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Phinder | A Resource for Phonics Lessons

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This is a free website that allows teachers and researchers to find words that match certain letter-sound patterns. Teachers can create word lists for phonics lessons, and researchers can find words for word recognition research.

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Reading Simplified | streamlined instruction, accelerated achievement

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Set for Variability: A Reading Strategy You Might Not Know About | Reading Simplified

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Expert Dr. Marnie Ginsberg describes Set for Variability, a reading strategy that's often overlooked. Learn the science behind it and why you should be using it.

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Orthographic Mapping for Reading and Spelling

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Orthographic Mapping for Reading and Spelling

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Neither Orthographic Mapping , Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping nor its inverse Grapheme to Phoneme Mapping are the same as learning words by memorizing their shapes - a practice frequently employed "to help" children retain sight word s without referring to the phoneme-grapheme properties of the word. Research has shown that proficient readers do not automatically go from images of words to their meanings.

For decades, Dr. Linnea Ehri's research has helped us understand the psychological processes and the sources of reading and spelling difficulty. Her studies have underscored the importance of beginning readers acquiring knowledge of our alphabetic writing system. Her research on how readers use their knowledge of phoneme-grapheme connections (as well as grapheme-phoneme connections) to retain sight words in memory has contributed greatly to the science of teaching reading.

Reading words can take several forms. Readers may use decoding, predicting, or analogy to read unfamiliar words. However, familiar words are accessed in memory which is commonly referred to as sight word reading. With practice, all words can eventually be read automatically by sight - the most efficient, unobtrusive way to read words in running text. (Ehri, 2005). However, this process involves making connections between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letter/s) or vice versa to bond the spelling of these words to their pronunciations and meanings in memory.

Dr. Linnea Ehri's research regarding the Development of sight word reading: Phases and Findings (2005) helped lay the groundwork for understanding how children remember words. She found that being able to access words from memory (by sight) is extremely valuable because it allows readers to focus their attention on constructing the meaning of the text while their eyes automatically recognize individual words. Ehri characterized the development of sight word learning through a sequence of four overlapping phases that she distinguished by the type of alphabetic knowledge needed to form connections in the brain. She concluded that skilled reading is the ability to read individual words accurately and quickly as well as in isolation and within connected text.

Professor Stanislaus Dehaene, a French neuroscientist and author of Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (2010) further acknowledged the brain's contribution to learning to read. His research revealed that the brain has areas that are shared between spoken and written language and they are present in your brain when you are very young - even before you learn to read. He also noted that reading involves creating an interface between the vision system in your brain and your spoken language system. "An entire series of mental and cerebral operations must occur before a word can be decoded. Our brain takes each string apart then recomposes it into a hierarchy of letters, bigrams, syllables and morphemes. Effortless reading simply serves to show that these decomposition and recomposition stages have become entirely automatic and unconscious." (Dehaene, 2010) His findings have been supported by neuroimaging and eye tracking research that demonstrated how skilled readers process every single letter of the printed word from left to right and in parallel so quickly and automatically that it is even unnoticeable to the reader. He further concludes that "Whole-word reading is a myth" since "the brain processes every single letter and does not look at the whole word shape."

Dr. Ehri published " Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learnin g" in 2014. According to her theory and evidence, she concluded that "spellings of words are retained in memory when their letters become bonded to phonemes and syllables in their pronunciations. Many practitioners have limited their definition of sight words to high-frequency or irregularly spelled words. However, Ehri notes "all words when practiced become read from memory by sight." (2014) Orthographic mapping occurs in the brain while reading specific words when readers form connections between written units and spoken units. These can be either phonemes, syllables or morphemes in speech or single graphemes or larger spelling patterns in print. These connections are then stored in memory with their word meanings and enable readers to recognize the words by sight. As the spellings of words enter memory via orthographic memory, they also influence the phonological processing of words, phonological memory and vocabulary.

