easily built when both verbal and visual materials are presented contiguously ( Mayer and Sims, 1994).

Despite the sound vocabulary recall that that EG had, the CG performed better in the two post-tests.

This result might be explained by the redundancy effect of cognitive load theory. The redundancy effect occurs when one source is sufficient to allow for understanding and learning while the other source merely reiterates the information of the first source in a different form. Abundant information was also recognized as a source of impairment in learner's working processing capacity ( Davis and Lyman-Hager, 1997). In this study, students in the EG had to divide their attention to different modes of information with a limited class time. On the positive side, the plentiful multimodal materials used in the EG, with the combination of verbal information and visual information, may aid memory trace in learners. However, the multimodal input method also forced the participants to handle additional visual information with a limited time, which increased their cognitive load. Besides, the provision of pictures alongside textual information to elucidate the meaning of new words may reduce the amount of attention that the students give to the word proper ( Boers et al., 2017).

Another explanation might be found in the low cognitive ability of the students. The participants in this study were junior high school students, meaning that their cognitive ability is in the developmental stage. According to Plass et al. (2003), adults with low cognitive ability may learn worse when an additional picture is added in the multimodal input method of vocabulary learning. Compared with adults, the cognitive ability of junior high school students could be lower. It is, therefore, possible that elimination of some visual inputs or provision of additional input time could have led to a better result.

Lastly, the multimodal input method in class teaching was new to the EG, and it took time for students in this group to get used to this new type of input method, while students in the CG were familiar with the monomodal input method, as it is a conventional teaching method. Adding videos in class teaching reduced the amount of attention that students had to give to meaningful information. As one of the interviewees said, videos might interrupt class teaching. He also stated that adding a video might be helpful to learn vocabulary outside of class if a student has self-discipline. Junior high school students are easily attracted by videos themselves, which might actually hamper the process of mentally integrating visual information and verbal information on target words.

L2 Learners' Attitudes Toward the Multimodal Input Approach

Research question 3 of this study is answered by means of questionnaire II and interview. According to questionnaire II, most students in the EG adopted a favorable attitude toward the application of multimodal input in vocabulary learning. They thought this method motivated them in the process of vocabulary learning, which is similar to the questionnaire results discussed in the study of Sydorenko (2010). Most students declared that multimodalities of L2 translation, L1 definition, audio, picture, and video attracted their attention, deepened their impression of the words, and promoted their memory of the words. According to the interviews, the interviewees showed both favorable and critical attitudes toward the multimodal input method of vocabulary learning. Combined with the results of questionnaire II and the interview, the multimodal input of visual and verbal materials did help the students in arousing interests and understanding of the meaning of the new words, but at the same time, it brought the disadvantages of consuming time and distracting the attention of the students.

Although some studies (e.g., Taylor, 2005; Kam et al., 2020) have shown that learners do not necessarily have preferences for multimodal input, whose additional information may devolve as attention-getter and, thus, detrimental to vocabulary learning, positive perceptions of the learners benefiting from the advantages of multimodal input in this study have been previously identified by some scholars. Shadiev et al. (2020), for instance, developed a vocabulary learning system featuring image-to-text recognition (ITR) technology. Learners in the CG learned vocabulary through corresponding pictures in the textbook, while learners in the EG used the ITR learning system to learn vocabulary. Then, their perceptions were analyzed by a questionnaire survey and an interview. The quantitative results suggest that learners who study using the learning system featuring ITR technology learn vocabulary better than those who study using traditional methods. The qualitative results revealed that most learners in the EG had positive perceptions of this multimodal computer-assisted language learning (CALL) method. Bisson et al. (2015) also affirmed the crucial role of multimodal input in the acquisition of L2 vocabulary. In this study, participants who had been presented with a picture recalled significantly more L2 words after a week's delay. In addition, the time spent looking at the pictures predicted recognition and recall scores. The results demonstrated the impact of exposure to multimodal input, especially the important role that pictorial information can play in L2 vocabulary acquisition.

The outcome of this research is that additional vivid visual information (picture and video) is useful for attracting learners' attention and improving the learners' learning motivation and satisfaction, thus inducing them to learn vocabulary more actively compared to other methods, particularly rote learning ( Krashen, 1989; Pan, 2017; Blaz, 2018). In general, both the advantages and disadvantages of the multimodal input method of vocabulary learning are distinct to notice, as students can be influenced in either way. Students' responses on both sides indicate that teachers should make efforts to increase the positive effects and avoid the negative effects of the multimodal input method in classroom teaching.

Pedagogical Implications

In light of the reported findings, some implications for English vocabulary teaching and learning can be drawn based on the analysis of the results.

On the one hand, this study confirmed the great potential of multimodal input to bring significant increases in vocabulary learning. In addition, it also demonstrated that using different modes improves student's perception of his or her own learning process; learners are more conscious and interested in learning materials. Hence, in order to promote learners' vocabulary learning, teachers or instructional designers should try to use multimodal corpora like iWeb employed in this study, which provides an efficient approach to gain plentiful audiovisual materials in order to create a multimodal learning environment with informed use of visual and verbal information. On the other hand, this study indicates that compared with the effects of the monomodal input of vocabulary learning, the multimodal input showed less sound effect. It is suggested, thus, that practitioners should consider the processes involved in each task to impose the minimum cognitive load instead of mindlessly misusing such learning materials, especially under conditions where the wide availability of audiovisual input from the Internet and streaming platforms means that language learners can be easily overwhelmed by being exposed to large amounts of multimodal language input ( Webb, 2015). In conclusion, even though the application of the multimodal input method is gaining attention and becoming popular in teaching, and using it is considered as a signal of keeping up with the trend ( Zhang and Zou, 2021), the advantages and disadvantages should be critically analyzed before putting it into practice.

In addition, students need to be aware that human cognitive abilities are limited, so when they "have to" be exposed to large amounts of information in the classroom, they should allocate their attention appropriately according to their proficiency and modality preference (e.g., visual or auditory learner, etc.) in order to achieve more productive vocabulary learning outcomes.

Lastly, as highlighted in this article, cognitive load theory is of great value. It is the responsibility of instructional administrators to make teachers aware of the importance of taking it into account. Teaching vocabulary is not just a process of providing information: the more information provided is not always the better. If a teacher gives too much information to students simultaneously, the students will be at a risk of cognitive overload.

Limitations and Suggestions

This study has a number of limitations.

First, the number of target words in this study is small, which has a direct impact on the application of the multimodal input method. Most studies reviewed in this study selected about 15 words or more. There are 17 target words in Perez et al. (2014), 18 target words in Zarei and Khazaie (2011), and as many as 82 target words in Chun and Plass (1996a; 1996b). To improve the generalizability of the findings of this study, future studies should expand the number of target words.

Second, this study only targeted Grade 9 students in a single school. Moreover, the EG and the CG were the top students of this school; generally, "results must be viewed in terms of the level of the learner's L2 language ability and cannot be generalized to all learners" ( Chun, 2006, p. 77). That is to say, the differences of students should be taken into consideration. Future studies can further explore the effects of learner-related factors, such as different English proficiency levels, learning styles, and levels of motivation.

Lastly, the instruments used in this study are also limited. This study conducted two post-tests to explore the effects of the multimodal input method of vocabulary learning. The questionnaire and interview were then used to explain the results. In a future study, eye-tracking could be a valuable research instrument, as it produces a real-time record of learners' eye movements during tasks, and provides researchers with information not only about what students are paying attention to but also about how long they are focusing on a certain word or picture ( Kang et al., 2020).

The results of this study and major findings should be interpreted in light of the aforementioned limitations.

Conclusion

This study explored issues surrounding the multimodal input of verbal and visual materials and monomodal input of verbal materials in English vocabulary learning. This research proved that the multimodal input method has a positive effect on vocabulary learning. However, compared with the monomodal input method applied in this study, this method showed fewer sound effects on recalling vocabulary meaning in the longer run. The redundancy effect of cognitive load might have affected the results of this study. Additional visual information forced the students to handle additional information in a limited time, which increased their cognitive load. With regard to students' attitudes toward the application of the multimodal input method of vocabulary learning, there were both positive and negative opinions. On the one hand, they reported that this method motivated their interest, deepened their impression of the words, and promoted their memory of the words. On the other hand, this method can be time-consuming and distract students' attention.

In general, the results of this study indicate a promising application of the multimodal input method in junior high school students' vocabulary learning. Reasons contributing to the less sound effect of the multimodal input method compared with the monomodal input method and students' opinions on the advantages and disadvantages of this method are of referential significance in maximizing its strengths and minimizing its weaknesses.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants' legal guardian/next of kin.

Author Contributions

XL: conceptualization, supervision, project administration, and funding acquisition. WL and XL: methodology, investigation, data curation, and writing-original draft preparation. JY and ZZ: writing-review and editing. WL: visualization. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research was supported by the Center for Language Cognition and Assessment, Guangdong, China. It's also the result of Guangdong "13th Five-Year" Plan Project of Philosophy and Social Science (GD20WZX01-02).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

References

Bisson, M. J., van Heuven, W. J., Conklin, K., and Tunney, R. J. (2015). The role of verbal and pictorial information in multimodal incidental acquisition of foreign language vocabulary. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 68, 1306-1326. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2014.979211

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Chun, D. M. (2006). "CALL technologies for L2 reading," in Calling on CALL: From Theory and Research to New Directions in Foreign Language Teaching. CALICO Monograph Series, Vol. 5, eds L. Ducate and N. Arnold (San Marcos, TX: Texas State University), 77. doi: 10.1177/0033294120954139

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

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Dual Coding or Cognitive Load? Exploring the Effect of Multimodal Input on English as a Foreign Language Learners' Vocabulary Learning

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In the era of eLearning 4.0, many researchers have suggested that multimodal input helps to enhance second language (L2) vocabulary learning. However, previous studies on the effects of multimodal teaching have failed to yield definitive conclusions. Furthermore, only few studies on the multimodal input of vocabulary learning have aimed at junior high school students and have focused on explicit vocabulary instruction in class.

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15b. A Dual Coding View of Vocabulary Learning

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15b. A Dual Coding View of Vocabulary Learning

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In 2019, Dr. Hollis Scarborough was the inaugural recipient of AIM's Hollis Scarborough Award, which honors a researcher whose work has been instrumental in literacy and inspired others. Her presentation, A Case History of a Twisty Metaphor, is a must see video for anyone who cares about structured literacy.

Please enjoy it and share with others.

Want to Learn More?

When AIM created our first AIM Pathways online professional learning course, we knew that Dr. Scarborough's Reading Rope would be a central piece of instruction. With her input, we created the Animated Reading Rope, a video description detailing the pieces of each strand of the rope that leads to skilled reading.

Enjoy the first portion of the video here and to learn more about AIM Pathways course options.

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A Case History of a Twisty Metphor - Dr. Hollis Scarborough on the Reading Rope

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Dr. Hollis Scarborough, literacy researcher and creator of the iconic Reading Rope, presents A Case History of a Twisty Metaphor on the origins and history of the tool at AIM's 2019 Research Symposium.

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29.  Monitoring the Reading Comprehension of Older Students

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29.  Monitoring the Reading Comprehension of Older Students

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I'm writing to you about high school progress monitoring for reading comprehension. Our school has learning goals for Reading Comprehension. Every two weeks, students read an on-grade level passage and answer 5 multiple-choice questions that assess literal comprehension and main idea. Our data are not matching well with other data that we have (such as course passing rates and state assessments). What might be a more effective progress monitoring process, that go beyond the literal level, and that would provide information the teachers could use to improve instruction.
Shanahan response:

I'm not surprised that approach is not working. There is so much wrong with it.

First, why test students so often? Does anyone really believe (or is there any evidence supporting the idea) that student reading ability is so sensitive to teaching that their reading performance would be measurably changed in any 10-day period. Performance on measures like reading comprehension don't change that quickly, especially with older students.

I don't think it would be possible to evaluate reading comprehension more than 2 or 3 times over an entire school year in the hopes of seeing any changes in ability. It is unlikely that students would experience meaningful measurable changes in comprehension ability in shorter time spans. The changes from test-to-test that you might see would likely be meaningless noise - that is test unreliability or student disgust. Acting on such differences (changing placement or curriculum, for instance) would, in most cases, be more disruptive than helpful.

Second, I get why we seek brief, efficient assessments (e.g., a single passage with 5 multiple-choice questions). Let's not sacrifice a lot of instructional time for testing. We have such dipsticks for monitoring the learning of foundational skills (e.g., decoding, alphabet knowledge) with younger students and it would be great to have something comparable for the older ones too.

Unfortunately, reading comprehension is more complicated than that. To estimate reliably the reading comprehension of older students takes a lot more time, a lot more questions, and a lot more text. That's why typical standardized tests of reading comprehension usually ask 30-40 questions about multiple texts - and texts longer than the ones that your district is using.

How many questions does a student have to answer correctly to decide he/she is doing well? Remember, guessing is possible with multiple-choice questions, so with only 5, I'd expect kids to, by chance, get 1 or 2 correct, even if they don't bother to read the passages at all. There is simply no room in that scenario to either decide that the student is doing better or worse than previously or to differentiate across students. If a student got 2 items correct last testing, and this week he gets 3, does that mean he showed progress?

Third, reading comprehension question types are not useful for determining instructional needs. Studies repeatedly find no meaningful differences in comprehension across categories like literal, inferential, or main idea categories. If a text passage is easy for students, they usually can answer any kind of question one might ask about it; and, if a passage is hard (in readability and/or content), students will struggle to answer any of the question types.

That means there is no reason to either limit the questions to literal ones or to shift to a different questioning regime. In fact, doing so might focus teacher attention on trying to improve performance with certain types of questions, rather than on decoding, fluency, vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, text structure, writing, and other abilities that really matter.

Fourth, the measurement of readability or text difficulty is not as specific or reliable as you might think. Look at Lexile levels, one of the better of these tools: texts that Lexiles designate as grade level for high school freshmen are also grade level for students in grades 5-8 and 10-12. This kind of overlap is common with readability estimates, and suggests that passages judged to be 1200L will differ in the difficulties that they actually pose for students. Kids might be more familiar with the vocabulary or content of one text or another which can lead to dramatic outcome differences from assessment to assessment.
That's why the standardized comprehension tests not only pay attention to readability ratings but evaluate combinations of specific passages to make sure that those combinations are going to provide sufficiently accurate and reliable results.

I would suggest that you test students twice a year (at the beginning of each semester) with a more substantial validated reading test. To monitor more closely how students are performing with what is being taught.

For example, one valuable area of growth in reading comprehension is vocabulary. Keep track of what words are being taught in the remedial program and monitor student retention of these words.

Or, If you are teaching students how to break down sentences to make sense of them, then identify such sentences in the texts students are reading to see how well they can apply what is being taught. The same kind of monitoring is possible with cohesion and text structure.

My point is that since you cannot provide the kind of meaningful close monitoring of general reading comprehension that you would like, instead monitor how well students are doing with the skills and abilities that you are teaching - that should provide you with some useful index of progress.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Monitoring the Reading Comprehension of Older Students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I'm writing to you about high school progress monitoring for reading comprehension. Our school has learning goals for Reading Comprehension. Every two weeks, students read an on-grade level passage and answer 5 multiple-choice questions that assess literal comprehension and main idea.

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60b. Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School

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60b. Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School

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74b. Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4–9 (practice guide)

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74b. Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4–9 (practice guide)

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1. Preparing young children for school (oral language, phonological awareness and more)

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1. Preparing young children for school (oral language, phonological awareness and more)

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62 c. Flyleaf Publishing - free reading decodable books this school year

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62 c. Flyleaf Publishing - free reading decodable books this school year

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Flyleaf Publishing - Online Materials Portal

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This portal is offered as a free resource through the 2023-2024 school year.

There are two areas of the site, one for Students and one for Instructors. Materials are organized by our Foundational Skills Scope & Sequence, and can be quickly navigated using the Menu at the top of the page.

If you would like more information about Flyleaf products, please visit flyleafpublishing.com.

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Home - Flyleaf Publishing - Online Materials Portal

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Online Materials PortalThis portal is offered as a free resource through the 2023-2024 school year. There are two areas of the site, one for Students and one for Instructors. Materials are organized by our Foundational Skills Scope & Sequence, and can be quickly navigated using the Menu at the top of the page.

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About the cover artist

Elizabeth Close is an Anangu woman from the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara language groups in the APY Lands in outback South Australia. She was born in Adelaide and spent much of her upbringing in remote communities, learning her language and receiving cultural education.

'This artwork represents the literacy and numeracy learning journey, and the path towards independent learning. The circles represent the collaborative learning and supports around children with specific learning difficulties, including children, schools, families, SPELD SA and others.'  Elizabeth Close, Artist.

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About the cover artist Elizabeth Close is an Anangu woman from the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara language groups in the APY Lands in outback South Australia. She was born in Adelaide and spent much of her upbringing in remote communities, learning her language and receiving cultural education.

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UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS!
This page has moved to:

Endless Phonics: Free Decodable Books Master List

https://endlessphonics.blogspot.com/p/endless-phonics-free-decodables-list.html

If you want to read the 2020 archived version, you can do so below:

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If you know me, you know I love decodable readers. They're so helpful when teaching kids to read. I can't get enough of them!

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The decodables in this list are in a variety of digital formats (PDF, PPT, online), and are written with a variety of phonics scope and sequence progressions in mind. Hopefully you can find a controlled text that suits your needs.

Please drop me a comment if you know of any phonics books I've missed!
Free Decodables
I'm so excited to share my own set of decodable readers with you. I have several different levels of decodables available as PDFs and am writing more! The link above will send you to the (You can also find my original page listing my Free Endless Phonics Decodable Readers
FREEBIES on my Decodable Readers here on the blog.) TPT store, which has the most up-to-date collection!

The full list (decodable readers - free and non) is on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

At the moment most of the readers are for kiddos working on their Long Vowel sounds, as that's where my kiddos are at :) I have a few basic Short Vowel readers and am hoping to have more soon.

For those of you in need of some quick practice, and for beginning readers needing to hone their phonics skills. endless phonics iterations, check out my text-only Decodable Silly Stories Generator. You'll get a new decodable mini-story every time you click! Good

I'm also somewhat pathologically helpful (hah!) so let me know in the comments if there's a particular phoneme or phonics rule you'd like to see a book for. I'd love to help you out!
CKLA - Student Readers
Core Knowledge has an amazing, 100% free Language Arts curriculum, including a decodable Student Reader series available as a free PDF when you sign up.
SPELD-SA Phonic Books
The Specific Learning Disabilites Association of South Australia has over 100 free and recently updated/re-illustrated decodables as PDFs on their site, following the Jolly Phonics sequence. They've recently updated their emergent readers but if you want, you can still get the old phonic books.
Half Pint Books
Short decodable books for beginning readers. My kiddo loves the cute illustrations and slapstick humor.
Starfall Learn To Read Books
Starfall Academy offers a series of 15 free online phonics books. The set linked above are interactive and not downloadable, but do have the added feature that your child can click to hear the words read aloud. They also have Cut-Up-And-Take-Home versions of the same books (you'll have to scroll a bit to find them on the page. Look for the "Short Vowels" section).
Progressive Phonics Beginner Books
This series of phonics books is a read-together (aka "shared reader") series available as PDFs. You'll read most of the text, while your child will read the larger words that fit the target phonemes they're learning. While they contain color, they have a great deal of white space and would be printable.
Friends on the Block
While not all the books on this site are free, the above is a link to a few free read-together books.
Decodable Books Written By Teachers
Dr. Bruce Murray (aka the ReadingGenie) hosts a webpage where teachers share Decodable Readers they've written as free Powerpoint files. Some may be suitable for printing.
Tennessee Department of Education Foundation Skills Curriculum Supplement - Decodables
The Tennessee Dept of Ed offers free, open-source curriculum materials for parents and teachers of K-2 students. This includes decodable books. Some materials may draw from the CKLA curriculum linked earlier.
Phonics Play Comics
Decodables written as comic strips!
Free Phonetic Readers
A series of black-and-white printable, colorable, and highly decodable readers!
Fun Phonics Free Book Series
Another great series of black-and-white printable phonics books and worksheets.

A phonics program with decodable readers. There are several levels of decodables available: Short Vowels || Practice Stories for Beginning Readers ||
Text Project - Beginning Reads
Short decodable texts paired with photos for beginning readers.
Really Great Reading - Decodable Passages
These aren't books so much as collections of decodable paragraphs in printable PDF format, but still great for practice! There are several levels and options: Countdown: Level One || Blast: Level Two || HD: Level Three || Blitz: Level Four
Miss Winter's Bliss - Free Decodable Passages Sample
Short decodable passages with integrated reading comprehension and handwriting activities!
Decodables from West Virginia Phonics by Jessica Pasik
Decodable books on Google Slides. Note that these are designed to be printed and collated. The first slides should sit on top and the last slides on the bottom to get the page numbers in the right order. Some of the clip art seems to be missing so you may want to insert your own.

Tan Cat and Fat Rat || Tom || Tim and Kip || Hop and Jog || Mutt and the Bug || The Red Hen || Chet and Chad || Mack the Cat || The King and Queen || The Sled Club || Kim and Flip || Brad and the Frog
I See Sam
A series of simple phonics books from the 1970s (out of print and now available as free PDFs) with repetitive text for practice, and the narrative driven by the illustrations. The phoneme sequence may not fit with some modern phonics programs, but if you are using a classic phonics sequence these may be perfect for you.

This link will take you to the Updated online Version that is currently available for free during COVID.
Free Word Family Books - This Reading Mama
You'll have to do a bit of digging and scrolling to find all the free printable gems, but Becky has written quite a number of free decodable readers! The stories are interspersed with a fair dose of high frequency words as well.
Decodable Non-Fiction Readers - The Measured Mom
Decodable readers that are perfect for your non-fiction lover! These are for beginning readers as picture clues may make things too predictable for more advanced readers. Also check out her Sight Word readers!
Fun Phonics Readers Slideshare
Sample versions of the FunPhonics Readers available from the author online.
Storyberries - Phonics
A few of the books on the Storyberries free bedtime stories website are decodables!
Hubbard's Cupboard
A set of simple decodable books for beginning readers. Repeat sentence structures and "clue" type pictures may be too predictable for more advanced readers.
Elemeno Decodables Search
This website is a fabulous decodable books search engine with links to decodables of all sorts (some free, some paid). You can search by price, publisher, or number of words. It may not be online for much longer as it was acquired by a parent company. If the link is broken, try here: The Lexile Hub or here: MetaMetrics
Publishers with Free Decodable Book Samples
All About Reading - Samples
Laughing Ogre Press - Samples
A few publishers offer free samples of some of their decodable books online!
Fantastic Phonics Books - Samples
All About Reading is a full synthetic phonics program available for purchase, but they also offer several decodable stories for free.
SuperBooks - Samples
Laughing Ogre Press offers a few of their cute decodable readers as free downloads! Here are direct links to the free ones: ||
Phonic Books - Moon Dogs at Home - Samples
The first five are free. However, they do use some repeat sentence structures that might lead children to guess the word rather than sound it out.
Piper Books
Several books are available to read online for free

A few free decodable novellas for older readers!

Several decodables were at one time free, including a few books for older readers.
Open Source Decodables
Whole Phonics

A free sample is available when you sign up!
Temporarily Free Decodable Books
You may find more free samples here: EPS - School Specialty Samples

Decodable text passages (no pictures, but still good practice!)
Reading Elephant
This is a list of books that were made free during the COVID pandemic in 2020. They may only be available for a limited period of time.
SPIRE Resources
These beautiful and very popular decodables are available for free as online ebooks through the 2020-2021 school year.
Affordable Decodable Readers Dog on a Log
You can purchase the collection of printable phonics books, or try the samples in the link above.

Decodable Readers, Lesson Plans, and Workbooks are all available for free for those who have paid for SPIRE curricula during COVID.
Teachers Pay Teachers
Dog on a Log is a series of nearly 100 decodable readers. Many of the stories are available at several levels: some quite short for just-starting-out readers, as well others for children able to handle slightly longer books with 300+ words. ( A few are available )
More Lists ($):
If you're in search of decodable books designed for older readers, then check out this series!

There is a wealth of wonderful decodable material on TeachersPayTeachers. I haven't even had a chance to dig into a fraction of it! Some samples are available .

These webpages have collected links to various sources of decodable text. While some may be free, many are available for a fee.

A great collection of links to decodables for various ages.

Resources for decodable texts.

Additional Resources:
Online books, printables, online learning, and phonics resources. Some are free resources, others are not. I haven't reviewed all of these yet, but maybe you'll find something that helps you.

||
The Measured Mom Free Kindergarten Printables and Free Printable Phonics Books and List of Phonics Books This Reading Mama: Free Printables and Learning Activities for Homeschooling - and Free Phonics Activities and Phonics Books || A Teachable Teacher Free Phonics Bundles || Homeschooling Down Under : Learning to Read Books Mommy Shorts: Quarantine Learning Resources || Miss Kindergarten Free At Home Learning Resources for Reading || Money Saving Mom : Free Quarantine School Resources || Spelfabet: Decodable Books list UF Literacy Institute - Connected Texts || ThinkCentral || Mark Revis's Phonics Books || Oxford owl (requires login) || The Reading League Decodables List 2020 || Geniebooks || Free Decodable Books Rollup || IDA Ontario || FreeReading || Sound City Reading || || Text Project || EPS - School Specialty Samples || Kastner Collection Decodables Links || Stephen Parker - Free Phonics Instructional Book for Parents || Id Ontario

Apps: Reach for the Stars African Readers

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UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS! This page has moved to: Endless Phonics: Free Decodable Books Master List https://endlessphonics.blogspot.com/p/endless-phonics-free-decodables-list.html If you want to read the 2020 archived version, you can do so below: . . . . If you know me, you know I love decodable readers. They're so helpful when teaching kids to read.

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18 b. Overcoming Dyslexia - free course by Dr. Shaywitz

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18 b. Overcoming Dyslexia - free course by Dr. Shaywitz

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Offered by Yale University. Dyslexia is everywhere, touching so many children and adults, and while science has made extraordinary progress ... Enroll for free.

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38 b. Home reading and spelling from UFLI

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38 b. Home reading and spelling from UFLI

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Lesson Resources

The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

Some of the companion lesson resources you will find below include:

Lesson slide decks (in PowerPoint and Google Slide formats)

Decodable passages

Homework sheets

Games and activities for additional practice

We have grouped the lessons into smaller units so you can access these resources more easily. Scroll down to use the buttons below to find the resources for each lesson or groups of lessons.

Please note that we are still building out these free resources, and we will be editing this page over the next few weeks. We wanted you to be able to access some materials as soon as possible, but be sure to come back later to see the rest!
New to UFLI Foundations? Learn about its development, check out a sample lesson plan, view the scope and sequence, and more.

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The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

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38 a. Home reading and spelling from UFLI

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38 a. Home reading and spelling from UFLI

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4a. What Teachers Need to Know and Do to Teach Letter–Sounds, Phonemic Awareness, Word Reading, and Phonics

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4a. What Teachers Need to Know and Do to Teach Letter–Sounds, Phonemic Awareness, Word Reading, and Phonics

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60 a. How to Choose and Use Decodable Books?

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60 a. How to Choose and Use Decodable Books?

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In this post, I answer the question "what are decodable books and when should I use them?" I offer you an explicit routine for using decodable books with your small groups. Finally, I leave you with 5 FREE DECODABLE BOOKS with comprehension questions and explicit teacher lesson plans that are perfect for small group instruction in Kindergarten, first and second-grade classrooms.

In a recent blog post, I shared the problems with the 3 cueing systems and offered science-based strategies for how to help students navigate texts and solve unknown words. One of the tips I offered was to use decodable texts.

While many of you found this tip helpful, you had more questions. You wanted to know more about decodable texts. Specifically, you wanted to know how to use and where to find high-quality decodable books.

Today I'm excited to talk to you more about how to choose and use high-quality decodable books in your classroom. I'll share what I learned through my study of Wiley Blevins' book, Choosing and Using Decodable Books, and walk you through an instructional routine for using decodable books with your small groups. Finally, I'll leave you with a FREE sample of my decodable books with comprehension questions resource that includes detailed teacher lesson plans!

What is a Decodable Text?

A decodable text is a text you use in beginning reading instruction. It can be a book, a passage, or a poem that only includes phonics patterns and high-frequency words that you have already taught your students. I find it most effective to use decodable texts for small-group instruction.

There are a lot of decodable texts out there these days. It can be hard to know which are truly high-quality. According to Wiley Blevins high-quality decodable texts are:

Comprehensive. It should make sense and sound natural.

Instructive. This means they include previously taught decodable words and have a heavy focus on the target phonics skills for a specific week of instruction.

Engaging. High-quality decodables are texts that students will want to read over and over again. This is necessary to ensure students build fluency and are able to discuss and write about the text.

The Benefits of Using Decodable Books

Studies have shown, students who use decodable controlled text in their early reading instruction get off to a stronger start in their reading instruction. For one, decodable texts give students practice applying the skills that you have taught to real reading experiences. This application is how skills stick and it is essential for building a faster foundation in early reading.

Secondly, decodable texts focus on developing accurate decoding. Students DO NOT guess at words or rely on pictures to figure out unknown words because we know those are ineffective, bad habits to develop. The majority of the words in a decodable text can be sounded out based on the sound-spelling relationships students have already been taught. This helps them to promote orthographic mapping, the mental process used to permanently store words for immediate retrieval.

Finally, the use of decodable text also has a powerful effect on students' confidence and motivation to read. When students read decodable texts there are lots of words they can successfully sound out using their growing phonics skills. Studies have shown that this reading success breeds self-confidence and enjoyment of reading.

When Should You Use Decodable Texts?

Decodable books are wonderful resources to use for small-group instruction. Small groups allow you to provide explicit, targeted instruction to students based on their identified needs. It is an opportunity for students to receive the additional teaching and practice that is often needed for them to master the skills we teach.

Decodable books are organized by phonics skill, not reading level. So instead of creating small groups based on reading levels as you did for guided reading, you group students by the specific skills they need more help and practice with.

You'll want to make sure your small group is developmentally ready for decodable books before you plan to use them. Decodables should be used once children have had explicit instruction with all letters and sounds that are included in the particular text.

After students show strong decoding skills, they are ready to move on from decodable texts and read leveled books independently. According to Linda Farrell and Michael Hunter of readsters.com, students should continue to use decodable readers until they can do ALL three of these things:

Demonstrate mastery of decoding real and nonsense CVC words (short vowels, digraphs, and blends) in isolation.

Decode 2-syllable words and known 3-syllable words in isolation that have short vowel syllables (closed) or schwa.

Decode one and 2-syllable real words with r-controlled vowels and silent e.

Generally, students are able to do these three things towards the end of first grade or the beginning of 2nd grade.

A Routine for Using Decodable Books in Small Group Instruction

Now that we have a grasp on what decodable books are and how they help our students, I want to share an explicit routine for how to use decodable books with your small groups that Wiley Blevins' book, Choosing and Using Decodable Books. While this routine can be used with any high-quality decodable book, I will walk you through how it looks when using my Decodable Books with Comprehension Questions resource.

Before reading, prepare students for reading by first explicitly telling your students what target skill you are practicing. Then, provide students with blending practice using blending lines. These are a list of words that can be used to introduce the new skill for a decodable book. Blending lines should be used following the I do, We do, You do format.

In addition, before passing out books to read, we want to review or explicitly teach the irregular parts of the new high frequency words students will encounter while reading the new text.

Now it's time to pass out the decodable books! Have students read the title and preview and predict what they will be reading. This is a wonderful time to frontload higher-level tier 2 vocabulary that likely is not in the book but will build their content knowledge.

Now students are ready to read! You can do this in a few different ways depending on the needs of your students. For the first reading, students can choral read or echo read the book. For subsequent reading, children can practice their decoding and fluency skills while partner reading or whisper reading, etc. Keep in mind that the actual reading of the text should take about 50% of the small group instruction time.

When students make a mistake while reading, be sure to provide them with immediate corrective feedback. Point to the mistake, state the error, and state what it should be. Have the student repeat the correction and go back and re-read it correctly.

After reading, we can check children's understanding of the text through comprehension activities. The purpose of reading is to build meaning, so you want to give students opportunities to practice oral and written comprehension.

Students can discuss with a partner orally their ideas before writing their answers to the comprehension question. Encourage them to find details in the text to support their answers.

My decodable books resource offers students opportunities to discuss the text and write about the text. It includes two different options for writing for easy differentiation.

If you are ready to give this routine a try but need decodable books, I am happy to offer you a FREE sample of my Decodable Books Resource. This sample includes:
5 FREE decodable books aligned to a research-based systematic phonics scope and sequence.

Explicit lesson plans for each book with activities to use before, during, and after reading

Two versions of student printables

Audio recordings for each passage to ensure you can easily differentiate based on students' needs.

Looking for a complete set of high-quality decodable books? My science of reading-aligned decodable books with comprehension questions and explicit teacher lesson plans has all that you need!

This bundle includes:
60 explicit and systematic decodable books (you can print them in B&W or color)

60 step-by-step teacher lesson plans AND blending lines for every book

2 versions of the student printable for easy differentiation

15 pages of teacher info, helpful tips, and a suggested scope and sequence

QR codes for students to scan and listen to the stories

Instructional videos showing you how to put together the decodable books & how to use blending lines

We know that decodable books offer students a strong foundation in early reading. I hope the information and resources I've shared today will help you bring more effective early reading instruction into your classroom!

-SHOP THIS POST-

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In this post, I answer the question "what are decodable books and when should I use them?" I offer you an explicit routine for using decodable books with your small groups.

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39.  Phonics & stuff (phoneme grapheme mapping, decodables, read alouds etc.)

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39.  Phonics & stuff (phoneme grapheme mapping, decodables, read alouds etc.)

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Phonics & Stuff is dedicated to providing high-quality resources for learning and teaching phonics. Explore our games for learners or our sophisticated tools to create customized phonics lessons.

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28. RTI for English Language Learners: Appropriately Using Screening and  Progress Monitoring Tools 

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28. RTI for English Language Learners: Appropriately Using Screening and  Progress Monitoring Tools 

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16 b. IDAPEL French Screener (Acadience): K to Grade 5

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16 b. IDAPEL French Screener (Acadience): K to Grade 5

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The authors of IDAPEL® at Acadience Learning are pleased to announce the continued research release of IDAPEL for research partners for the 2022-2023 school year. IDAPEL is a series of French-language formative measures designed to assess the early literacy skills of students learning to read in French in grades K through 5. IDAPEL assesses the fundamental early reading skills of phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, accuracy and fluency with connected text, and text comprehension.

As diagnostic tools, the IDAPEL measures are sensitive to student growth over time, and facilitate the early identification of students who may be at risk of insufficient reading gain. The measures are time efficient and easy to use, and invaluable for progress monitoring student skill, and for evaluating student response to intervention.

The measures are currently being used with French-language native speakers and students enrolled in French-language immersion programs. Preliminary benchmark goals have been established for native French-speaking students learning to read in French as their native language. We continue to analyze data collected with French immersion students for the purpose of establishing benchmark goals for this population of students.

IDAPEL is available to participating research release partners. The IDAPEL assessments materials are available to participating sites for free download through the Acadience Learning website. Participating sites are responsible for printing copies of the testing materials as needed.

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IDAPEL Research Release | Acadience Learning

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The authors of IDAPEL® at Acadience Learning are pleased to announce the continued research release of IDAPEL for research partners for the 2022-2023 school year. IDAPEL is a series of French-language formative measures designed to assess the early literacy skills of students learning to read in French in grades K through 5.

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95 a. Phonics & stuff (phoneme grapheme mapping, decodables, read alouds, teaching tools etc.)

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95 a. Phonics & stuff (phoneme grapheme mapping, decodables, read alouds, teaching tools etc.)

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Phonics & Stuff is dedicated to providing high-quality resources for learning and teaching phonics. Explore our games for learners or our sophisticated tools to create customized phonics lessons.