In Dr. David Kilpatrick's book, Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (2019), he described orthographic mapping as "the mental process we use to permanently store words for immediate, effortless retrieval". It allows us to take an unfamiliar printed word and turn it into an immediately recognizable word. However, this is not the same as memorizing the way a word "looks". With OM, our brain simultaneously processes the letters we see with our eyes and the sounds we hear in the word so they are stored together in the brain. Dr. Kilpatrick writes that "Orthographic Mapping is not a skill, teaching technique or activity you can do with students." However, phonemic awareness and phonics skills can be taught which greatly facilitate the brain's orthographic mapping of the word. (Kilpatrick, 2019)

In my recent exchange with Dr. Ehri, she expressed that, "Teaching children to decode is teaching them orthographic mapping. Teaching them to analyze grapheme-phoneme relationships within [words] to determine how the spellings of words map onto their pronunciations is orthographic mapping. Teaching children to remember the spellings of words by remembering how phonemes are represented by graphemes within the word is orthographic mapping." (Ehri, 2022)

It is much easier to remember something if it is connected to something you already know. Since we learn to speak long before we learn to read, students frequently already know a word's pronunciation and meaning through listening and speaking activities which help to store them in long term memory. Dr. Kilpatrick notes, "Orthographic mapping proposes that we use the pronunciations of words that are already stored in long-term memory as the anchoring points for the orthographic sequences (letters) used to represent those pronunciations." Therefore, a written word is turned into a sight word through orthographic mapping by attaching the sounds (phonemes) in the word's pronunciation to the word's letter sequence (grapheme(s) that have been stored in the brain. For this to occur, the word needs to be split into its individual phonemes so strong phonemic awareness skills are extremely important.

Learning to read is key to a child's success in achieving skilled reading. The accrual of written words in memory is ongoing and orthographic mapping processes underlie the development of a student's skill in reading words accurately and automatically from memory. Alphabetic knowledge is essential to connect spellings to pronunciations and for retaining sight words in memory. This is an internal process that is spontaneously activated when we see, hear or orally produce words. Therefore, it is crucial we teach students the knowledge and skills they need to ensure these essential connections are activated when they see or read words.

Orthographic Mapping in the brain is facilitated by the following:

1. Proficient phonemic awareness or the ability to segment spoken words into their smallest sounds (or phonemes) and to blend the phonemes into recognizable words.

2. Automatic letter-sound correspondences or the mastery of the major letter-sound relationships that comprise the writing system. By understanding the relationship of the letters in the alphabet to the sounds they produce, children are better able to decode unfamiliar words by sounding out letters and blending them to form words. By forming connections between individual graphemes in the spelling of specific words and their respective phonemes in pronunciation and vice versa, children are better able to store sight words in memory via the process of orthographic mapping.

3. An understanding of the alphabetic principle or the knowledge that letter or groups of letters (grapheme/s) match individual sounds (phonemes) in words and there may not always be a one to one correspondence between the sound(s) you hear and the letter(s) you write. .

It is imperative that early learners acquire a practical knowledge of phoneme/grapheme and grapheme/phoneme correspondences and recognize it is a bidirectional process that has become unitized and can be applied to both decoding and spelling. (Ehri, 2022) This helps learners develop an accumulation of words they can read fluently via phonological recoding which allows them to later transfer this information about known words to help decode unknown words. By connecting the sounds (phonemes) in oral words to the letter/s (grapheme/s) in written words, children are able to lock the words in memory via orthographic mapping for fast, efficient retrieval in the future.

The attached diagram depicts the role of orthographic mapping (OM) in learning to read and spell. It also demonstrates how the processes of phoneme-grapheme mapping and its inverse (grapheme-phoneme mapping) are essential facilitators of OM in the brain so children can more effectively retain these relationships for more automatic retrieval of words during reading, spelling and vocabulary tasks.

An effective word study program is essential to help students make connections between what they hear and what they see or write so they can be orthographically mapped in the brain. Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping and its reciprocal process of grapheme-phoneme mapping are effective methods for facilitating these important connections. Ultimately, this enables a child to read and spell individual words accurately and quickly so they can better retrieve them in isolation and within connected text.

Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping (Grace 1983) is an effective word study program that incorporates both phoneme/grapheme and grapheme/phoneme correspondences. It also facilitates Orthographic Mapping - the brain process that enables students to form connections between what they hear and what they see in print so they can retain it in memory for easier retrieval. Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping (PGM) is also a sequential, systematic, multi-sensory process that helps students better understand the alphabetic principle - that is the number of sounds they hear in a word may be different from the number of letter/s (grapheme/s) that represent those sounds. PGM also supports the development of automaticity and fluency in both reading and spelling and helps children visualize the connections between the two. By mapping sounds to print via Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping, students acquire a metacognitive approach to decoding, spelling, and reading connected text.
References:
Dehaene, S. (2010). Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. New York: Penguin Books.