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See evidence-based literacy instruction in action, as Literacy How mentors and classroom teachers demonstrate activities and lessons for PreK-grade 3 students. Topics align with Literacy How’s Reading Wheel: Oral Language, Phoneme Awareness, Phonics, Spelling, Syntax, Vocabulary, Morphology, Text Co…

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47 b. A Syntax-focused Kindergarten Lesson

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47 b. A Syntax-focused Kindergarten Lesson

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10 b. Webinar recordings and more - IDA Ontario

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10 b. Webinar recordings and more - IDA Ontario

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The International Dyslexia Association Ontario Branch - Promoting literacy through research, education, and advocacy.™

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We recognize the transformative power educators can have for students with dyslexia; we offer structured literacy webinars, workshops and training courses in French and English.

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51. b. Explicit instruction - examples for intermediate and high school (video + details)

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51. b. Explicit instruction - examples for intermediate and high school (video + details)

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Grade Level: Sixth Grade - Middle School

School: Fees Middle School

Location: Tempe, Arizona

Videographer: Dima Yaremenko

Elapsed Time: 2:11

Introduction: Dr. Archer is preparing students to read a biography of Harriet Tubman including the following activities: a) teaching background knowledge, b) introducing the pronunciation of multi-syllabic words, and c) teaching critical vocabulary words.

In this video segment, Dr. Archer is introducing the pronunciation of multi-syllabic words within the passage. If students can pronounce these words accurately, it should have a positive impact on their passage reading fluency. Increased reading fluency should have a positive impact on reading comprehension, allowing students to shift their cognitive energy from decoding to passage comprehension.

To see the entire passage reading preparation, see the following videos:

Vocabulary Instruction - Sixth Grade Language Arts

Background Knowledge Instruction - Sixth Grade Language Arts

Focus: As you watch this very short video, note any good practices that Dr. Archer used when introducing the pronunciation of the multi-syllabic words.
Feedback: Good practices
1) The words were segmented into decodable parts and students were guided in reading each of the parts and then the entire word. This teacher strategy, which is central to the Rewards programs, is referred to as "Loop, Loop, Loop".

Having the students read the words by parts serves to reinforce a generalizable decoding strategy (Say the parts. Say the parts quickly. Say the word. Make it a real word.) that can be used when decoding other unknown words and at the same time introducing passage vocabulary.

2) Affixes, even those containing more than one syllable (e.g., ary), were treated as a "word part" so that recognition of the affix was reinforced.

3) In most cases, students were "asked" to say the word part. However, if the part was difficult to decode (e.g., 'suade' in persuade), Dr. Archer modeled the pronunciation of the word part and students repeated the word part.

4) In some cases, Dr. Archer provided brief explanations of word meanings.

5) After introducing the words, the list was reread to increase fluency.

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2. Pronunciation of Multi-syllabic Passage Words - Sixth Grade Language Arts

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Grade Level: Sixth Grade - Middle School School: Fees Middle School Location: Tempe, Arizona Videographer: Dima Yaremenko Elapsed Time: 2:11 Introduction: Dr. Archer is preparing students to read a biography of Harriet Tubman including the following activities: a) teaching background knowledge, b) introducing the pronunciation of multi-syllabic words, and c) teaching critical vocabulary words.

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14 a. Reading performance is predicted by more than phonological processing

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14 a. Reading performance is predicted by more than phonological processing

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Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA

Center for Integrated Research in Cognitive and Neural Sciences, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale and Springfield, IL, USA

We compared three phonological processing components (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and phonological memory), verbal working memory, and attention control in terms of how well they predict the various aspects of reading: word recognition, pseudoword decoding, fluency and comprehension, in a mixed sample of 182 children ages 8-12 years. Participants displayed a wide range of reading ability and attention control. Multiple regression was used to determine how well the phonological processing components, verbal working memory, and attention control predict reading performance. All equations were highly significant. Phonological memory predicted word identification and decoding. In addition, phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming predicted every aspect of reading assessed, supporting the notion that phonological processing is a core contributor to reading ability. Nonetheless, phonological processing was not the only predictor of reading performance. Verbal working memory predicted fluency, decoding and comprehension, and attention control predicted fluency. Based upon our results, when using Baddeley's model of working memory it appears that the phonological loop contributes to basic reading ability, whereas the central executive contributes to fluency and comprehension, along with decoding. Attention control was of interest as some children with ADHD have poor reading ability even if it is not sufficiently impaired to warrant diagnosis. Our finding that attention control predicts reading fluency is consistent with prior research which showed sustained attention plays a role in fluency. Taken together, our results suggest that reading is a highly complex skill that entails more than phonological processing to perform well.

Introduction

Several researchers have supported the view that phonological processing is the "core" deficit in developmental dyslexia (for a review, see Snowling, 2000; Ramus, 2003). Consistent with this notion, prior researchers have demonstrated that phonological processing plays a role in multiple aspects of reading including basic reading, fluency, and comprehension ( Cornwall, 1992; Wagner et al., 1993; Sprugevica and Hoien, 2004; Nelson et al., 2012). Three of the main components of phonological processing are phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and phonological memory ( Wagner et al., 1993). Phonological awareness includes one's ability to process and manipulate individual phonemes; rapid naming includes one's ability to retrieve phonemes rapidly/automatically from long-term memory; and phonological memory refers to short-term memory for phonetically coded material. Research by Nelson et al. (2012) supports the idea that these skills are best conceived as three separate but correlated abilities rather than highly overlapping measures of one or two underlying constructs. Consistent with the idea of these being separate skills, these three abilities may differentially predict reading ability. Basic reading skills may have stronger associations with phonological awareness than with rapid naming ( Wagner et al., 1997; Nelson et al., 2012), and reading fluency and comprehension may have stronger associations with rapid naming than with phonological awareness ( Young and Bowers, 1995; Sprugevica and Hoien, 2004). However, these relationships may vary with the age/grade level of the reader ( Wagner et al., 1993, 1997; Torgesen, 1999; Kirby et al., 2003). In their review, Wolf and Bowers (1999) suggested that phonological awareness is important for decoding, whereas rapid naming is important for reading fluency. Both skills may contribute to word identification and reading comprehension. Phonological memory may play a role in basic reading as well, especially decoding ( Gathercole et al., 1991; Kibby, 2009). Phonological memory may play a greater role in basic reading than in fluency ( Puolakanaho et al., 2008) or in comprehension ( Kibby and Cohen, 2008).

Working memory (WM) may contribute to reading ability in addition to phonological processing. For example, Swanson repeatedly has found that WM plays a role in reading comprehension regardless of whether verbal or visual WM was assessed (for a review, see Swanson et al., 2009). Others also have shown that WM is related to reading ability ( Baddeley et al., 1985; Vellutino et al., 2004; Kibby and Cohen, 2008; Sesma et al., 2009; Christopher et al., 2012). Moreover, when studying children with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Miller et al. (2013) found that poor WM contributes to their comprehension problems in that WM mediated the relationship between ADHD symptoms and the ability to recall the central ideas of the passage. WM may play a role in reading fluency as well ( Baddeley et al., 1985). For example, Christopher et al. (2012) found WM to be related to word reading when a composite of word reading was used that included a timed measure. Furthermore, deficits in WM may play a role in the inefficient reading fluency often found in children with ADHD ( Jacobson et al., 2011).

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder frequently co-occurs with reading disability (RD) at a rate of 15-35% ( Shaywitz et al., 1995). Although basic reading skills tend to be relatively preserved in children with ADHD alone, attention problems can impact their reading performance, even if at a subclinical level ( Ghelani et al., 2004; Cain and Bignell, 2014). This is particularly true of reading fluency and comprehension. A possible contributor to the reduced reading performance in this group is poor sustained attention. Sustained attention may be related to both reading fluency and comprehension ( Stern and Shalev, 2013). Consistent with this notion, lapses in attention as measured by reaction time variability have been shown to be predictive of fluency and comprehension ( Jacobson et al., 2013; Tamm et al., 2014).

One area that was found to be lacking in the literature is the integration of these various predictors. More specifically, the relative contributions of phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, phonological short-term memory, verbal WM, and attention control to the various aspects of reading is unknown. Therefore, our study compared these possible contributors in terms of how well they predict the various aspects of reading: word recognition, decoding, fluency and comprehension, in a mixed sample of children. We used a mixed sample in order to have a wide range of ability levels represented in both the independent and dependent variables. Furthermore, as all variables utilized vary on a continuum rather than being categorical in nature, looking at them from a continuous perspective is justified.

Based upon our review of the literature we hypothesized that phonological awareness would predict basic reading skills and reading comprehension; rapid naming would predict every reading skill except decoding; phonological memory would predict basic reading skills; and WM and attention control would predict reading fluency and comprehension.

Materials and Methods

Participants

Participants included 182 children, ages 8-12 years. Thirty had a reading disorder, 65 had ADHD, 35 had both disorders, and 52 were typically developing children as determined by a child neuropsychologist. Group membership is provided for descriptive purposes, since groups were not compared in this study for the reasons noted above. Children with other psychiatric, neurological, or medical diagnoses were excluded from this study. Additional exclusion criteria included significant pre- or post-natal complications, suspected abuse, and an IQ below 80.

The participants are from a community sample. Parents brought them to the first author's laboratory for the study. The children attended various schools in our region, including public and private schools. Most of the children with reading problems have a history of intervention such as special education services, remedial services, and/or tutoring. Some of the children with ADHD were previously diagnosed and treated with stimulant medication, but none were on medication at the time of testing.

Measures

Phonological processing

Phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming were measured using Elision and Rapid Letter Naming (RLN) from the Children's Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP; Wagner et al., 1999). Elision is considered to be a measure of phonological awareness, as it requires both analysis and synthesis of phonemes. The child must remove the stated phoneme from a word and blend the remaining phonemes to form a new word. It is an orally administered subtest. RLN requires that the child name a series of printed letters as quickly as possible. Internal consistency for Elision ranges from 0.86 to 0.91 for 8- to 12-year-old children. Since RLN is a timed measure, alternate-form reliability was used instead of internal consistency and ranged from 0.73 to 0.87 for 8- to 12-year-old children ( Wagner et al., 1999). The CTOPP has good validity as well ( Mitchell, 2001; Haight, 2006).

Memory

Phonological short-term memory and verbal WM were measured using Digit Span Forward (DSF) and Digit Span Backward (DSB) from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV; Wechsler, 2003). DSF requires immediate, verbatim recall of lists of digits presented at one digit per second. DSB requires the child to immediately recall lists of digits in reverse order. We used the WISC-IV to determine the participants' IQ as well. The reliability and validity of the WISC-IV have been well-established according to the manual, with internal consistency of 0.83 and 0.80 for DSF and DSB, respectively.

Attention

Effectiveness of attention control was measured by parent-report using the Behavior Assessment System for Children - Second Edition (BASC-2; Reynolds and Kamphaus, 2004). The age-appropriate form (child form for ages 8-11 and adolescent form for age 12) was used with gender-specific norms. The Attention Problems scale on the BASC-2 measures common symptoms of inattention such as "has a short attention span", "pays attention when spoken to," and "is easily distracted." The parent-report form of the BASC-2 has good reliability and validity according to the manual, with Attention Problems having an internal consistency of 0.87 for the child form and 0.88 for the adolescent form.

Reading ability

Reading was measured with the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement - Third Edition (WJ-III Form A; Woodcock et al., 2001). Decoding was measured using Word Attack, which requires the child to decode pronounceable non-words. Word identification was measured using the Letter-Word Identification subtest, which requires the child to identify words of increasing difficulty at our age range (8-12). Reading comprehension was measured using the Passage Comprehension subtest, which requires the child to read sentences or paragraphs and provide an appropriate word to complete the passage. Reading fluency was measured using the Reading Fluency subtest, which requires the child to read a series of brief statements quickly and determine if each statement is true or false. Scoring on this subtest is based on the number of accurate responses within a 3-min time limit. It was the only timed measure of reading used. Median internal consistency for these four subtests ranges from 0.87 and 0.94 ( Schrank et al., 2001). Generally, the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement has well-established reliability and validity according to the test's technical manual.

Procedures

All participants partook in a full day of testing, including the measures above, as part of a larger project. Participants' parents completed questionnaires on the participants and took part in an interview designed to obtain background information on their child. The measures selected for the project were chosen in order to assess multiple areas of functioning. For time reasons, complete test batteries, such as the WJ-III and CTOPP, were not administered. Rather, the subtests that were believed to best represent the constructs of interest were selected.

The project from which this study was derived was approved by the Southern Illinois University Institutional Review Board's Human Subjects Committee and conformed to all relevant regulatory standards. All participants provided informed assent, and their parent/legal guardian provided informed consent before testing began.

Results

Preliminary Analyses

All variables were checked for normality and found to be normally distributed. Table 1 includes the demographic and descriptive data for our sample. Of note, the sample as a whole tended to perform in the Average range on the various measures, with distributions in the expected range based on the various tests' means and standard deviations.
TABLE 1. Demographic and descriptive data.
Main Results

To assess our hypotheses, we conducted four multiple linear regressions using SPSS in which Elision, RLN, DSF, DSB, and Attention Problems were entered to predict decoding, word recognition, reading fluency and reading comprehension, respectively. Our findings are summarized in Figure 1 and Table 2.
FIGURE 1. Percentage of the total variance explained by Elision, Rapid Letter Naming (RLN), Digit Span Forward (DSF), Digit Span Backward (DSB), and Attention Problems (Attention) in basic reading, reading fluency and reading comprehension. TABLE 2. Predictors of reading ability in β units.
Our results revealed that all of the phonological processing components, as well as DSB, significantly predicted decoding performance, F(5,165) = 42.85, p < 0.001. More specifically, Elision [ t(165) = 9.79, p < 0.001], RLN [ t(165) = 2.93, p = 0.004], DSB [ t(165) = 2.55, p = 0.01], and DSF [ t(165) = 2.36, p = 0.02] all positively predicted performance. However, Attention Problems did not predict this basic reading skill [ t(165) = 0.05, p = 0.96]. Together the predictor variables accounted for 55% of the variance in decoding performance when using adjusted R 2.

The combination of independent variables significantly predicted word identification as well, F(5,165) = 43.00, p < 0.001 accounting for 55% of the variance when using adjusted R 2. Elision [ t(165) = 9.82, p < 0.001], RLN [ t(165) = 4.17, p < 0.001], and DSF [ t(165) = 2.18, p = 0.03] were significant predictors, while DSB [ t(165) = 1.48, p = 0.14] and Attention Problems [ t(165) = -0.68, p = 0.50] were not.

The regression predicting reading fluency was significant also, F(5,158) = 28.27, p < 0.001, explaining 46% of the variance when using adjusted R 2. Furthermore, all of the independent variables were significant except DSF [ t(158) = 0.34, p = 0.74]. More specifically, Elision [ t(158) = 6.02, p < 0.001], RLN [ t(158) = 5.23, p < 0.001], and DSB [ t(158) = 3.63, p < 0.001] were all positive predictors of reading fluency. Attention Problems had a negative relationship with fluency [ t(158) = -2.32, p = 0.02].

Finally, the regression predicting passage comprehension was significant, F(5,164) = 28.85, p < 0.001, accounting for 45% of the variance when using adjusted R 2. Similar to reading fluency, passage comprehension was not significantly predicted by DSF, t(164) = 1.78, p = 0.08. Attention Problems also was not a significant predictor, t(164) = -1.01, p = 0.32. However, Elision [ t(164) = 7.19, p < 0.001], RLN [ t(164) = 3.93, p < 0.001], and DSB [ t(164) = 2.13, p = 0.04] all positively predicted reading comprehension performance.

Discussion

Taken together, our findings support the notion that phonological processing is a core contributor to reading ability regardless of the aspect of reading being assessed. Nonetheless, we found that phonological processing was not the only predictor of reading performance. Verbal WM and attention control predicted reading ability as well, at least for some aspects of reading performance. Thus, reading appears to be a highly complex skill, requiring multiple abilities to perform it well.

When breaking down phonological processing into its component skills, we hypothesized that phonological awareness would predict basic reading skills and reading comprehension based on the work of Wagner et al. (1997) and the review by Wolf and Bowers (1999). We found this to be the case. In addition, when looking at its relative contributions to the various reading skills, phonological awareness was a better predictor of basic reading skills than reading fluency or comprehension, consistent with the work of Gray and McCutchen (2006). Nonetheless, phonological awareness also predicted reading fluency, which we did not hypothesize. In fact, phonological awareness was the best single predictor of every reading skill assessed. Thus, even among the phonological processing components it may be a "core" skill.

Another important contributor to reading performance is rapid automatized naming ( Wagner et al., 1997; Wolf and Bowers, 1999). We hypothesized that rapid naming would predict every reading skill assessed except decoding. Our findings were generally consistent with this hypothesis except that we also found rapid naming to predict decoding. In fact, RLN was the second best predictor of every reading skill assessed, accounting for 3-9% of the explained variance. Consistent with the review by Wolf and Bowers (1999), RLN was a better predictor of reading fluency than it was of the other reading skills. However, in contrast to this review and the work of Sprugevica and Hoien (2004), rapid naming was a close second to phonological awareness in its ability to predict reading fluency, suggesting both skills may be of comparable importance in our age range (8-12 years).

In terms of the third component of phonological processing, we hypothesized that phonological memory would predict basic reading skills. Our findings are consistent with this hypothesis, as phonological memory was a significant predictor of both basic reading skills. Nonetheless, it only explained a small portion of the variance when in equations with phonological awareness and RLN. In general, our findings on phonological memory are consistent with prior research showing that phonological short-term memory is a contributor to basic reading skills ( Gathercole et al., 1991; Kibby, 2009). It has been proposed that phonemes are held in phonological short-term memory during segmentation and blending when forming words ( Snowling, 2000).

It has been debated whether these three tests of phonological processing (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and phonological memory) are measuring separate but correlated abilities or whether they are highly overlapping measures of one or two underlying constructs. Whereas research by Nelson et al. (2012) supports the idea that these tests are best conceived as measuring separate but correlated abilities, research by Wagner and colleagues (1987, 1993) suggests that these tests may be best construed as measures of one or two underlying constructs. Our findings are consistent with the former position in that all three tests predicted at least some aspects of reading ability despite being entered into the same equations. In addition, Pearson correlations between the three tests were significant at the 0.001 alpha level but were moderate, ranging from 0.2 to 0.4.

Another important contributor to reading performance beyond phonological processing is WM ( Vellutino et al., 2004; Kibby and Cohen, 2008; Sesma et al., 2009; Christopher et al., 2012). WM may be particularly important for reading comprehension (for a review, see Swanson et al., 2009) and reading fluency ( Baddeley et al., 1985). Based on this literature, we hypothesized that WM would predict both reading fluency and comprehension. This hypothesis was supported in that our measure of verbal WM accounted for a unique portion of the variance in both reading skills. However, verbal WM also predicted decoding skill beyond phonological memory, which suggests that it may support the mental operations of analysis and synthesis that are required to decode novel items. Thus, when utilizing Baddeley's model of WM ( Baddeley, 2007), it appears that the phonological loop contributes to basic reading ability and the central executive contributes to reading fluency and comprehension, along with decoding skill. Consistent with the work of Jacobson et al. (2011) which showed WM is important for efficient reading in a sample with ADHD, the central executive explained the greatest proportion of variance in fluency of all the reading skills, explaining 4% of the variance.

We hypothesized that attention control would predict both reading fluency and comprehension based on the prior literature, but we found that it only predicted fluency. Thus, inattention may play a more limited role in basic reading skills. This statement is commensurate with the finding that over half of children with ADHD do not have a comorbid learning disability in basic reading ( Shaywitz et al., 1995). We anticipated that attention control would affect reading fluency as inattention can result in both errors and slowed rate intuitively. This supposition and our results are consistent with the work of Stern and Shalev (2013) who found poor sustained attention to be associated with longer reading duration. It also is consistent with the work of Jacobson et al. (2013) who found lapses in attention to be predictive of worse reading fluency. Because our reading comprehension measure only included about one paragraph per item, it is unknown whether inattention would affect comprehension of a longer passage, such as that found in most texts a child would read. Hence, this aspect of reading comprehension is worthy of future study.

Our findings in total suggest that (1) phonological processing, particularly phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming, are core processes involved in reading, and (2) other cognitive processes contribute to reading ability as well, with the proportion of variance explained being variable across reading measures. Therefore, our results are generally commensurate with the phonological-core variable-difference model put forth by Stanovich (1988). He suggested that most students with a RD involving word recognition have a core deficit in phonological processing. However, "garden variety" poor readers have additional deficits in other cognitive skills that vary across individuals. This variability was believed to contribute to the individual differences seen across poor readers. Although we studied the continuum of reading ability from impaired to superior rather than just poor readers, we did find that phonological processing was the primary predictor of each aspect of reading assessed, being a core contributor, and that WM and attention control explained additional variance in some reading skills. Our findings also are generally commensurate with the work of Morris et al. (1998) who found that children with RD usually have impaired phonological awareness, with more variability in deficits being found across individuals in rapid naming, phonological memory, and other cognitive skills. Although we did not study children with RD specifically, we did find that phonological awareness accounted for the greatest proportion of variance in reading skill across the reading measures used, and this was most pronounced in basic reading skills.

Although our study may be the first to compare multiple phonological processing skills, verbal WM, and attention control in terms of how well they predict the various reading abilities, it has several limitations. One limitation is that this sample was only tested once, so we cannot compare the various predictors over time. It is quite possible that rapid naming and other cognitive skills (WM, attention control) could play a larger role in reading ability if we assessed older children/adolescents. This is because various researchers have found that predictors of reading ability vary across development ( Wagner et al., 1993; Torgesen, 1999; Kirby et al., 2003), with phonological awareness being particularly important in the younger grades. Using a longitudinal format would help researchers understand how these predictors change and interact over the course of development. Another limitation is that our measures of reading fluency and comprehension utilized short sentences and passages, respectively. The predictors of fluency and comprehension could vary if longer texts were used, with WM and attention problems being expected to play a greater role. Third, our measure of attention control was from a parent-rated questionnaire. Our results would be clearer as to whether poor sustained attention and/or other aspects of inattention were driving this result if experimental measures were used. Fourth, we included a wide range of reading ability in our sample. Thus, future research should investigate the independent variables we used in terms of how well they predict reading functioning in different clinical groups (e.g., learning disability in word recognition, learning disability in reading comprehension, ADHD) to determine if there are differences in predictors amongst the clinical groups and controls.

Author Contributions

Michelle Y. Kibby worked with Sylvia E. Lee and Sarah M. Dyer to develop the idea for this manuscript. Michelle Y. Kibby is the PI on this project and did most of the writing of this manuscript. Sylvia E. Lee conducted the analyses and wrote the Results section including Table 1 and the figure. Sarah M. Dyer wrote the Methods section. All three individuals worked on the literature review, reference section and editing of the manuscript.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

This project was funded in part by grants (R03 HD048752, R15 HD065627, R15 HD065627-01S1) from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Our project does not necessarily reflect the views of NICHD or NIH.

References

Shaywitz, B. A., Fletcher, J. M., and Shaywitz, S. E. (1995). Defining and classifying learning disabilities and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. J. Child Neurol. 10, S50-S57.

Pubmed Abstract | Pubmed Full Text

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Reading performance is predicted by more than phonological processing

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We compared three phonological processing components (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and phonological memory), verbal working memory, and attention control in terms of how well they predict the various aspects of reading: word recognition, pseudoword decoding, fluency and comprehension, in a mixed sample of 182 children ages 8-12 years.

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14 c. The connection between Working Memory and Reading

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14 c. The connection between Working Memory and Reading

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Approximately 10% of us have weak working memory; however, the estimates of the percentage of weak working memory in students with specific learning disorders, including dyslexia, ranges from 20 to 50 percent. Weak working memory is a core difficulty for students with ADHD, Inattentive Type.

Individuals with traumatic brain injury, deafness, oral language deficits or genetic disorders such as Down Syndrome are also more likely to have weak working memory. The purpose of this fact sheet is to describe the function of working memory, discuss the impact that weak working memory has on learning, and offer suggestions and resources for improving working memory and learning.

Types of Memory

Parents often report that their child has a "poor memory" and that poor memory is contributing to difficulties with learning; however, we don't have just one global memory system. We have several different memory systems that hold different types of information. For example, episodic memory is the store for events in the relatively recent past, such as the birthday party we attended last weekend. Procedural memory is memory for skills and habits. We use procedural memory for riding a bike or driving a car. Semantic memory is the store of knowledge gained over our lifetime and includes information about word meanings, spellings, and pronunciations. We may have great variation in the capacity of these different memory systems. For example, it's possible to have a very strong episodic memory but a weak semantic memory.

Working Memory

"Working memory" is crucial for learning and refers to the ability to hold and manipulate information mentally over short periods of time. Working memory is a process and is different than rote memory, which involves passively memorizing static information.

Working memory is a cognitive process and not a passive store of information.

Working memory is what is needed when we must go beyond straight memorization and do something with the information. Examples of everyday tasks that require working memory include:

Listening to, remembering, and following directions that contain multiple steps

Remembering a question long enough to think about it and formulate an answer

Carrying out the steps to a recipe when no longer looking at the recipe

Engaging in mental arithmetic

Working memory is limited both in capacity and duration. The average adult cannot hold more than six or seven bits of information in working memory. The duration of working memory is usually limited to a matter of seconds. Once information is lost from working memory, it cannot be retrieved. The student who "loses" some of the steps for directions delivered orally will not be able to retrieve the steps without repetition or some other form of assistance.

Components of Working Memory

Working memory is a system of interlinked components. The working memory system includes verbal and visual-spatial short-term memory stores. Verbal short-term memory holds information that can be expressed in numbers, words, and sentences. Visual-spatial short-term memory holds images, pictures, and information about location in space. Working memory also has a component that helps us resist distractions and remain focused when engaged in a task that requires working memory.

One of the key responsibilities of working memory is to manage, manipulate, and transform information from short-term and long-term memory. Working memory is the "go-between" for short and long-term memory. For example, solving a math word problem involves holding on to the details of the word problem in verbal short-term memory while retrieving from long-term memory the basic math facts needed to carry out the calculations involved in solving the problem.

Characteristics of a Weak Working Memory

Individuals with poor working memory tend to have trouble planning, organizing, and carrying out daily chores such as running errands, because it requires mentally formulating a "to do" list organized by time and location. Study skills may also suffer. Working memory allows us to keep track of priorities and helps us block the external or internal distractors that can derail us from the task at hand. Working memory helps us persist with tasks that require focused attention over time. Any of us, even those with strong working memories, can experience working memory problems when overly tired, anxious, or stressed.

Weak Working Memory in the Classroom

A weak working memory can also have an impact on learning. Students with working memory constraints may

perform below average in some or all areas of learning

have difficulty with complex reasoning

have trouble with tasks that have more than one step

stop working because they have lost track of what they are supposed to do

frequently engage in daydreaming

lack skills in planning and organization

have difficulty applying what they learned in a previous experience to a new situation

have trouble remembering all the steps in oral directions

have trouble thinking and doing at the same time

appear highly distractible and inattentive but not impulsive or hyperactive

demonstrate low self-esteem

have relationships with peers but have difficulty following conversations in a group

Impact of Weak Working Memory on Reading and Written Language

A weak working memory can impede phonological learning and production at all levels. Consider a frequent rhyming exercise for young children. "Tell me which word rhymes with fox: truck, dog, box."

To identify the two rhyming words, the child must hold and then compare all of the words in working memory (fox/truck, fox/dog, fox/box). When older children attempt to sound out new words, they must use their working memory to hold the entire sequence of sounds long enough to blend those sounds together.

Working memory is also key to

linking to information held in long-term semantic memory stores to provide the meaning and pronunciation of words.

holding and sequencing sounds for spelling and also for composing, holding, and connecting ideas in written text.

reading comprehension and reading fluency. When reading a long sentence, paragraph or passage, working memory is what allows us to hold on to and integrate information we read early on with information that comes later. Students with strong decoding skills but weak working memories often comment that they "can't remember anything!" from a page that they just read.

Impact of Weak Working Memory on Math

Children with math learning disorders have pervasive weaknesses across all working memory components. Young students with weak working memory make more errors when translating numbers from verbal to written form than do students with strong working memory. The most persistent weakness in children with math learning difficulties is the ability to store and retrieve number combinations and facts from long-term memory. As a result, working memory resources are not available for more complex aspects of mathematical processing. Math fluency is disrupted because a slow and unpredictable response time is the outcome of lack of automaticity in retrieval of basic math facts.

Helpful Approaches

Gaps in reading and spelling skills should be addressed directly. Weak working memory contributes to poor word decoding and encoding. Systematic synthetic multisensory phonic approaches are recommended for students with weak working memory.

For students with adequate decoding but low reading comprehension, direct training in strategies such as comprehension monitoring, knowledge and use of text structures, and use of linguistic context should be addressed. Students can also learn that it may be difficult to hold on to information when sentences are too long. Recognizing when sentences are too long is a cue to slow down, check for comprehension, and, if necessary, re-read.

Slow reading interferes with sentence/phrase comprehension. One strategy to address fluency is to model good fluency for the student by using proper intonation and chunking sentences into meaningful chunks. "Chunking" helps reduce the number of parts to be stored in working memory for immediate processing.

Students who struggle with math due to difficulty retrieving math facts should be allowed easy access to basic math facts. This approach allows the student to focus on higher level math reasoning without bogging down while trying to pull up information that is not automatic. In more advanced math, students may have trouble carrying out math processes that involve multiple steps. Such students may understand long division but make errors due to omitting some essential step. A ring with index cards that provide examples of worked problems that involved multiple steps can support memory and learning.

Classroom-based Support

Classroom-based supports are easy to use and can benefit all students, not just students with weak working memory! Such supports include the following:

Monitoring the students for signs of poor working memory

Reducing the amount of information to be stored (for example, providing information on a white board so students don't have to hold the information in memory)

Simplifying information to make it easier to process

Teaching students how/when to apply memory aids

Repeating information as often as needed

Keeping directions simple and brief

Providing worked examples

Working memory is essential for learning. While we do not yet have a way to change working memory per se, there are many things that parents and teachers can do to support learning and achievement in students who have weak working memories. Helpful resources and websites are listed below:

"Math: Memory Challenges" available at dyslexia.yale.edu

"Understanding Working Memory: A Classroom Guide" by S. Gathercole & T Alloway available at mrc-cbu.com.ac.uk

understood.org provides information regarding how children use working memory to learn. This information can be found under the section "Learning & Attention Issues."

Working Memory: How You Keep Things "In Mind" Over the Short Term. Burmester, A. Scientific American. The Conversation US. June, 2017.

"Working Memory Tips: Helping Kids Reach Their Full Potential" available at https://wwwparentingscience.com/working-memory-tips.html

References

Berch, D. (2011), Working memory limitations in mathematics learning: Their Development, assessment, and remediation. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, ( 37) 2. 21-26.

Dehn, M. J. (2011) Helping students remember: Exercises and strategies to strengthen memory. New Jersey: Wiley and Sons.

Dehn, M. J. (2008) Working memory and academic learning: Assessment and Intervention. New Jersey: Wiley and Sons.

Farrell, M. L., & Matthews, M. (2010). Ready to read: A multisensory approach to language-based comprehension instruction. Baltimore: Brookes Publishing.

Gathercole, S. E., & Alloway, T.P. (2008) Working memory & learning: A practical guide for teachers. London: Sage Publications.

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015) Essentials of assessing, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons.
The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) thanks Michele Berg, Ph.D., for her assistance in the preparation of this fact sheet.
The International Dyslexia Association (IDA). IDA encourages the reproduction and distribution of this fact sheet.
If portions of the text are cited, appropriate reference must be made. Fact sheets may not be reprinted for the purpose of resale. © Copyright 2020. The International Dyslexia Association (IDA). For copyright information, pleaseclick here.

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Working Memory: The Engine for Learning - International Dyslexia Association

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20. The 6 Shifts: Shifting the Balance blog

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20. The 6 Shifts: Shifting the Balance blog

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In the last couple of blogs, we've unpacked these three questions about decodable texts: Who really needs decodable texts, anyway? What is a decodable text, really? How many decodable texts do I need? If you missed those posts, you can catch up here and here. As...

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In the last couple of blogs, we've unpacked these three questions about decodable texts: Who really needs decodable texts, anyway? What is a decodable text, really? How many decodable texts do I need? If you missed those posts, you can catch up here and here. As...

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The Science of Reading Basics, Part 3: Scarborough’s Reading Rope

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11. 6 Tips for Teaching Phonemic Awareness

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11. 6 Tips for Teaching Phonemic Awareness

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6 Tips for How to Teach Phonemic Awareness

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In this post, I explain the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness skills and offer 6 research-based tips for how to teach phonemic awareness. I share details about my science of reading-aligned phonemic awareness lesson plans for kindergarten and first-grade students and leave you with FREE phonemic awareness lesson plans that you can begin using with your small groups right away!

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94. K to Grade 5 Student Center Activities - Phonemic awareness, phonics

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94. K to Grade 5 Student Center Activities - Phonemic awareness, phonics

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Kindergarten and First Grade Student Center Activities Phonological Awareness | Phonics | Fluency | Vocabulary | Comprehension

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62 a. Decodable reading passages UFLI (no pictures)

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62 a. Decodable reading passages UFLI (no pictures)

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37. 5 Proven ways to support your child's reading

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37. 5 Proven ways to support your child's reading

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Reading Simplified - streamlined instruction, accelerated achievement

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5 Proven Ways for You to Support Your Child’s Reading - Reading Simplified

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Bookmark this one-stop-shop for the 5 proven ways for you to support your child’s reading! Find advice on what to prioritize & links to free easy-to-use resources

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This tool lets you type in a word and see its graphemes and phonemes mapped out.

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26. Using the Data You Already Have to Help Students with Dyslexia

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26. Using the Data You Already Have to Help Students with Dyslexia

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When you examine your teaching approaches and how to best help students with dyslexia, it can be easy to assume special data will be needed to help these students improve their foundational reading skills and move toward grade-level literacy.
However, the data you already have from regular assessment practices, like that collected from Acadience® Learning measures, can provide invaluable insight to help you tailor instruction and ensure all students-especially those with dyslexia and other reading challenges-receive the appropriate and timely intervention they need to succeed.
Our guest for this EDVIEW360 podcast is Matthew K. Burns, a literacy, assessment, and special education expert who has dedicated his career to improving the lives of the most-vulnerable children, including those with disabilities, from high-poverty backgrounds, and for whom English is not their native language. Dr. Burns will share how schools can help shape K-12 practice and improve literacy using existing data.
He will also discuss how educators can:
Use data to target reading interventions for students with dyslexiaIdentify breakdowns in the learning process to better increase reading skillsMatch reading interventions to student needImprove students' reading skills through schoolwide Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, such as Response to Intervention, and school-based teams, like problem-solving teams and professional learning communities.
We hope you'll join us for this fascinating podcast!

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using the data you already have to help students with dyslexia

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‎EDVIEW 360: Using the Data You Already Have to Help Students with Dyslexia on Apple Podcasts

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When you examine your teaching approaches and how to best help students with dyslexia, it can be easy to assume special data will be needed to help these students improve their foundational reading skills and move toward grade-level literacy. However, the data you already have from regular assessme...

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33. The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction

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33. The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction

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To build fluency we need to allow our students to repeat what they read. However, it can quickly become a stale task to just reread a text. As educators, we need to consider how we provide a purpose for ensuring our students have the chance to practice reading. Providing an opportunity to perform gives students a reason to rehearse their reading.

I recently witnessed a teacher use a Readers' Theatre script to build their students' fluency to maximum effect.

On the first day, the teacher read the script to their students. They modelled how to deliver it with expression, while the students followed along with their own copy.

The next day, the class were divided into parts. Each part would read their lines in unison. This exercise gave students the chance to focus on their accuracy. The teacher had given thought to which students were assigned each part to ensure that each child would succeed.

For the third and fourth days, the class rehearsed in their small groups. By this stage every part had practiced their lines. This meant that they focused on how to make their lines come alive. Students provided each other with feedback and collaborated to create an expressive performance.