Ehri, L. (1984). "How Orthography alters spoken language competencies in children learning to read and spell". In J. Downing & R. Valtin (Eds.), Language awareness and learning to read (pp. 119-147). New York, NY: Springer Verlag.

Ehri, L. (1987). "Learning to read and spell words". Journal of Reading Behavior, 14, 5-31.

Ehri, L. (1992). "Re-conceptualizing the development of sight word reading and its relationship to recoding."

Ehri, L. (1998). "Grapheme-phoneme knowledge is essential for learning to read words in English". I

Ehri, L. (2005a) "Development of sight word reading: Phases and findings". In M. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), the science of reading: A handbook (pp. 135-154). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Ehri (2014) "Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary" Learning, Scientific Studies of Reading, 18:1, 5-21, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2013.819356

Ehri (2022). Upon review of Kathryn Grace's article, "The Role of Orthographic Mapping and Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping in Learning to Read and Spell"

Kilpatrick, D. A. (2016). Equipped for reading success: A comprehensive, step-by-step program for developing phonemic awareness and fluent word recognition. Syracuse, NY: Casey & Kirsch Publishers.

Peltier, Tiffany (2021). "Dr. Linnea Ehri's List of Instructional Guidelines for Enhancing Orthographic Mapping and Word Learning". Understanding the Science of Reading blog https://understandingreading.home.blog/2021/04/18/dr-linnea-ehris-list-of-instructional-guidelines-for-enhancing-orthographic-mapping-and-word-learning/

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The Role of Orthographic Mapping in Learning to Read and Spell - Phoneme-GraphemeMapping.com

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"Orthographic mapping is a brain activity that involves parts of the brain connecting graphemes and phonemes within words." (Ehri 2022) Orthographic maps are set up in the brain when decoding and spelling activities are performed.

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What is 'Set for Variability' and how do we develop this reading strategy? - Phonic Books

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Set for Variability is a cognitive flip that we do when we mispronounce a new word, and we need to try a different pronunciation to fit in that word. A classic example is when a learner reads the word 'head' as 'heed'. They are misapplying their phonic knowledge to this word.

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How Children Learn to Read- The Science of Reading by Sound

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How Children Learn to Read- The Science of Reading by Sound

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Editor's note: Usually our blog posts are only about 2,000 or so words. This month's guest post is much lengthier - but we feel it's worth it! Grab a cuppa and get comfy, as our guest writer, Marnie Ginsberg, gives a longer but very easy-to-follow overview of the science behind how children learn to read.
Imagine the confusion of neurologists in China in the 30s who were caring for a businessman who suffered a severe stroke. This man was bilingual in Chinese and English, yet after the stroke, he was no longer able to read...Chinese.
However, he could still read English!
What could explain the loss of reading in one language, but not another?

Reading researcher Maryann Wolf details this story in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story of Science of the Reading Brain, as she reveals that this seeming mystery is quite understandable-given what we now know from brain imaging.

First, a little bit of background: The Chinese written language is a logographic language, meaning that Chinese characters represent words or smaller units of meaning.

English, on the other hand, is an alphabetic language, meaning that English characters, or letters, represent sounds in words. Letters themselves do not represent meaningful words.

How does this relate to the stroke victim who could read English but no longer Chinese?

This is where it gets interesting, in light of the vast numbers of studies of the last 100+ years on how children learn to read!

Alphabetic languages, such as English, Spanish, and Greek, rely mostly on the left hemisphere of the brain to read words. Chinese, in contrast, also utilises much of the right hemisphere of the brain as well in order to translate the picture-like logographs into meaningful words.

It is likely the businessman suffered a stroke on his right posterior hemisphere, but not his left. Thus, Chinese reading was lost, but English reading was retained.

What does this story of a Chinese businessman, brain hemispheres, and modern imaging have to do with how children learn to read English?

Reading by Sound

Common sense tells us that we read by sight. That learning to read is mostly a visual process, right?

Indeed, good adult readers recognise words by sight so rapidly that they recognise words faster than even letter names. As a result of this accomplishment of our adult reading abilities, a lot of confusion has settled in the land about how we read and how we should teach reading. However, when we only look at what we can observe on the outside (of the brain) and at what we do as mature readers, we miss the real story of how our reading brain develops-at least for alphabetic languages such as English.