On the fifth day, the various groups went to different classes and performed the short play. It was fantastic to see some students who often lack confidence reading aloud performing with aplomb.

The teacher was successful in supporting their students to improve the prosody because they first ensured that their students' were accurate and automatic with what they read.

(5) Check it

How do we know if our students' fluency is improving? How do we know if there is an issue? We check it. As with any assessment, we need to be mindful of what we are measuring and how this informs our teaching.

One measure is Oral Reading Fluency (ORF). Students read a passage of connected text within a set time. They are assessed on the number of words they read correctly per minute. This means that we have a measure of a student's reading rate and their accuracy. These are both essential elements to measure, and if you use a standardised ORF then you can monitor students who may be at risk.

Technology can also enable us to record students reading fluency. One promising development is the Reading Progress function in Microsoft Teams. A teacher can set up an assignment, including uploading a text, or using one from the sample library (sourced from ReadWorks.org) for students to read. Students record themselves. Their accuracy rate and number of correct words per minute are automatically calculated. This tool has the potential to save teacher time in assessing accuracy and pace. It also allows us to save samples of our students' fluency which is could be valuable when we are reporting on student progress.

While prosody can be a more complicated aspect to assess, educators can easily tell which students are not reading fluently yet. One thing to consider when checking prosody is that a student's automaticity with words is not the barrier. This would then give us a false data set where we think we've assessed their expression, but we've actually been assessing their decoding skills. Therefore it is important for us to make sure we allow our students to practice a text before assessing their prosody.

Using a rubric is one way that we can evaluate prosody. There are plenty available online, including one by Rasinski here. The teacher can complete rubrics, or you can teach your students how to use them to guide peer feedback. It is always crucial to unpack the criteria and provide examples so that students know what you are looking (or listening) for.

Fluency is the bridge between being able to decode to understanding what they read. It is essential that we recognise its importance and teach our students how they can become confident and capable readers.

References:

Hiskes, D. (2007). Reading Pathways: Simple Exercises to Improve Reading Fluency (5th ed). Jossey-Bass Teacher

Rasinski, T., & Cheeseman Smith, M. (2018). The Megabook of Fluency: Strategies and Texts to Engage All Readers. Scholastic

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5 Ways to: Focus on Fluency - Think Forward Educators

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Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom. Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curate

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36. 5 Ways To: Be Strategic In Your Phonics Instruction

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36. 5 Ways To: Be Strategic In Your Phonics Instruction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom.

Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain.

The second blog post of the series comes from structured literacy specialist, Lindsey Bates.

Phonics is simply the correlation of sound and symbol in an alphabetic writing system.

As Steve Dykstra says "No one reads English or similar, phonetic languages, without phonics instruction. No one. No exceptions. Ever. The only difference is whether we teach it to them, or they teach it to themselves. We all do some of the latter, and most of us need some of the former, but no one learns to read without phonics instruction."

There are different schools of thought as to what phonics instruction might look like. Synthetic phonics, analytic phonics and embedded phonics all focus on teaching the correlation of sounds and symbols, but they look quite different in the classroom. The evidence is incredibly compelling that the most effective phonics instruction is both explicit and systematic. Only systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) truly meets both those criteria, and since we're being strategic, in this article the term phonics will be used in reference to SSP.

The English language has 26 letters (symbols), used individually or in combination, to represent 44 sounds (phonemes). These symbol-sound correspondences are referred to as Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs). Now, English doesn't have a transparent orthography, so sometimes the letters in our words don't align particularly well to their pronunciation, and morphology or etymology can help us understand those irregularities better. About 95% of words can be decoded at the word level with basic phonics and morphology knowledge. Students' automatic recognition of GPCs allow students to become proficient decoders and creates a strong foundational understanding of how words work.

Putting it into Practice

As a teacher, educational coach and parent, I see and hear a lot about what phonics instruction looks like in different classrooms. Here are five ways teachers can be strategic in their phonics instruction.

Use a scope and sequence from a high quality published program, or at least adapt their principles.

Begin working on segmenting and blending as soon as possible, and allow for plenty of practice

Find ways to extend your students by adding breadth and depth

Recognise when adaptations and modifications are needed

(1) Use a scope and sequence from a high quality published program, or at least adapt their principles.

No one has yet established a perfect order in which to introduce Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs). Generally the scope and sequences from high quality published programs follow these principles:

Introduce common GPCs early

Introduce at least some vowel GPCs early

Introduce similar sounds (/f/ and /v/) or symbols (d and b) separately

Include opportunities for teachers to check for understanding, and for students to develop mastery

Provide opportunities for application and revision

Instruction happening at Tier 1, 2 and 3 all follow the same principles

If the scope and sequence you select follows these principles, then you'll set your students up for success.

A few other things to note when assessing a scope and sequence:

With a good scope and sequence, and strong explicit direct instruction, there shouldn't need to be more than about the equivalent of 20min of phonics instruction each day. A good scope and sequence should leave you with plenty of time for addressing the members of The Big Six.

There's little evidence to support the benefit of phonological awareness (PA) work in isolation from phonics. If you want to be strategic, weave phonological awareness into your phonics instructional time.

A systematic synthetic phonics scope and sequence will not include explicitly teaching consonant blends in isolation (for example bl, sp, tr etc), or include an onset-rime focus. If students are developing strong segmenting and blending skills, this is unnecessary and simply creates unnecessary teaching and learning. Louisa Moats (2010) reminds us, "Blends should not be described as one sound in phonics or spelling instruction".

(2) Begin working on segmenting and blending as soon as possible, and allow for plenty of practise

As mentioned, a good scope and sequence introduces at least some vowel GPCs early. This allows readers to begin applying their new knowledge of letters and sounds to decoding actual words as early as possible.

The ability to make the connections between symbols on the page and word pronunciation is the most important first step in developing fluent decoding skills. Students who understand that a word itself contains all the information they need to read it, are able to extend this to complex code and irregular code, and apply this to understanding spelling patterns connected to morphology and etymology.

Some students will seem to move quickly and effortlessly into fluent decoding of words with familiar GPCs, while others will need to spend much more time on this before those connections become firm. This is where taking advantage of opportunities to weave PA into your instruction would be wise. When segmenting and blending doesn't come easily to a student, it is all the more important to foster this foundational skill.

This attention to word-level reading contributes to the development of orthographic processing: The ability to create, remember and retrieve letter sequences for words, and connect them effortlessly to sounds and meaning. The storing of these sequences, for instant word-recognition, is often referred to as orthographic mapping, a term coined by Ehri (2014) and explained beautifully by linguist Lyn Stone.

In short, the clumsy and slow sounding out that we hear when our youngest students first begin decoding is what sets them to eventually recognise tens of thousands of words instantly. Begin segmenting and blending early and provide opportunities for practice. There are no shortcuts.

(3) Find ways to extend your students by adding breadth and depth

It can be easy to worry that if you're not extending the students who are quick to master new GPCs and that those students will quickly get bored, or that you're somehow doing them a disservice by holding them back. Keep in mind the following:

Some students will learn to read despite your instruction. Once children master the concepts that underpin decoding, the self-teaching principle begins to take over. Armed with the simple code and strong decoding skills, these children will, very likely, develop some understanding of complex code before they're formally introduced to it. Moving things along quickly for these students will likely have no negative impact for them long term, but is absolutely detrimental to your readers who are most in need of explicit direct instruction.

Application of simple code in connected text, and for decoding multisyllabic words, is more complex than simply memorising the necessary GPCs. Providing plenty of practice at these skills will benefit all students, providing opportunities for students to develop orthographic processing and create extensive banks of orthographically mapped sight-words.

Extension shouldn't just mean moving more quickly through a phonics scope and sequence. There's so much more to proficient reading. As mentioned above, developing orthographically-mapped banks of sight-words through repetition and exposure to word-level reading and connected text will contribute to more fluent and accurate reading, and more fluent and accurate reading will lead to increased word exposure and provide extension in all of The Big Six.

For faster decoders and spellers, extend them by giving them bonus words to read or spell, or ask them to add suffixes on the end, while the remainder of the class reads/spells simply the target word.

Put simply, if you want to be strategic, find ways to extend children by building breadth. Extending some children should never need to come at the cost of leaving others behind.

(4) Recognise when adaptations and modifications are needed

Ironically, your students who need SSP least will probably display the greatest gains early on, and the students who need it most may be the students who make you wonder 'Is this working'.

A criticism I often hear is that there are no 'silver bullets', and that's absolutely true. But there are best bets, and know that SSP is our best bet for getting out most at risk students to read.

So what do we do when it seems like it isn't enough? Three key things to keep in mind are:

Some students will simply need more exposures or a greater level of repetitions for new information to move from working memory to long term memory. This is where the Response to Intervention model can be quite helpful. Start with the assumption that there will be a small number of students for whom the standard scope and sequence at the standard level of instruction isn't enough, and plan for it in your intervention model and in your Tier 1 instruction.

Consider what supports you can put in place to ease cognitive load. Here are just a few examples of simple modifications that can make big difference to instruction:

Letter cards, tiles or magnets can be used for word-building by a student who struggles with letter formation. Of course, developing accurate and fluent letter formation is important, but it can be the focus elsewhere in your literacy instruction.

Manipulatives are also helpful for working with non-verbal or low-verbal students, allowing you to check for understanding without requiring high levels of verbal engagement.

Anxiety is a source of cognitive load often overlooked. Front loading a student by giving them a quick preview of the lesson can greatly increase the effectiveness of Tier 1 instruction for these students.

(5) Trust the process (avoid putting the lipstick on the pig)

Change is difficult, and there are lots of reasons we might not be able to do away with all of our balanced literacy practices at once. That said, it's important to understand that practices like teaching large banks of commonly used words as whole-word sight-words, and tools like predictable texts, actively undermine the development of strong decoding skills.

When we teach commonly used words using a flashcard, whole-word method, we can often see quick success in children memorising these words as images or logographs. Along with predictable sentence stems and supporting images, what we observe is beautiful fluent reading from very early on in their reading instruction. Pamela Snow refers to this as pseudo-reading. It is the illusion of reading. We can't learn all the words we need to learn this way, and when vocabulary steers away from those commonly used words, and picture cues disappear, the illusion vanishes.

When we teach children that they should 'just know' a word by looking at it, or that they may be able to guess or predict a word, we actively undermine the attention to symbol and sequence that underpins effective word mapping, automatic word recognition, and fluent and effortless reading.

References

Comment from Steve Dykstra, PhD, Psychologist, on the SpellTalk listserve.

https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2017/08/balanced-literacy-phonics-lipstick-is-not-enough/

http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2018/11/who-sank-reading-boat-sad-tale-of.html

About Lindsey Bates

Lindsey Bates is a teacher, Learning Specialist, Educational Coach and Dyslexia Intervention Specialist from Melbourne, Australia. She's been a classroom teacher since 2007, working in government schools across Melbourne Vic, and in Ontario Canada. She became an Associate Member of the Australia Dyslexic Association in 2020 and an Accredited Coach with Growth Coaching International in 2021. Lindsey has also been a mentor as a part of the Think Forward Educators Mentor Program.

She works with schools to build stronger, more inclusive, literacy instruction through her consultancy business, Sound Foundations Education, and is passionate about contributing to a system-wide shift to evidence based classroom practices.

Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom.

Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain.

The second blog post of the series comes from structured literacy specialist, Lindsey Bates.

Phonics is simply the correlation of sound and symbol in an alphabetic writing system.

As Steve Dykstra says "No one reads English or similar, phonetic languages, without phonics instruction. No one. No exceptions. Ever. The only difference is whether we teach it to them, or they teach it to themselves. We all do some of the latter, and most of us need some of the former, but no one learns to read without phonics instruction."

There are different schools of thought as to what phonics instruction might look like. Synthetic phonics, analytic phonics and embedded phonics all focus on teaching the correlation of sounds and symbols, but they look quite different in the classroom. The evidence is incredibly compelling that the most effective phonics instruction is both explicit and systematic. Only systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) truly meets both those criteria, and since we're being strategic, in this article the term phonics will be used in reference to SSP.

The English language has 26 letters (symbols), used individually or in combination, to represent 44 sounds (phonemes). These symbol-sound correspondences are referred to as Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs). Now, English doesn't have a transparent orthography, so sometimes the letters in our words don't align particularly well to their pronunciation, and morphology or etymology can help us understand those irregularities better. About 95% of words can be decoded at the word level with basic phonics and morphology knowledge. Students' automatic recognition of GPCs allow students to become proficient decoders and creates a strong foundational understanding of how words work.

Putting it into Practice

As a teacher, educational coach and parent, I see and hear a lot about what phonics instruction looks like in different classrooms. Here are five ways teachers can be strategic in their phonics instruction.

Use a scope and sequence from a high quality published program, or at least adapt their principles.

Begin working on segmenting and blending as soon as possible, and allow for plenty of practice

Find ways to extend your students by adding breadth and depth

Recognise when adaptations and modifications are needed

(1) Use a scope and sequence from a high quality published program, or at least adapt their principles.

No one has yet established a perfect order in which to introduce Grapheme Phoneme Correspondences (GPCs). Generally the scope and sequences from high quality published programs follow these principles:

Introduce common GPCs early

Introduce at least some vowel GPCs early

Introduce similar sounds (/f/ and /v/) or symbols (d and b) separately

Include opportunities for teachers to check for understanding, and for students to develop mastery

Provide opportunities for application and revision

Instruction happening at Tier 1, 2 and 3 all follow the same principles

If the scope and sequence you select follows these principles, then you'll set your students up for success.

A few other things to note when assessing a scope and sequence:

With a good scope and sequence, and strong explicit direct instruction, there shouldn't need to be more than about the equivalent of 20min of phonics instruction each day. A good scope and sequence should leave you with plenty of time for addressing the members of The Big Six.

There's little evidence to support the benefit of phonological awareness (PA) work in isolation from phonics. If you want to be strategic, weave phonological awareness into your phonics instructional time.

A systematic synthetic phonics scope and sequence will not include explicitly teaching consonant blends in isolation (for example bl, sp, tr etc), or include an onset-rime focus. If students are developing strong segmenting and blending skills, this is unnecessary and simply creates unnecessary teaching and learning. Louisa Moats (2010) reminds us, "Blends should not be described as one sound in phonics or spelling instruction".

(2) Begin working on segmenting and blending as soon as possible, and allow for plenty of practise

As mentioned, a good scope and sequence introduces at least some vowel GPCs early. This allows readers to begin applying their new knowledge of letters and sounds to decoding actual words as early as possible.

The ability to make the connections between symbols on the page and word pronunciation is the most important first step in developing fluent decoding skills. Students who understand that a word itself contains all the information they need to read it, are able to extend this to complex code and irregular code, and apply this to understanding spelling patterns connected to morphology and etymology.

Some students will seem to move quickly and effortlessly into fluent decoding of words with familiar GPCs, while others will need to spend much more time on this before those connections become firm. This is where taking advantage of opportunities to weave PA into your instruction would be wise. When segmenting and blending doesn't come easily to a student, it is all the more important to foster this foundational skill.

This attention to word-level reading contributes to the development of orthographic processing: The ability to create, remember and retrieve letter sequences for words, and connect them effortlessly to sounds and meaning. The storing of these sequences, for instant word-recognition, is often referred to as orthographic mapping, a term coined by Ehri (2014) and explained beautifully by linguist Lyn Stone.

In short, the clumsy and slow sounding out that we hear when our youngest students first begin decoding is what sets them to eventually recognise tens of thousands of words instantly. Begin segmenting and blending early and provide opportunities for practice. There are no shortcuts.

(3) Find ways to extend your students by adding breadth and depth

It can be easy to worry that if you're not extending the students who are quick to master new GPCs and that those students will quickly get bored, or that you're somehow doing them a disservice by holding them back. Keep in mind the following:

Some students will learn to read despite your instruction. Once children master the concepts that underpin decoding, the self-teaching principle begins to take over. Armed with the simple code and strong decoding skills, these children will, very likely, develop some understanding of complex code before they're formally introduced to it. Moving things along quickly for these students will likely have no negative impact for them long term, but is absolutely detrimental to your readers who are most in need of explicit direct instruction.

Application of simple code in connected text, and for decoding multisyllabic words, is more complex than simply memorising the necessary GPCs. Providing plenty of practice at these skills will benefit all students, providing opportunities for students to develop orthographic processing and create extensive banks of orthographically mapped sight-words.

Extension shouldn't just mean moving more quickly through a phonics scope and sequence. There's so much more to proficient reading. As mentioned above, developing orthographically-mapped banks of sight-words through repetition and exposure to word-level reading and connected text will contribute to more fluent and accurate reading, and more fluent and accurate reading will lead to increased word exposure and provide extension in all of The Big Six.

For faster decoders and spellers, extend them by giving them bonus words to read or spell, or ask them to add suffixes on the end, while the remainder of the class reads/spells simply the target word.

Put simply, if you want to be strategic, find ways to extend children by building breadth. Extending some children should never need to come at the cost of leaving others behind.

(4) Recognise when adaptations and modifications are needed

Ironically, your students who need SSP least will probably display the greatest gains early on, and the students who need it most may be the students who make you wonder 'Is this working'.

A criticism I often hear is that there are no 'silver bullets', and that's absolutely true. But there are best bets, and know that SSP is our best bet for getting out most at risk students to read.

So what do we do when it seems like it isn't enough? Three key things to keep in mind are:

Some students will simply need more exposures or a greater level of repetitions for new information to move from working memory to long term memory. This is where the Response to Intervention model can be quite helpful. Start with the assumption that there will be a small number of students for whom the standard scope and sequence at the standard level of instruction isn't enough, and plan for it in your intervention model and in your Tier 1 instruction.

Consider what supports you can put in place to ease cognitive load. Here are just a few examples of simple modifications that can make big difference to instruction:

Letter cards, tiles or magnets can be used for word-building by a student who struggles with letter formation. Of course, developing accurate and fluent letter formation is important, but it can be the focus elsewhere in your literacy instruction.

Manipulatives are also helpful for working with non-verbal or low-verbal students, allowing you to check for understanding without requiring high levels of verbal engagement.

Anxiety is a source of cognitive load often overlooked. Front loading a student by giving them a quick preview of the lesson can greatly increase the effectiveness of Tier 1 instruction for these students.