Thousands of brain imaging, psychological, and other types of reading research studies have built a mountain of evidence to demonstrate that young readers of alphabetic languages learn to read via sound. Yes, of course, our eyes and visual system are involved. But the heavy lifting in cracking our written code-learning how to convert letters on the page into sounds in words that make meaningful words-is done by our sound processing system, or phonological system.

This blog post will explain the most compelling, and well-researched theory of how learners acquire the ability to read English words. It's not just what we "see" on the surface!

How the Brain Learns to Read Words

There are many brains which 'get by' in learning to read in English, but these readers struggle as they rely on parts of their brains that are poorly adapted (the right hemisphere, like our Chinese businessman who also read a logographic script) to meet the needs of an alphabetic writing system. Instead, I am going to look at brains that are efficient and accurate at learning to read in an alphabetic system. In the English reading world, there are different types of reading brains, but only one type of brain is highly successful at reading in an alphabetic system.

We'll examine how to build that type of brain.

When readers like them of all ages receive training on how to read like successful readers, they do learn to read well and their brain changes! ( See this research example). This is good news for readers who struggle!

Let's travel along with a hypothetical five-year-old, Jonah, as he goes about becoming a reader.

Jonah has already spent the first five years of his life learning much of the English language and he's good at both listening and speaking (for his age). This has been accomplished through many one-on-one conversational turns between his primary caregivers and him. He also learned more advanced words through listening along to storybooks.

This pivotal oral language experience and skill, however, has given him marginal benefit at knowing how to translate specifically the 26 letters of our alphabet into meaningful words that make up sentences and meaningful lines of thought. In other words, if his teacher reads to aloud him Dr. Seuss' famous The Cat and the Hat , Jonah has no trouble understanding, or comprehending, just what havoc the cat caused for poor Sally and her brother that one rainy day.

On the other hand, if Jonah's teacher hands him The Cat and the Hat without having read it to him previously, he is stumped.

He has learned several letter-sounds so he recognises some of the squiggles on the page as having to do with letters and sounds. But he can't yet translate, or decode, any of them into words that make sense to him.

How can he take a word like 'sun' or 'shine' and decode those letter strings into meaningful words and concepts?

The 3 Ingredients for Beginning Word Acquisition

Given age appropriate oral language abilities, Jonah requires three new key ingredients in order to begin to translate the letters in 'sun' into the meaningful word itself. He needs to develop:

a concept of the alphabetic principle,

letter-sound (or phonics) knowledge.

The Concept of the Alphabetic Principle

The concept of the alphabetic principle means that our written language is a code for sounds. For example the 's' represents the /s/ in 'sun'. Similarly, the 'i_e' represents the /ie/ sound in 'shine'.

This insight of the alphabetic principle isn't self-evident to non-readers. Some beginning readers think long words are for words like 'snake' because snakes are long. Others create other curious explanations for how to attack, or decode, unfamiliar words. It's the adult readers job to reveal to the child how our code works.

If a child has never seen a door get unlocked, how will giving her the key to the lock help unless you reveal to her how the lock works? Similarly, advanced readers in the child's life need to reveal how our written code works. How the words are lifted from the page. Very few children deduce how our written language works on their own.

Helping the young child discover the alphabetic principle can be quite simple. Here's one way: just drag a pencil or finger along the letter-sounds in a word as you drag out the sounds in the word, like below.

At this point, Jonah, indeed, may not be "reading." He may just be repeating the word he heard the adult speak aloud. However, he's beginning to understand how our code works....The squiggles on the page are a code for sounds in words; that's the alphabetic principle.

It's an "aha!" that every beginning reader should be taught. The two skills that follow help the alphabetic principle move beyond just a concept to rapid facility with decoding-the alphabetic principle in action.

Watch this short example of a young student in one of her first encounters with the alphabetic principle. As she goes through this word building activity, she'll also be gaining knowledge in the 2 upcoming ingredients: letter-sound knowledge (phonics) and phonemic awareness.

Letter-Sound, or Phonics, Knowledge and the Reading Wars

The second much-needed skill is letter-sound knowledge. Jonah needs to know that when he sees the letter 's', he's likely going to say "/s/". Not "/m/". Not "/oy/". Not "sit".

This information is also called phonics knowledge. For instance, in The Cat and the Hat's first sentence, Jonah will need to learn various phonics information, such as:

In order to know that 'shine' consists of the sounds /sh/ /ie/ /n/, Jonah will need to deconstruct 'shine'. He'll need to convert 'sh' into /sh/ and the other letter combinations (or graphemes) into their relevant sounds (or phonemes).

To move from beginning reader to advanced reader, Jonah will need to learn which phonemes are tied to over 240 graphemes, such 't,' 'm,' 'er', 'oa', 'ck', or 'gn'.
Much more than just the 26 alphabet sounds, right?
It IS a lot to learn in the early years of learning to read, and it's made more complicated by the fact that some graphemes can represent more than one phoneme (i.e., 'ow' = /oa/ or /ow/ in 'snow' or 'cow').

But that's not all!

Many phonemes represent more than one grapheme, as in the /oa/ sound: 'go', 'home', 'show', 'boat', 'toe', etc. Learning these grapheme-phoneme correspondences takes practice reading and doing word work activities, which is why computerised games that teach all of these phonics spellings, such as Phonics Hero, can be so beneficial (get access to the free resources with Phonics Hero Teacher Account or a 7-day trial as a parent).

Phonics Hero offers Jonah the possibility of fun while his brain makes links (paired-associate learning) between the 240+ graphemes he will need to learn in order to become a strong adult reader and recognise words like 'infantile', 'prevaricate', and 'gregariousness'.

If you're new to thinking about how children learn to read, you may not be aware that the reading education field has been susceptible to philosophical debates that have become so heated as to be termed the "reading wars." These debates mostly center on the place of phonics instruction in a beginning readers' classroom.

Some (the "phonics" side) claim that phonics information needs to be explicitly and systematically taught. Others (the "whole word" or "whole language" side) purport that this information is better deduced through the reading of authentic texts and whole word learning. A more recent version of the whole-word line of thought emphasises that reading instruction which centers on levelled texts, contextual guessing, understanding of the whole text, and occasional phonics lessons, will result in better outcomes.

These arguments have fuelled little good and mostly chaos for classroom teachers and, even worse, low performance for those students most in need of systematic phonics instruction. [See, for instance, over 60% of U.S. fourth-graders are not proficient according to federal assessments.]

The winds are turning, however.

The evidence-base on the essential need for systematic phonics instruction has reached such a mountain's height that more and more leaders, teachers, and parents are aware of the research. Tellingly, the U.S. based International Literacy Association (ILA) has just released a nuanced position paper validating the importance of explicit and systematic phonics despite previously endorsing some leaders and texts that have historically thumbed their noses at the contemporary research base on how children learn to read words.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonemic Proficiency

Finally, the concept of the alphabetic principle and knowledge of phonics information are insufficient alone to learn to read words. The developing reader also needs to perceive the individual sounds in words; we call this oral language ability, phonemic awareness.

For instance, Jonah needs to be able to recognise that the word 'play' can be segmented into the sounds /p/ /l/ and /ay/. Or, he might be able to hear three segmented sounds, such as /w/ /e/ /t/ and blend those sounds together to hear the word, "wet." These are just two types of phonemic awareness. See this little girl demonstrate:

Phonemic awareness allows the child to utilise our written code. It's the engine that allows the phonics knowledge to be put into play.

When Jonah encounters the word, 'shine', he has to:

1. Recognise the individual spellings, 'sh' 'i_e' and 'n' for their respective sounds, but it also has to

2. Phonemically blend those sounds together to "hear" a real word -"shine."

Many young beginning readers cannot do this without support! They lack phonemic blending ability.

In addition, Jonah also needs to be able to quickly separate, or phonemically segment, the sounds in words. If he can perceive that 'sun' is three sounds: /s/ /u/ and /n/, he can connect each of those sounds to their respective spellings. He may already have memorised how to read and spell the word; he's cracked the code for the word 'sun'.

Phonemic blending and segmenting were emphasised in recent decades in research syntheses, such as the U.S. National Reading Panel Report and the so-nicknamed Rose Report from the U.K., as the main phonemic awareness vehicles to learning to decode. Indeed, they are essential.

But further research has revealed that one more phonemic awareness skill is still needed - phonemic manipulation.

Phonemic manipulation is the ability to add, delete, or change phonemes in words. For example, ask a beginning reader orally "what is 'slip' without the /l/ " and you'll likely receive little more than a blank stare. However, ask any skilled 4th-grade reader and they'll be able to do the task easily.