(5) Trust the process (avoid putting the lipstick on the pig)

Change is difficult, and there are lots of reasons we might not be able to do away with all of our balanced literacy practices at once. That said, it's important to understand that practices like teaching large banks of commonly used words as whole-word sight-words, and tools like predictable texts, actively undermine the development of strong decoding skills.

When we teach commonly used words using a flashcard, whole-word method, we can often see quick success in children memorising these words as images or logographs. Along with predictable sentence stems and supporting images, what we observe is beautiful fluent reading from very early on in their reading instruction. Pamela Snow refers to this as pseudo-reading. It is the illusion of reading. We can't learn all the words we need to learn this way, and when vocabulary steers away from those commonly used words, and picture cues disappear, the illusion vanishes.

When we teach children that they should 'just know' a word by looking at it, or that they may be able to guess or predict a word, we actively undermine the attention to symbol and sequence that underpins effective word mapping, automatic word recognition, and fluent and effortless reading.

References

Comment from Steve Dykstra, PhD, Psychologist, on the SpellTalk listserve.

https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2017/08/balanced-literacy-phonics-lipstick-is-not-enough/

http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2018/11/who-sank-reading-boat-sad-tale-of.html

About Lindsey Bates

Lindsey Bates is a teacher, Learning Specialist, Educational Coach and Dyslexia Intervention Specialist from Melbourne, Australia. She's been a classroom teacher since 2007, working in government schools across Melbourne Vic, and in Ontario Canada. She became an Associate Member of the Australia Dyslexic Association in 2020 and an Accredited Coach with Growth Coaching International in 2021. Lindsey has also been a mentor as a part of the Think Forward Educators Mentor Program.

She works with schools to build stronger, more inclusive, literacy instruction through her consultancy business, Sound Foundations Education, and is passionate about contributing to a system-wide shift to evidence based classroom practices.

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5 Ways To: Be Strategic In Your Phonics Instruction - Think Forward Educators

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Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom. Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curate

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13. 5 Ways To: Improve Phonological Awareness

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13. 5 Ways To: Improve Phonological Awareness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom.

Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain.

The first blog post of the series comes from structured literacy specialist, Jocelyn Seamer.

Phonological and phonemic awareness (PA) are the bridge between oral language and decoding (Kilpatrick, 2015). Development in this area may be described in three broad areas including:

Phonological sensitivity - rhyming, alliteration, syllable segmentation (Brady, 2020)

Basic phonemic awareness - identifying individual phonemes in words, phoneme blending and segmenting. Blending occurs when children combine the phonemes /c/ - /a/ - /t/ into the word 'cat'. Every time we utter a word, we are engaging in oral blending. Taking the separate phonemes in a word and blending them is the vehicle by which we lift unfamiliar words from the page. Segmenting occurs when we separate and isolate the phonemes in a word, such as being able to separate the word 'dog' into /d/ /o/ /g/. Spelling is what happens when we represent those phonemes with a written symbol.

'Advanced' phonemic awareness - which develops once automaticity in basic phonemic awareness is established. This enables students to delete, add and substitute phonemes in words.

Some controversy in the nitty gritty

It is acknowledged that the above framework may be somewhat contested by readers. This is not surprising considering the level of debate in the academic community about phonological and phonemic awareness.

Regardless of whether you subscribe to a particular perspective on the 'levels' of phonological and phonemic awareness, there is ample evidence of the positive effects of instruction on later reading development. A recent surge in prepared, whole class oral programs has resulted in an increased awareness of phonological and phonemic awareness in our classrooms. However, the role of graphemes in this work has been difficult for some classroom teachers to establish in practice. This is made more challenging when we consider that the matter is still hotly contested by reading researchers.

With letters or without letters?

While children can learn to blend and segment orally, the National Reading Panel (2000) found that the effects of phonemic awareness instruction were greater when graphemes were used than when they were not. Finally, it is important to note that phonemic awareness is a means to enable reading and spelling, not an end in itself. That is, it is not a separate, stand-alone activity done for the entire time a student is in primary school.

Putting it into Practice

Disagreements about instructional practices to help students develop phonemic awareness only serve to make it harder for teachers to know exactly what they are supposed to be doing in the classroom.

Here are five suggestions for making your phonological and phonemic awareness instruction simple and effective.

Don't wait until students have early phonological awareness before teaching blending and segmenting.

Include phonological sensitivity in your day to transitions and activities

Include blending and segmenting activities in your phonics lessons

Monitor progress regularly

Identify and support strugglers early

(1) Don't wait until students have early phonological awareness before teaching blending and segmenting

There used to be a school of thought that placed phonological and phonemic awareness on a continuum with the development of early phonological skills preceding phonemic awareness. This led many teachers to delay the introduction of blending and segmenting until phonological sensitivity had developed. Research indicates that children can develop blending and segmenting at the phoneme level before they acquire phonological sensitivity making it unnecessary to wait to introduce instruction into the Foundation year classroom (Brady, 2020). That isn't to say that phonological sensitivity isn't important, but rather we can introduce phoneme level blending and segmenting right at the start of the Foundation Year.

(2) Include phonological sensitivity in your day to transitions and activities

We all know that teachers are time poor. After differentiation, time management and 'fitting everything in' is the most common challenge faced by teachers. Rather than creating a separate section of the literacy block especially for early phonological skills, it can be very useful to include phonological sensitivity in your day-to-day activities. For example, when you send your students off to wash their hands or collect their bags, engage them in a brief activity to practise segmenting syllables. One by one, you call on the students to 'chop' their names before they leave the group. This prevents a stampede of students all headed for the same place and gives you the opportunity to check-in with each student. You can even use this as an opportunity for assessment, keeping a checklist nearby to note when students have demonstrated a particular skill.

(3) Include blending and segmenting activities in your phonics lessons

As with phonological sensitivity, it isn't necessary to find time for separate practice in blending and segmenting. The point of these skills is to enable the development of reading and spelling and, as such, should be put to work in the context of work with graphemes. When introducing early phoneme awareness to young children, you might have a short oral activity focused on identifying phonemes as part of your phonics lesson. You would then include both blending and segmenting with graphemes as part of the daily, low variance routine in the phonics lesson.

A note of caution on this. Ensure that students have automaticity with phoneme/grapheme correspondence before asking them to read and spell words containing those graphemes. 'Wobbly' phonemic skills combined with 'wobbly' phoneme grapheme correspondence only serves to overwhelm our young students. Once students have acquired automaticity with blending a segmenting, you can include some short and sharp addition, deletion and substitution activities in your phonics lesson as well. Aim to keep this part of your lesson to less than 3 minutes.

(4) Monitor progress regularly

As mentioned, assessment and monitoring does not need to only occur via a one-on-one assessment. You can maintain a checklist or spreadsheet manually during your various classroom activities. An informal assessment in phonological and phonemic skills is sufficient monitor progress. You do not need to have a norm referenced assessment to inform your teaching. You can find a very useful tool for this here.

Monitoring progress enables you to target instruction on the skills most needed at the time. The National Reading Panel (2000) found that instruction that focused on just one or two skills yielded better results than instruction that covered a wide range of skills at once. Using your assessment to inform teaching will ensure that you are targeted and specific in your teaching to help students get the best results. Assessment data also tells you when you can stop focusing on specific skills. If your whole class can segment syllables confidently, you no longer need to spend time on that skill. If you teach Year 1 and 2, it isn't necessary to teach every skill on the list.

(5) Identify and support at-risk students early

Assessment helps you provide more targeted instruction, but it also helps you to identify students at risk of reading difficulty. Students with dyslexia very often have core phonological deficits which significantly impact their reading development (Kilpatrick, 2015). Using our phonological and phonemic assessment data in the Foundation year means that we don't have to wait until the Year 1 phonics screening check to identify students who need additional support. Once we know that a student is struggling to acquire any of the necessary skills, we can provide Tier 2 support in the form of additional and more intensive instruction as needed. If you teach Year 1 and 2, your assessment data will help you keep on top of the ongoing support that may be required by students in these grades.

Phonological and phonemic awareness instruction is a critical aspect of our teaching, but it need not take over our whole literacy block. Focusing on activities that provide bang for your buck (such as including graphemes once known) will ensure that our students learn what they need to without instruction taking precious time away from other core undertakings.

References

Brady, S (2020) A 2020 Perspective on Research Findings on Alphabetics (Phoneme Awareness and Phonics): Implications for Instruction (Expanded Version). Posted on The Reading League website: https://www.thereadingleague.org/journal/ https://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Brady-Expanded-Version-of-Alphabetics-TRLJ.pdf

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

Kilpatrick, D. (2015) Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. John Wiley and Sons. New Jersey.

About Jocelyn Seamer

Jocelyn Seamer is a teacher, tutor and former school leader. She has led teams in some of Australia's remotest schools to develop practice that reflects the evidence base of reading instruction. She shares simple yet effective strategies with classroom teachers in a variety of forums - learn more at Jocelyn's website.

Her book, Reading Success in the Early Primary Years, can be purchased here.

Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom.

Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain.

The first blog post of the series comes from structured literacy specialist, Jocelyn Seamer.

Phonological and phonemic awareness (PA) are the bridge between oral language and decoding (Kilpatrick, 2015). Development in this area may be described in three broad areas including:

Phonological sensitivity - rhyming, alliteration, syllable segmentation (Brady, 2020)

Basic phonemic awareness - identifying individual phonemes in words, phoneme blending and segmenting. Blending occurs when children combine the phonemes /c/ - /a/ - /t/ into the word 'cat'. Every time we utter a word, we are engaging in oral blending. Taking the separate phonemes in a word and blending them is the vehicle by which we lift unfamiliar words from the page. Segmenting occurs when we separate and isolate the phonemes in a word, such as being able to separate the word 'dog' into /d/ /o/ /g/. Spelling is what happens when we represent those phonemes with a written symbol.

'Advanced' phonemic awareness - which develops once automaticity in basic phonemic awareness is established. This enables students to delete, add and substitute phonemes in words.

Some controversy in the nitty gritty

It is acknowledged that the above framework may be somewhat contested by readers. This is not surprising considering the level of debate in the academic community about phonological and phonemic awareness.

Regardless of whether you subscribe to a particular perspective on the 'levels' of phonological and phonemic awareness, there is ample evidence of the positive effects of instruction on later reading development. A recent surge in prepared, whole class oral programs has resulted in an increased awareness of phonological and phonemic awareness in our classrooms. However, the role of graphemes in this work has been difficult for some classroom teachers to establish in practice. This is made more challenging when we consider that the matter is still hotly contested by reading researchers.

With letters or without letters?

While children can learn to blend and segment orally, the National Reading Panel (2000) found that the effects of phonemic awareness instruction were greater when graphemes were used than when they were not. Finally, it is important to note that phonemic awareness is a means to enable reading and spelling, not an end in itself. That is, it is not a separate, stand-alone activity done for the entire time a student is in primary school.

Putting it into Practice

Disagreements about instructional practices to help students develop phonemic awareness only serve to make it harder for teachers to know exactly what they are supposed to be doing in the classroom.

Here are five suggestions for making your phonological and phonemic awareness instruction simple and effective.

Don't wait until students have early phonological awareness before teaching blending and segmenting.

Include phonological sensitivity in your day to transitions and activities

Include blending and segmenting activities in your phonics lessons

Monitor progress regularly

Identify and support strugglers early

(1) Don't wait until students have early phonological awareness before teaching blending and segmenting

There used to be a school of thought that placed phonological and phonemic awareness on a continuum with the development of early phonological skills preceding phonemic awareness. This led many teachers to delay the introduction of blending and segmenting until phonological sensitivity had developed. Research indicates that children can develop blending and segmenting at the phoneme level before they acquire phonological sensitivity making it unnecessary to wait to introduce instruction into the Foundation year classroom (Brady, 2020). That isn't to say that phonological sensitivity isn't important, but rather we can introduce phoneme level blending and segmenting right at the start of the Foundation Year.

(2) Include phonological sensitivity in your day to transitions and activities

We all know that teachers are time poor. After differentiation, time management and 'fitting everything in' is the most common challenge faced by teachers. Rather than creating a separate section of the literacy block especially for early phonological skills, it can be very useful to include phonological sensitivity in your day-to-day activities. For example, when you send your students off to wash their hands or collect their bags, engage them in a brief activity to practise segmenting syllables. One by one, you call on the students to 'chop' their names before they leave the group. This prevents a stampede of students all headed for the same place and gives you the opportunity to check-in with each student. You can even use this as an opportunity for assessment, keeping a checklist nearby to note when students have demonstrated a particular skill.

(3) Include blending and segmenting activities in your phonics lessons

As with phonological sensitivity, it isn't necessary to find time for separate practice in blending and segmenting. The point of these skills is to enable the development of reading and spelling and, as such, should be put to work in the context of work with graphemes. When introducing early phoneme awareness to young children, you might have a short oral activity focused on identifying phonemes as part of your phonics lesson. You would then include both blending and segmenting with graphemes as part of the daily, low variance routine in the phonics lesson.

A note of caution on this. Ensure that students have automaticity with phoneme/grapheme correspondence before asking them to read and spell words containing those graphemes. 'Wobbly' phonemic skills combined with 'wobbly' phoneme grapheme correspondence only serves to overwhelm our young students. Once students have acquired automaticity with blending a segmenting, you can include some short and sharp addition, deletion and substitution activities in your phonics lesson as well. Aim to keep this part of your lesson to less than 3 minutes.

(4) Monitor progress regularly

As mentioned, assessment and monitoring does not need to only occur via a one-on-one assessment. You can maintain a checklist or spreadsheet manually during your various classroom activities. An informal assessment in phonological and phonemic skills is sufficient monitor progress. You do not need to have a norm referenced assessment to inform your teaching. You can find a very useful tool for this here.

Monitoring progress enables you to target instruction on the skills most needed at the time. The National Reading Panel (2000) found that instruction that focused on just one or two skills yielded better results than instruction that covered a wide range of skills at once. Using your assessment to inform teaching will ensure that you are targeted and specific in your teaching to help students get the best results. Assessment data also tells you when you can stop focusing on specific skills. If your whole class can segment syllables confidently, you no longer need to spend time on that skill. If you teach Year 1 and 2, it isn't necessary to teach every skill on the list.

(5) Identify and support at-risk students early

Assessment helps you provide more targeted instruction, but it also helps you to identify students at risk of reading difficulty. Students with dyslexia very often have core phonological deficits which significantly impact their reading development (Kilpatrick, 2015). Using our phonological and phonemic assessment data in the Foundation year means that we don't have to wait until the Year 1 phonics screening check to identify students who need additional support. Once we know that a student is struggling to acquire any of the necessary skills, we can provide Tier 2 support in the form of additional and more intensive instruction as needed. If you teach Year 1 and 2, your assessment data will help you keep on top of the ongoing support that may be required by students in these grades.

Phonological and phonemic awareness instruction is a critical aspect of our teaching, but it need not take over our whole literacy block. Focusing on activities that provide bang for your buck (such as including graphemes once known) will ensure that our students learn what they need to without instruction taking precious time away from other core undertakings.

References

Brady, S (2020) A 2020 Perspective on Research Findings on Alphabetics (Phoneme Awareness and Phonics): Implications for Instruction (Expanded Version). Posted on The Reading League website: https://www.thereadingleague.org/journal/ https://www.thereadingleague.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Brady-Expanded-Version-of-Alphabetics-TRLJ.pdf

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

Kilpatrick, D. (2015) Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. John Wiley and Sons. New Jersey.

About Jocelyn Seamer

Jocelyn Seamer is a teacher, tutor and former school leader. She has led teams in some of Australia's remotest schools to develop practice that reflects the evidence base of reading instruction. She shares simple yet effective strategies with classroom teachers in a variety of forums - learn more at Jocelyn's website.

Her book, Reading Success in the Early Primary Years, can be purchased here.

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5 Ways To: Improve Phonological Awareness - Think Forward Educators

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Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom. Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curate

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39. 5 Ways to Improve Reading Comprehension Instruction

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39. 5 Ways to Improve Reading Comprehension Instruction

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Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom.

Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain.

The third blog post of the series from structured literacy specialist, Debbie Draper gives us a comprehensive look at comprehension.

Comprehension involves forming a coherent mental model that integrates vocabulary, syntax, background knowledge and semantic knowledge. It relies on

It is sometimes assumed (and indeed, implied by the Reading Rope) that fluency and comprehension will automatically result from the coming together of the separate strands. Comprehension can also be improved with explicit instruction.

What is comprehension anyway?

Comprehension, simply put, is understanding. Oral comprehension (listening comprehension) is being able to understand the spoken word. Oral language, however, is usually much less formal in vocabulary and structure than written language. When we are talking and listening, cues such as tone of voice and body language and firsthand background knowledge assists with understanding the speaker's message.

However, written language is rarely just speech written down and we have the complexities of written language to deal with as well. These are outlined in Scarborough's rope under the banner of language comprehension. Language comprehension refers to the understanding of written texts whether they are listened to or read independently.

Reading comprehension, oral and language comprehension are highly correlated. To be skilled comprehenders, readers need to be automatic and strategic with all elements of the reading rope and be able to select and use cognitive and metacognitive strategies. This means that students need to be explicitly taught how to monitor their comprehension, understand when meaning breaks down and be able to select and use appropriate fix-up strategies to build meaning.

The Complexity of Comprehension

Unlike decoding, comprehension is harder to recognise and assess. As it is something that occurs in the brain, we can't actually see or hear it. We can usually only infer that a reader has comprehended a text by their oral, visual and written responses.

Comprehension is an interaction between the reader's

and the text

complexity (syntax, sentence length, multisyllabic words, structure, vocabulary)

difficulty (familiarity with content)

type, genre, forms and features.

Putting it into Practice

Here are five ways to improve reading comprehension instruction:

Embed comprehension into content instruction

Teach micro-skills as well as whole text comprehension

Think about what to teach and when

Don't be afraid of strategy instruction - but be wary of decontextualising it!

Teach explicitly through the Gradual Release of Responsibility model

(1) Embed comprehension into content instruction

We use the term "mental model" to describe the structure you create in your memory while reading a passage. It makes sense to help students meaningfully interact with a text at the same time as deepening their comprehension of the content. In order to do this efficiently, consider embedding comprehension instruction into content instruction.

Integrated comprehension instruction facilitates reciprocity - the more knowledge developed on a topic, the easier it becomes to read and understand other texts on that topic. As well as helping students develop a rich mental representation of content, it enables teachers to integrate comprehension into all curriculum areas. Rich learning is not about separating what is traditionally seen as English from Science or HASS or the Arts or PE. The aim of all learning areas is understanding of the subject.

So, rather than thinking about comprehension strategies first start with the question "Why is this learning important?"

Consider content (concepts, understanding and skills), then consider the texts that will help support the development of the content knowledge. Finally think about your students and the support that they will need to be able to access those texts.

What text structures and features might students need to be explicitly taught?

What vocabulary (Tier 2 academic and 3 content- specific) will students need to know and how will I teach it?

What skills and strategies will students need to employ in order to understand this text?

How can we best help students meaningfully interact with text to deepen comprehension?
(2) Teach micro-skills as well as whole text comprehension

Comprehension instruction has traditionally focused on comprehension of chunks of texts, if not whole texts. The attention is now being drawn to those comprehension micro-skills that developing readers need to develop a better mental model as they are reading. The micro-skills focus on the sentence level.

Understanding that sentences have particular structures is important to reading comprehension

Anaphors - part of the text that takes it meaning from another part of the text (pronoun - noun connection, ellipses)

Connectives (temporal, causal, contrastive and continuant)

Syntactic Awareness - the meaning behind word order and function, phrase and clause structure and the role of punctuation.

Comprehension of texts also relies on the reader being able to make " gap filling inferences." Writers do not include all the information needed to understand a text. For example, the sentence "Alex looked out the window then searched for her coat." relies on the reader to infer that Alex is about to go outside for some reason, looks out of the window to check the weather, sees that it is cold or windy and decides that she will need her coat.

When teaching these skills explicitly, use authentic texts to find relevant examples. Explicitly teach through modelled reading / think-alouds and shared reading before guided and independent practice.

Here are some examples from a draft English / Science shared reading and writing unit currently being trialed. Take note that teaching syntax and sentence structure is more effective when connected to writing.

Butterflies are flying bugs.

They live on trees.

They live in grassy places.

Butterflies like to be warm.

Anaphora (pronoun - noun connection). What does "they" refer to?

How can we combine the sentences into one or two sentences using connectives (and more scientific vocabulary)?

Butterflies are flying insects that live in trees and in grassy places.

Using connectives to show meaning and relationships

Butterflies cannot live in very cold places because

Butterflies cannot live in very cold places but

Butterflies cannot live in very cold places so

Refer to " The Reading Comprehension Blueprint " by Nancy Hennessy and " The Writing Revolution " by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler for more information and ideas. (NB: these books are available from many sites. I have no affiliation with any book sellers!)

(3) Think about what to teach and when

When we consider all the elements that impact on comprehension, it can become overwhelming. In order to focus your instruction go back to the curriculum. When writing learning intentions consider how students will be assessed and what evidence you will need to collect. The Achievement Standards (or similar) of the curriculum need to be clearly understood in terms of the skills and knowledge required. In this example I have used the Australian Curriculum.

The National Literacy Learning Progressions can help narrow your focus but be wary of teaching these skills in a decontextualised way. Use the curriculum and the progressions as a resource to determine what to focus on within your content rich teaching sequence.

The ultimate goal of strategy instruction is not the strategy itself but the comprehension of texts through the flexible use of a variety of relevant strategies.

The following example details a lesson plan based on these curriculum outcomes:

(4) Don't be afraid of strategy instruction - but be wary of decontextualising it!

Strategy instruction has become a hot topic recently, particularly as a result of Natalie Wexlers's assessment, that the teaching of reading comprehension has become narrowly constricted to practicing a growing set of disconnected skills. Her recommendation is to focus on knowledge and vocabulary building and reject the practising of comprehension skills.

When we look back at the original research , knowledge-building and research-informed cognitive strategy instruction went hand in hand. These studies focused on the cognitive strategies that led to improved comprehension. This was also backed up a meta-analysis of over two hundred studies for the National Reading Panel Report in 2000. The studies took place over a relatively short time with positive results but, unfortunately the idea that "if a little bit is good, a lot must be better" took hold. Strategy instruction is best practised in a relatively short time, with some strategy revisiting as text demands become more complex.

Remember that the aim of strategy instruction is for readers to have a toolkit of strategies to draw from when meaning breaks down. Strategy instruction is a means to an end, that being the comprehension of the text.

The transition from promising research into the classroom practice often involves over- simplification along with a plethora of ready resources from eager publishers. Over time, educators were led to mistakenly believe that practising skills such as finding the main idea or inferring would lead to better outcomes. These skills were mostly practised out of context with no explicit instruction.

Effective comprehension strategy instruction involves teachers modelling through a "think aloud" how to read and understand a text. This process enables students to understand how a good reader thinks while they are reading - opening the "black box" to reveal how a reader develops a mental model.

Strategies that have been determined to have a high effect size include inferring meaning, summarising and synthesising, developing questioning strategies, using graphic and semantic organisers and monitoring comprehension and identifying and resolving difficulties.

However, each of these strategies also require a range of cognitive processes to occur:
Comprehension Strategy
Inferring meaning

Understanding what an inference is

Understanding that prediction and inference are different but share some commonalities

Connecting background knowledge (schema) to information from the text

Determining the validity of an inference

Monitoring and adjusting inferences as more information is learned

Summarising and synthesising

Understanding the purpose of the task (what to summarise)

Determining importance - of the information relevant to the task

Sifting key ideas and relevant / irrelevant details

Collecting and evaluating information from a range of sources

Determining how to present a summary relevant to the task

Developing questioning strategies

Knowing what a question is

Understanding different question types and their purpose

Knowing how to answer different question types

Locating relevant information

Generating relevant questions

Using graphic and semantic organisers

Monitoring comprehension and identifying and resolving difficulties

Knowing when you have lost meaning and locating where

Determining why (vocabulary, semantics, content knowledge etc.)

Drawing from a range of cognitive strategies to resolve the difficulty

It can also be helpful to look at the curriculum expectations to determine which strategies to focus on.

(5) Teach explicitly through the Gradual Release of Responsibility model

The Gradual Release of Responsibility is a model designed to teach students skills and strategies that they have not yet mastered. The model brings back the "teach" into teaching and positions the teacher as an expert. It's sometimes called the apprenticeship model.

Most teachers are competent readers themselves and are unaware of the cognitive processes they are employing to understand a text. Because the strategies have become automatised, it is sometimes difficult to think about what we are actually doing when we read.
When planning to introduce a new strategy to students, it is important to consider the following

Locate an appropriate text which provides several opportunities to highlight the particular skill or strategy you wish to make explicit

Scan the text for relevant teaching opportunities

Read the text, highlighting with sticky notes where you might stop and "think aloud"

Select a few pertinent examples. There is no need to stop and articulate your thinking on every page.

Write a script - determine what you will say and how you will connect your thinking to the text. Write the script in first person using I statements

A think aloud might feel quite unnatural at first, but it is a very powerful strategy when done right.

Revisit the strategy with the same, or another text, inviting students to share their thoughts and ideas. Reinforce full sentence answers using scaffolds such as sentence stems if needed.

Consider revisiting and reinforcing the strategy during small group guided practice. This approach is effective for fluent readers but may be cognitive overload for emergent readers who should be focusing on decoding.

Cooperative structures such as Reciprocal Reading and Literature circle can be useful, but only after students have been explicitly taught the strategies required in these approaches.

When students are reading independently, it can be helpful for accountability purposes for students to record aspects of their thinking e.g. record three inferences citing evidence from the text and your own thinking, use a graphic organiser to summarise the text, write three questions about the text for someone else to answer.

I DO, YOU WATCH Reading & Comprehension Modelled Reading
Teacher reads aloud to students whilst modelling and articulating effective reading and comprehension strategies. The teacher articulates the purpose of the read aloud, names the strategy and explains that effective readers use the strategy when they are reading. During the read aloud, students are required to listen to the teacher "thinking aloud" as they read the text.

The teacher talks out loud about what they are thinking as they read the words and the illustrations in a text. The thinking is articulated out loud in the first person (using I).

When I look at the cover of this book, I am predicting..... I am thinking that because (evidence from the text)...... When I just read that bit, I am starting to infer ......because...
I DO, YOU HELP Shared Reading
Shared reading involves a simliar process to modelled reading, except that students are invited to share their own thinking at strategic points in the text.

The turn and talk strategy is very effective for this purpose as all students have an opportunity to participate. Model and reinforce the appropriate language to use.

Building an anchor chart with students helps them remember the strategy and anchors their thinking back to the lesson when they are required to use the strategy independently.
YOU DO, I SUPPORT Guided Practice
During guided practice, teachers explain the purpose of the lesson and can model the focus strategy during the book introduction as a reminder to students.

As students read the text, the teacher listens to the student read aloud. At strategic points in the text, the teacher may ask the student to think aloud (articulate their thinking using the focus strategy). A prompt card or bookmark can be used as a scaffold.
YOU DO, I WATCH Peer Collaboration
Students may work together in pairs or small groups to read and articulate their thinking out loud. For example, after a modelled reading students could "turn and talk" with a partner to explain their thinking about a text - "I infer that the wolf won't blow the house down because in the picture I can see that he looks angry. I think that's because he can't blow the bricks down."

During Literature Circles, students could take on roles and be scaffolded to explain their thinking along with evidence from the text. "When I read ........I made a text to text connection because......."

As students read independently, they should begin to automatically use the comprehension skills and strategies. In order to bring metacognitive thinking to the surface, teachers can require that students record 3 or 4 examples of their thinking. Scaffolds and sticky notes can be used to keep evidence for assessment.

An exploration of the various teaching approaches encompassed within Pearson and Gallagher's (1983) Gradual Release of Responsibility framework can be watched here.

In summary

DO integrate comprehension instruction into rich knowledge based units

DON'T teach comprehension using an isolated, decontextualised skills based approach

DO teach language comprehension from the early years through rich shared texts

DON'T wait to consider comprehension until students can decode

DO explicitly teachquestioning skills and strategies and focus on student generated questions

DON'T think that questioning students is teaching comprehension - it is assessing comprehension

DO use the gradual release of responsibility to model think-alouds and show students what a good reader does metacognitively whilst reading

DON'T expect students to go from explanation to independence

DO teach micro and macro comprehension skills

DON'T ignore word level comprehension (vocabulary) or sentence level comprehension syntax and semantics

DO remember that the ultimate goal of comprehension instruction is understanding the text

DON'T forget that some students seem to automatically develop a range of comprehension strategies but some students will need to be expicitly taught strategies in order to have a repertoire to draw from

Debbie Draper is an educational consultant specialising in the science of reading and writing. Debbie has held many roles in the educational field including over 20 years classroom teaching as well as leadership roles at site, partnership and state levels. Debbie has worked at state level supporting the implementation of the SHIP (Students with High Intellectual Potential) focus school programme and co-developed and delivered a teacher training programme nationally and internationally.

Debbie has held district and regional roles implementing literacy, numeracy and Australian Curriculum initiatives. Whilst working in Northern Adelaide, South Australia, Debbie was instrumental in developing a 4-year professional learning strategy that led to significant improvements in student outcomes in comprehension. She currently enjoys a role working with sites in a private capacity empowering teachers to enrich their reading and writing pedagogy.

Comprehension References and Resources

Cain, K. & Oakhill, J.V. (1999). Inference making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children. Reading and Writing, 11(5) , 489

Duke Nell K., Ward Alessandra E., P. Pearson David (2021) The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction in The Reading Teacher Vol. 74 No. 6 May/June 2021

Hennessy, Nancy Lewis (2021) The reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text

Hruby, George G. Grounding Reading Comprehension in the Neuroscience Literatures Utah State University

(PDF) Grounding Reading Comprehension in the Neuroscience Literatures | George Hruby - Academia.edu

McNamara, Danielle S (editor) (2007) Reading Comprehension Strategies Theories, Interventions, and Technologies

Oakhill, J., Cain, K., & Elbro, C. (2015). Understanding and teaching reading comprehension: A handbook. New York: Routledge.

, Natalie(2020) The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America's broken education system--and how to fix it

, Natalie(2022) 'What Works' in Reading Comprehension-And What Doesn't https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2022/04/09/what-works-in-reading-comprehension-and-what-doesnt/?sh=5e36581f4e26
Teaching Literacy Podcast
https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/episode-05-comprehension-ci-theory-and-practice-with-dr-d-ray-reutzel/
https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/episode-06-comprehension-ci-theory-and-practice-part-2-with-dr-d-ray-reutzel/
https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/reading-comprehension-research-schema-simple-view-of-reading-and-the-rope-comprehension-instruction-part-1-3/
https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/reading-comprehension-construction-integration-and-common-core/
(This episode explores Kintsch's Construction Integration model)

https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/comprehension-strategies-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

(This episode explores how strategy instruction is a key component of many classrooms, and what does research indicate about its effectiveness?)
Evidence into Action https://evidenceintoaction.podbean.com/e/ep-4-exploring-the-complexities-of-reading-comprehension/
https://evidenceintoaction.podbean.com/e/ep-11-teaching-reading-the-reading-comprehension-house/
Amplify - science-of-reading-the-podcast
https://amplify.com/science-of-reading-the-podcast/

Season 2, Episode 7. Research, comprehension, and content-rich literacy instruction: Sonia Cabell

Season 3, Episode 1. Deconstructing the Rope: An introduction with Dr. Jane Oakhill

Season 3, Episode 6. Deconstructing the Rope: Background knowledge with Susan Neuman

Season 3, Episode 9. Deconstructing the Rope: Vocabulary with Nancy Hennessy

Season 3, Episode 8. Deconstructing the Rope: Language comprehension with Sonia Cabell

Season 3, Episode 10.Deconstructing the Rope: Language structures with Kate Cain

Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom.

Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curated by Brendan Lee and Dr Nathaniel Swain.

The third blog post of the series from structured literacy specialist, Debbie Draper gives us a comprehensive look at comprehension.

Comprehension involves forming a coherent mental model that integrates vocabulary, syntax, background knowledge and semantic knowledge. It relies on

It is sometimes assumed (and indeed, implied by the Reading Rope) that fluency and comprehension will automatically result from the coming together of the separate strands. Comprehension can also be improved with explicit instruction.

What is comprehension anyway?

Comprehension, simply put, is understanding. Oral comprehension (listening comprehension) is being able to understand the spoken word. Oral language, however, is usually much less formal in vocabulary and structure than written language. When we are talking and listening, cues such as tone of voice and body language and firsthand background knowledge assists with understanding the speaker's message.

However, written language is rarely just speech written down and we have the complexities of written language to deal with as well. These are outlined in Scarborough's rope under the banner of language comprehension. Language comprehension refers to the understanding of written texts whether they are listened to or read independently.

Reading comprehension, oral and language comprehension are highly correlated. To be skilled comprehenders, readers need to be automatic and strategic with all elements of the reading rope and be able to select and use cognitive and metacognitive strategies. This means that students need to be explicitly taught how to monitor their comprehension, understand when meaning breaks down and be able to select and use appropriate fix-up strategies to build meaning.

The Complexity of Comprehension

Unlike decoding, comprehension is harder to recognise and assess. As it is something that occurs in the brain, we can't actually see or hear it. We can usually only infer that a reader has comprehended a text by their oral, visual and written responses.

Comprehension is an interaction between the reader's

and the text

complexity (syntax, sentence length, multisyllabic words, structure, vocabulary)

difficulty (familiarity with content)

type, genre, forms and features.

Putting it into Practice

Here are five ways to improve reading comprehension instruction:

Embed comprehension into content instruction

Teach micro-skills as well as whole text comprehension

Think about what to teach and when

Don't be afraid of strategy instruction - but be wary of decontextualising it!

Teach explicitly through the Gradual Release of Responsibility model

(1) Embed comprehension into content instruction

We use the term "mental model" to describe the structure you create in your memory while reading a passage. It makes sense to help students meaningfully interact with a text at the same time as deepening their comprehension of the content. In order to do this efficiently, consider embedding comprehension instruction into content instruction.

Integrated comprehension instruction facilitates reciprocity - the more knowledge developed on a topic, the easier it becomes to read and understand other texts on that topic. As well as helping students develop a rich mental representation of content, it enables teachers to integrate comprehension into all curriculum areas. Rich learning is not about separating what is traditionally seen as English from Science or HASS or the Arts or PE. The aim of all learning areas is understanding of the subject.

So, rather than thinking about comprehension strategies first start with the question "Why is this learning important?"

Consider content (concepts, understanding and skills), then consider the texts that will help support the development of the content knowledge. Finally think about your students and the support that they will need to be able to access those texts.

What text structures and features might students need to be explicitly taught?

What vocabulary (Tier 2 academic and 3 content- specific) will students need to know and how will I teach it?

What skills and strategies will students need to employ in order to understand this text?

How can we best help students meaningfully interact with text to deepen comprehension?
(2) Teach micro-skills as well as whole text comprehension

Comprehension instruction has traditionally focused on comprehension of chunks of texts, if not whole texts. The attention is now being drawn to those comprehension micro-skills that developing readers need to develop a better mental model as they are reading. The micro-skills focus on the sentence level.

Understanding that sentences have particular structures is important to reading comprehension

Anaphors - part of the text that takes it meaning from another part of the text (pronoun - noun connection, ellipses)

Connectives (temporal, causal, contrastive and continuant)

Syntactic Awareness - the meaning behind word order and function, phrase and clause structure and the role of punctuation.

Comprehension of texts also relies on the reader being able to make " gap filling inferences." Writers do not include all the information needed to understand a text. For example, the sentence "Alex looked out the window then searched for her coat." relies on the reader to infer that Alex is about to go outside for some reason, looks out of the window to check the weather, sees that it is cold or windy and decides that she will need her coat.

When teaching these skills explicitly, use authentic texts to find relevant examples. Explicitly teach through modelled reading / think-alouds and shared reading before guided and independent practice.