This higher level phonemic awareness skill is harder than blending and segmenting and is a better predictor of reading achievement than just blending segmenting. David Kilpatrick makes the case that phonemic proficiency - rather than phonemic awareness - better describes the skill that sets apart the strong from the weaker reader. "Proficiency" draws out the concept of speed of processing, which appears to be essential for both decoding and automatic word identification.

How does playing around with sounds in words relate to decoding and word learning?

All the mechanisms for why phonemic proficiency makes such a difference are not yet fleshed out by research, but here are two partial explanations. First, when Jonah encounters a word for the first time and he tries to decode it, he's likely to make an error in his first guess. However, if he deletes an attempted vowel sound and adds another option to test out another possible word, he's relying on advanced phonemic awareness skills (i.e., phonemic proficiency).

For example, take the word 'shine' again. Jonah may or may not have been explicitly taught the spelling pattern of 'i_e' for /ie/. Even if he had been taught it, he may not notice the 'e' at the end of the word when he first observes the 'i' spelling in 'shine'.

As a result, his first attempt to read 'shine' sounds like "shin", which is a reasonable choice if the 'e' ending is ignored. Have no fear, though.

Jonah is searching for meaning as he reads. He realises that, "The sun did not shin," makes no sense. He attempts to correct his mis-reading by dropping the /i/ sound in "shin" and replaces it with another common "i" sound -/ie/.

Now the word sounds like "shine" and that fits the sentence. He is pleased with his second attempt and moves on. Thus phonemic proficiency has served him well in his decoding process.

The Self-Teaching Theory of Word Learning

Jonah's reading of "shine" can be used to describe the theory of how word learning occurs - the self-teaching hypothesis (popularised by Share, 1995). Jonah's teacher or parent likely provided Jonah with the ingredients to be able to decode some words himself: the alphabetic principle, phonics knowledge, and phonemic awareness.

But Jonah deduced that 'i_e' must be /ie/ in 'shine'. Through attacking most of the word correctly but getting stuck with the vowel sound, he figured out the information he was lacking that must be needed to make a meaningful word in the sentence, "The sun did not shine."

In that "positive learning trial" (Jorm and Share, 1983), he may have learned consciously or subconsciously that 'i_e' is likely the sound /ie/. He may have also learned that 'shine' is the correct spelling of the word. He may have even learned a spelling pattern of the two sounds in 'ine' to more quickly read 'twine', 'mine','fine', or 'spine' in the future.

This spelling and reading-word-parts information may have become part of his orthographic learning. Orthographic learning, or orthographic mapping, is the correct knowledge of our spelling system: that the spelling 'i_e' is the /ie/ in 'shine' and 'like' and that 'whose' is spelled with a 'wh' 'o_e' and 's'. The reading brain "orthographically maps" the concept of 'wh' to 'whose' for future reference.

A typically developing reader can decode a word for the first time, such as 'shine' and recall the way it looks for automatic future reading with as few as one to four exposures of the word. Readers develop an abstract concept of the word and its interior parts so that they might recognise the same word in their very next exposure even if the word is written:

This process of decoding → orthographic mapping → automatic word recognition is not just a one-way street, however.

As the developing reader orthographically maps more and more words in our language, she develops deeper phonemic awareness. The very print itself fixes the abstract phoneme representations into a concrete visual form - letters! This helps explain how reading itself has been demonstrated to reciprocally interact with phonemic development. This bi-directional relationship between decoding and phonemic awareness is yet another explanation for why strong readers have phonemic proficiency. The act of reading accurately, and then orthographically mapping so many words and letter combinations, has developed their processing of sounds in words. The phonemes in words have become inextricably linked with print.

Thus, we've come full circle with phonemic awareness. A rudimentary amount of it is necessary to really understand the alphabetic principle and to begin to decode unfamiliar words. But correct reading itself also trains the reader in stronger and stronger phonemic awareness. This is the other route in which we understand that phonemic proficiency is developed as students move from beginning to advanced reading.

Good readers develop it through the process of accurately decoding words by sound. Poor readers who rely on mostly visual-only information to recall a word (in other words ignoring some or all of the phonetic cues in the spelling of the word) are not able to orthographically map the words in their brain. They don't have tight sound-symbol (or phoneme-grapheme) connections on which to hang the information they may have just read in a word.

A Test of the Self-Teaching Theory of Word Learning

Jonah is not the only one who is still learning to read words. Even you, mature reader, may be learning to recognise rapidly new words, such as new medical terms, foreign names, or high falutin vocabulary. 😉

Let's experiment with this, shall we? Try to read this text with some made-up words:

Did you deduce how to pronounce 'murks' and 'yez'? Did it take much time?

For most good readers, these words were likely phonologically decoded in very little time. Your brain quickly cracked the code on the spelling of "murks" and translated them into phonemes, to then be pronounced accurately.

You likely broke it down into...

....and blended them together and arrived at /merks/ as a reasonable pronunciation for 'murks'.

That's the process that a beginning reader goes through every time she reads an unknown word-the early words, such as 'pen' and the later words such as 'stupendous'.

Let's test your ability to do the same as Jonah, shall we?

Choose the correct word for the blank:

Which did you choose?

They are all viable spelling options for the sound /er/!

And, if you've just read this text one time through, you've only seen the proposed pronunciation for the 'ants' substitute 4 times in your entire life.

But, if you're a good reader, you probably can recall which spelling is the "correct" one:

How?

You didn't deduce it alone from sound-based cues. All the choices are reasonable options for the /er/ sound. The 'i' spelling is often the /er/ sound as in 'bird', 'shirt', 'skirt', 'girl', or 'quirky', for instance.

And, although less common, 'ear' is the /er/ sound in many common words, such as 'earth', 'learn' and 'earn'. (There are even several other possibilities for the /er/ sound.)

You likely chose 'murk' because your amazing brain had already orthographically mapped the /er/ sound to 'ur' and 'murk' as yet another letter string to tie to a specific group of sounds and a specific semantic concept (i.e., an ant).

Researchers have even tested how long this memory trace could last. At least 30 days! Possibly much, much more ( Share, 2004).

But this would have been much harder for you to orthographically map if you didn't have good code-cracking ability and speed (phonemic proficiency). OR, it would be harder if the word had no code, no logic, to cue you.

Consider, what if I had written this:

Would you remember after 5 minutes whether 'ants' was:

Without a meaningful code, and without a system for cracking it, you're left to process this new word with other systems of the brain. And that visual-only system has not proven able to allow readers to learn the 40 to 70 thousand words mature readers recognise at a glance.

Phonological decoding, or sound-based decoding, draws the reader's attention to the orthographic elements of each new word. I call it noticing the "inside parts" of words. That 'ur' is the /er/ sound we use in 'murks'.

You got it now, right? 😉

Orthographic learning is item-based, not stage-based. Even though you are likely capable of reading thousands of words, and might be considered at the most "advanced" stage of a reader, you still had to go through the same process to mentally pronounce 'murks' that any 5-year-old would have to do to pronounce 'bird'.

Are you not at an advanced stage of reading?

Certainly!

You didn't recognize 'murks' by sight because it was your first exposure. It was a new item in your mental orthographic system.

Whether we are a beginning or advanced reader, we're all pioneers on the frontier of learning new words, or new orthographic patterns - for our own reading brain.

Today may be the day that you learn, not only to read 'murks' but also:

Each novel word is a new item to be decoded. Yet another code to be cracked. And, within just a handful of exposures, that word will likely be orthographically encoded, able to be recognised and pronounced in a split second. But perhaps you may have to check with a dictionary if you don't know how to pronounce the above words.

Reading by Sound and Sight

Now we've journeyed from China to analysing Jonah's process of reading simple words such as 'sun' and 'shine'. Hopefully, you understand a bit better the route that Jonah takes to move from beginner reader, who slowly decodes one word at a time, to that of an advanced reader who can recognise in milliseconds, literally, thousands upon thousands of words.

The brain's amazing system for learning to read words takes Jonah from matching sound (phoneme) to symbol (grapheme) over and over again till the words become memorised (orthographically mapped). Words that are easily recognized. Now they are read by sight in the blink of an eye.

The Self-Teaching Theory helps explain a number of confusing issues in the teaching of reading and reading research. For example, how can it be that research so convincingly demonstrates that students benefit from being taught phonics information explicitly AND children rapidly learn way more phonics information than they could possibly be explicitly taught?

In Kindergarten or Year One, the average child might know 25-100 words. By first grade perhaps they can read about 500-600. By fourth grade, the number has jumped to 4,000. By 12th grade, a good reader may know as many as 30,000 to 70,000. That's exponential growth.

Could teachers have explicitly taught (and students learned) that many spellings and words? Over 18 words a day if one assumes 40,000 words by the end of high school. It is hard to imagine that many words could be covered, and learned, through explicit teaching in school.