Here are some examples from a draft English / Science shared reading and writing unit currently being trialed. Take note that teaching syntax and sentence structure is more effective when connected to writing.

Butterflies are flying bugs.

They live on trees.

They live in grassy places.

Butterflies like to be warm.

Anaphora (pronoun - noun connection). What does "they" refer to?

How can we combine the sentences into one or two sentences using connectives (and more scientific vocabulary)?

Butterflies are flying insects that live in trees and in grassy places.

Using connectives to show meaning and relationships

Butterflies cannot live in very cold places because

Butterflies cannot live in very cold places but

Butterflies cannot live in very cold places so

Refer to " The Reading Comprehension Blueprint " by Nancy Hennessy and " The Writing Revolution " by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler for more information and ideas. (NB: these books are available from many sites. I have no affiliation with any book sellers!)

(3) Think about what to teach and when

When we consider all the elements that impact on comprehension, it can become overwhelming. In order to focus your instruction go back to the curriculum. When writing learning intentions consider how students will be assessed and what evidence you will need to collect. The Achievement Standards (or similar) of the curriculum need to be clearly understood in terms of the skills and knowledge required. In this example I have used the Australian Curriculum.

The National Literacy Learning Progressions can help narrow your focus but be wary of teaching these skills in a decontextualised way. Use the curriculum and the progressions as a resource to determine what to focus on within your content rich teaching sequence.

The ultimate goal of strategy instruction is not the strategy itself but the comprehension of texts through the flexible use of a variety of relevant strategies.

The following example details a lesson plan based on these curriculum outcomes:

(4) Don't be afraid of strategy instruction - but be wary of decontextualising it!

Strategy instruction has become a hot topic recently, particularly as a result of Natalie Wexlers's assessment, that the teaching of reading comprehension has become narrowly constricted to practicing a growing set of disconnected skills. Her recommendation is to focus on knowledge and vocabulary building and reject the practising of comprehension skills.

When we look back at the original research , knowledge-building and research-informed cognitive strategy instruction went hand in hand. These studies focused on the cognitive strategies that led to improved comprehension. This was also backed up a meta-analysis of over two hundred studies for the National Reading Panel Report in 2000. The studies took place over a relatively short time with positive results but, unfortunately the idea that "if a little bit is good, a lot must be better" took hold. Strategy instruction is best practised in a relatively short time, with some strategy revisiting as text demands become more complex.

Remember that the aim of strategy instruction is for readers to have a toolkit of strategies to draw from when meaning breaks down. Strategy instruction is a means to an end, that being the comprehension of the text.

The transition from promising research into the classroom practice often involves over- simplification along with a plethora of ready resources from eager publishers. Over time, educators were led to mistakenly believe that practising skills such as finding the main idea or inferring would lead to better outcomes. These skills were mostly practised out of context with no explicit instruction.

Effective comprehension strategy instruction involves teachers modelling through a "think aloud" how to read and understand a text. This process enables students to understand how a good reader thinks while they are reading - opening the "black box" to reveal how a reader develops a mental model.

Strategies that have been determined to have a high effect size include inferring meaning, summarising and synthesising, developing questioning strategies, using graphic and semantic organisers and monitoring comprehension and identifying and resolving difficulties.

However, each of these strategies also require a range of cognitive processes to occur:
Comprehension Strategy
Inferring meaning

Understanding what an inference is

Understanding that prediction and inference are different but share some commonalities

Connecting background knowledge (schema) to information from the text

Determining the validity of an inference

Monitoring and adjusting inferences as more information is learned

Summarising and synthesising

Understanding the purpose of the task (what to summarise)

Determining importance - of the information relevant to the task

Sifting key ideas and relevant / irrelevant details

Collecting and evaluating information from a range of sources

Determining how to present a summary relevant to the task

Developing questioning strategies

Knowing what a question is

Understanding different question types and their purpose

Knowing how to answer different question types

Locating relevant information

Generating relevant questions

Using graphic and semantic organisers

Monitoring comprehension and identifying and resolving difficulties

Knowing when you have lost meaning and locating where

Determining why (vocabulary, semantics, content knowledge etc.)

Drawing from a range of cognitive strategies to resolve the difficulty

It can also be helpful to look at the curriculum expectations to determine which strategies to focus on.

(5) Teach explicitly through the Gradual Release of Responsibility model

The Gradual Release of Responsibility is a model designed to teach students skills and strategies that they have not yet mastered. The model brings back the "teach" into teaching and positions the teacher as an expert. It's sometimes called the apprenticeship model.

Most teachers are competent readers themselves and are unaware of the cognitive processes they are employing to understand a text. Because the strategies have become automatised, it is sometimes difficult to think about what we are actually doing when we read.
When planning to introduce a new strategy to students, it is important to consider the following

Locate an appropriate text which provides several opportunities to highlight the particular skill or strategy you wish to make explicit

Scan the text for relevant teaching opportunities

Read the text, highlighting with sticky notes where you might stop and "think aloud"

Select a few pertinent examples. There is no need to stop and articulate your thinking on every page.

Write a script - determine what you will say and how you will connect your thinking to the text. Write the script in first person using I statements

A think aloud might feel quite unnatural at first, but it is a very powerful strategy when done right.

Revisit the strategy with the same, or another text, inviting students to share their thoughts and ideas. Reinforce full sentence answers using scaffolds such as sentence stems if needed.

Consider revisiting and reinforcing the strategy during small group guided practice. This approach is effective for fluent readers but may be cognitive overload for emergent readers who should be focusing on decoding.

Cooperative structures such as Reciprocal Reading and Literature circle can be useful, but only after students have been explicitly taught the strategies required in these approaches.

When students are reading independently, it can be helpful for accountability purposes for students to record aspects of their thinking e.g. record three inferences citing evidence from the text and your own thinking, use a graphic organiser to summarise the text, write three questions about the text for someone else to answer.

I DO, YOU WATCH Reading & Comprehension Modelled Reading
Teacher reads aloud to students whilst modelling and articulating effective reading and comprehension strategies. The teacher articulates the purpose of the read aloud, names the strategy and explains that effective readers use the strategy when they are reading. During the read aloud, students are required to listen to the teacher "thinking aloud" as they read the text.

The teacher talks out loud about what they are thinking as they read the words and the illustrations in a text. The thinking is articulated out loud in the first person (using I).

When I look at the cover of this book, I am predicting..... I am thinking that because (evidence from the text)...... When I just read that bit, I am starting to infer ......because...
I DO, YOU HELP Shared Reading
Shared reading involves a simliar process to modelled reading, except that students are invited to share their own thinking at strategic points in the text.

The turn and talk strategy is very effective for this purpose as all students have an opportunity to participate. Model and reinforce the appropriate language to use.

Building an anchor chart with students helps them remember the strategy and anchors their thinking back to the lesson when they are required to use the strategy independently.
YOU DO, I SUPPORT Guided Practice
During guided practice, teachers explain the purpose of the lesson and can model the focus strategy during the book introduction as a reminder to students.

As students read the text, the teacher listens to the student read aloud. At strategic points in the text, the teacher may ask the student to think aloud (articulate their thinking using the focus strategy). A prompt card or bookmark can be used as a scaffold.
YOU DO, I WATCH Peer Collaboration
Students may work together in pairs or small groups to read and articulate their thinking out loud. For example, after a modelled reading students could "turn and talk" with a partner to explain their thinking about a text - "I infer that the wolf won't blow the house down because in the picture I can see that he looks angry. I think that's because he can't blow the bricks down."

During Literature Circles, students could take on roles and be scaffolded to explain their thinking along with evidence from the text. "When I read ........I made a text to text connection because......."

As students read independently, they should begin to automatically use the comprehension skills and strategies. In order to bring metacognitive thinking to the surface, teachers can require that students record 3 or 4 examples of their thinking. Scaffolds and sticky notes can be used to keep evidence for assessment.

An exploration of the various teaching approaches encompassed within Pearson and Gallagher's (1983) Gradual Release of Responsibility framework can be watched here.

In summary

DO integrate comprehension instruction into rich knowledge based units

DON'T teach comprehension using an isolated, decontextualised skills based approach

DO teach language comprehension from the early years through rich shared texts

DON'T wait to consider comprehension until students can decode

DO explicitly teachquestioning skills and strategies and focus on student generated questions

DON'T think that questioning students is teaching comprehension - it is assessing comprehension

DO use the gradual release of responsibility to model think-alouds and show students what a good reader does metacognitively whilst reading

DON'T expect students to go from explanation to independence

DO teach micro and macro comprehension skills

DON'T ignore word level comprehension (vocabulary) or sentence level comprehension syntax and semantics

DO remember that the ultimate goal of comprehension instruction is understanding the text

DON'T forget that some students seem to automatically develop a range of comprehension strategies but some students will need to be expicitly taught strategies in order to have a repertoire to draw from

Debbie Draper is an educational consultant specialising in the science of reading and writing. Debbie has held many roles in the educational field including over 20 years classroom teaching as well as leadership roles at site, partnership and state levels. Debbie has worked at state level supporting the implementation of the SHIP (Students with High Intellectual Potential) focus school programme and co-developed and delivered a teacher training programme nationally and internationally.

Debbie has held district and regional roles implementing literacy, numeracy and Australian Curriculum initiatives. Whilst working in Northern Adelaide, South Australia, Debbie was instrumental in developing a 4-year professional learning strategy that led to significant improvements in student outcomes in comprehension. She currently enjoys a role working with sites in a private capacity empowering teachers to enrich their reading and writing pedagogy.

Comprehension References and Resources

Cain, K. & Oakhill, J.V. (1999). Inference making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children. Reading and Writing, 11(5) , 489

Duke Nell K., Ward Alessandra E., P. Pearson David (2021) The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction in The Reading Teacher Vol. 74 No. 6 May/June 2021

Hennessy, Nancy Lewis (2021) The reading Comprehension Blueprint: Helping Students Make Meaning from Text

Hruby, George G. Grounding Reading Comprehension in the Neuroscience Literatures Utah State University

(PDF) Grounding Reading Comprehension in the Neuroscience Literatures | George Hruby - Academia.edu

McNamara, Danielle S (editor) (2007) Reading Comprehension Strategies Theories, Interventions, and Technologies

Oakhill, J., Cain, K., & Elbro, C. (2015). Understanding and teaching reading comprehension: A handbook. New York: Routledge.

, Natalie(2020) The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America's broken education system--and how to fix it

, Natalie(2022) 'What Works' in Reading Comprehension-And What Doesn't https://www.forbes.com/sites/nataliewexler/2022/04/09/what-works-in-reading-comprehension-and-what-doesnt/?sh=5e36581f4e26
Teaching Literacy Podcast
https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/episode-05-comprehension-ci-theory-and-practice-with-dr-d-ray-reutzel/
https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/episode-06-comprehension-ci-theory-and-practice-part-2-with-dr-d-ray-reutzel/
https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/reading-comprehension-research-schema-simple-view-of-reading-and-the-rope-comprehension-instruction-part-1-3/
https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/reading-comprehension-construction-integration-and-common-core/
(This episode explores Kintsch's Construction Integration model)

https://teachingliteracypodcast.com/comprehension-strategies-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

(This episode explores how strategy instruction is a key component of many classrooms, and what does research indicate about its effectiveness?)
Evidence into Action https://evidenceintoaction.podbean.com/e/ep-4-exploring-the-complexities-of-reading-comprehension/
https://evidenceintoaction.podbean.com/e/ep-11-teaching-reading-the-reading-comprehension-house/
Amplify - science-of-reading-the-podcast
https://amplify.com/science-of-reading-the-podcast/

Season 2, Episode 7. Research, comprehension, and content-rich literacy instruction: Sonia Cabell

Season 3, Episode 1. Deconstructing the Rope: An introduction with Dr. Jane Oakhill

Season 3, Episode 6. Deconstructing the Rope: Background knowledge with Susan Neuman

Season 3, Episode 9. Deconstructing the Rope: Vocabulary with Nancy Hennessy

Season 3, Episode 8. Deconstructing the Rope: Language comprehension with Sonia Cabell

Season 3, Episode 10.Deconstructing the Rope: Language structures with Kate Cain

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5 Ways to: Improve Comprehension Instruction - Think Forward Educators

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Over the coming weeks, Think Forward Educators will be posting a series of blog articles written by educational experts providing ready-to-use tips on how to implement the Science of Reading into the classroom. Inspired by Tom Sherrington's Five Ways Collection, the posts have been edited and curate

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8. The Reading Brain | How We Learn To Read

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8. The Reading Brain | How We Learn To Read

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The Reading Brain | How We Learn To Read

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40 a. Science of reading or snake oil? (video)

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40 a. Science of reading or snake oil? (video)

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Science Or Snake Oil: How to Tell the Difference

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40 b. Science of reading or snake oil? How to tell the difference (resources)

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40 b. Science of reading or snake oil? How to tell the difference (resources)

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The science of reading has become a powerful movement, and program developers and publishers have taken note. In an effort to hold onto their share of the market, many have claimed to have incorporated science into their programs. Unfortunately, a new label on a package doesn't necessarily indicate there's a better product inside. As contradictory claims are made, how can educators know who and what to believe?

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Science or Snake Oil | UF Literacy Institute

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The science of reading has become a powerful movement, and program developers and publishers have taken note. In an effort to hold onto their share of the market, many have claimed to have incorporated science into their programs. Unfortunately, a new label on a package doesn't necessarily indicate there's a better product inside.

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14. Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies (HELPS) - Reading Fluency Program

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14. Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies (HELPS) - Reading Fluency Program

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Helping Early Literacy with Practice Strategies (HELPS) One-on-One | Helps Education Fund

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On This Page: Teachers and reading researchers generally agree that essential components of early elementary reading instruction should target phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension…

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57. Shared Reading in the Structured Literacy Era

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57. Shared Reading in the Structured Literacy Era

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Shared Reading in the Structured Literacy Era | Shanahan on Literacy

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This blog explains why reading to children is not a particularly effective way of teaching reading, but that teacher reading can be a good tool for supporting certain kinds of instruction.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

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If you prefer, read the text version of the infographic or watch the video that takes a closer look at how to spot questionable or ineffective practices.

Avoid a Lemon: Looking Under the Hood

Supporting Resources

Sound-Spelling Chart

Make-a-Word activity from FCRR

Route to Reading For Families: Avoid a Lemon

You and the school can share literacy resources to help your child and others get evidence-based literacy instruction. Learn to spot questionable or ineffective practices.

Decoding Words

What is it?

The ability to figure out unknown words correctly.

If you are given:

Strategies that encourage your child to look away from letters to read words (looking at the pictures, using context clues, saying the first sound and guessing).

Ask for:

Ways to help your child use knowledge of letter-sound relationships* to read words.

Why?

Kids who can't decode often don't become strong readers. Reading words correctly require knowing how letters and groups of letters link to sounds to form letter-sound relationships.

Learning Sight Words (like high-frequency words)

What is it?

The ability to know a word instantly and easily, including ones spelled regularly or irregularly.

If you are given:

Strategies, tips, or activities focusing your child on memorizing whole words to learn sight words.

Ask for:

Strategies, tips, or activities focusing your child on saying and using letter-sound relationships* and letter order to learn sight words (irregular word parts and advanced letter-sound relationships are taught to be remembered).

Why?

Sight word learning is not based on visual memory. It requires knowing speech sounds, letter-sound relationships, and letter order. There are too many
words to learn by memory alone.

Spelling Words

What is it?

The ability to write words correctly.

If you are given:

Strategies, tips, or activities focusing your child on memorizing letters or letter shapes to spell words (word searches, tracing words, rainbow writing).

Ask for:

Strategies, tips, or activities focusing your child on saying and using letter-sound relationships* and the right letter order to spell words.

Why?

Spelling is not based on visual memory. It requires knowing speech sounds, letter-sound relationships, and letter order.

*Based on skills appropriate for your child's grade-level and literacy needs

Suggested Citation

National Center on Improving Literacy (2019). Route to Reading: Avoid a Lemon. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy. Retrieved from http://improvingliteracy.org.

Abstract

You and the school can share literacy resources to help your child and others get evidence-based literacy instruction. Learn to spot questionable or ineffective practices.

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If you prefer, read the text version of the infographic or watch the video that takes a closer look at how to spot questionable or ineffective practices. Avoid a Lemon: Looking Under the Hood Supporting Resources Sound-Spelling Chart Make-a-Word activity from FCRR Route to Reading For Families: Avoid a Lemon You and the school can share literacy resources to help your child and others get evidence-based literacy instruction.

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68. Reading 101: A Guide to Teaching Reading and Writing

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68. Reading 101: A Guide to Teaching Reading and Writing

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Reading 101: Self-Paced Learning Modules

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Core knowledge about reading is a key to effective literacy instruction. Our free, self-paced learning modules can help you deepen your understanding of the building blocks of reading and writing.

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51. Comprehension Instruction That Really Helps – Teaching Cohesion

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51. Comprehension Instruction That Really Helps – Teaching Cohesion

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Comprehension Instruction That Really Helps – Teaching Cohesion | Shanahan on Literacy

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This essay explains that it is possible to improve students’ reading comprehension through explicit instruction in language and how it works. In this case, explicit instruction in cohesion and the inferences required by those ties.

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51. UFLI Lesson Resources (alphabet, phonemic awareness, phonics, morphology)

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51. UFLI Lesson Resources (alphabet, phonemic awareness, phonics, morphology)

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Lesson Resources

The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

Some of the companion lesson resources you will find below include:

Lesson slide decks (in PowerPoint and Google Slide formats)

Decodable passages

Homework sheets

Games and activities for additional practice

We have grouped the lessons into smaller units so you can access these resources more easily. Scroll down to use the buttons below to find the resources for each lesson or groups of lessons.

Please note that we are still building out these free resources, and we will be editing this page over the next few weeks. We wanted you to be able to access some materials as soon as possible, but be sure to come back later to see the rest!
New to UFLI Foundations? Learn about its development, check out a sample lesson plan, view the scope and sequence, and more.

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The UFLI Foundations Toolbox contains all the lesson resources to accompany the lesson plans provided in the UFLI Foundations manual. (Don't have a manual yet? Click here to order one) Every lesson has companion resources that will help you implement the lessons efficiently, effectively, and consistently.