No worries. A better understanding of how children learn to read is that they benefit from a sufficient amount of:

1. Insight about the code

2. Letter-sound (phonics) knowledge

3. Phonemic awareness

Bundle that together with accurate reading practice, and many students will begin to infer more and more about our code and learn more and more spellings and words...on their own.
How can this happen with all the unexpected spellings that we have in English?

1. That 'certain' and 'curtain' aren't the same word.

2. That 'pteranodon' starts with a /t/.

3. That 'gh' in 'ghost' is /g/.

4. That 'February' is pronounced /feb yoo air ee/.

The good reader's brain adjusts to the occasional quirk because she's drawing from her sound decoding brain and her meaning making brain. She hits upon a word and within a few exposures she has bound those sounds and symbols together. And that work helps not only with the word at hand, but also with other spelling patterns and words in words she'll uncover in the future.

Share explains it this way:

Because neither contextual guessing nor direct instruction, in and of themselves, are likely to contribute substantially to printed word learning, the ability to translate printed words independently into their spoken equivalents assumes a central role in reading acquisition. According to the self-teaching hypothesis, each successful decoding encounter with an unfamiliar word provides an opportunity to acquire the word-specific orthographic information that is the foundation of skilled word recognition. A relatively small number of (successful) exposures appear to be sufficient for acquiring orthographic representations, both for adult skilled readers (Brooks, 1977) and young children (Manis, 1985; Reitsma, 1983a, 1983b). In this way, phonological recoding ["decoding"] acts as a self-teaching mechanism or built-in teacher enabling a child to independently develop both (word)-specific and general orthographic knowledge. Although it may not be crucial in skilled word recognition, phonological recoding may be the principal means by which the reader attains word reading proficiency..."
(1995, p. 155).

Most of those who struggle with this process often don't have:

1. An instructional environment that points out clearly enough how our code works

2. The necessary initial phonics information pieces

3. Teaching in developing phonemic awareness.

Better dissemination of the what research suggests about how to teach reading would likely dramatically change reading achievement for upwards of 50% of children in English-speaking countries.

A smaller minority of learners can have good instruction in these three key word-learning instructional elements and still struggle with learning to read. They may have weaker abilities in the phonemic processing domain. They may also have weaker abilities to make orthographic representations with just a few exposures. This type of reader could be identified as "dyslexic" and benefit from more intensive instruction and practice in learning about the code. But that brings us to a topic for another day.

How Children Learn to Read - What Does This Mean for Instruction?

In describing the process that the good reader undergoes in order to become a fluent reader, I didn't discuss many specifics for instruction itself. The above is more a description of the processes that a developing reader's brain goes through. There are actually many instructional routes that would provide these key ingredients for good word reading acquisition.

But research has given us a nearly slam-dunk case on the critical features that we should look for when we consider reading instruction:

Does the instruction make the alphabetic principle clear?

Does the instruction help the student learn and apply essential phonics information?

Does the instruction develop advanced phonemic proficiency, in concert with print?

Does the child have sufficient amount of accurate word reading practice in order to orthographically map thousands of words?

Ideally, these key features of instruction are present for the child from the beginning of her reading journey so that she gets an early, strong start to reading. Then she'll be much more likely to enjoy reading, read more, and continue to develop her reading comprehension through a lifetime of wide reading (Stanovich, 1986).

If one or several of these important elements are missing, most children will struggle to become fluent. Consider these four elements for your child or your class of students and ensure that all ingredients are in the mix.

Finally, I leave you with a test - do you remember how to spell our made-up word for 'ants'?

To explore the Phonics Hero resources, sign up for a Teacher Account or Parent Account. To learn about how children learn to read with Marnie, visit Reading Simplified.

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How Children Learn to Read - the Science of Reading by Sound | Phonics Hero

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As adults it 'feels' like we learn to read by sight, but how children learn to read is a lot more complex. We explain the science.

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By Robyn Monaghan

The Reading League Illinois recently ran a session with Dr Elizabeth Norton titled " RAN and the Reading Brain". For anyone interested in early intervention and helping children at high risk of reading difficulties this is a must-see - we've even linked the video below, so there's no excuse! 😜 I recommend listening to the end as many common questions about RAN are answered during her Q&A.

I've pulled together some key points from Dr Norton's presentation which are included below. I'll finish by saying while this presentation focuses on what RAN is, the discussion around how best to support weak RAN is a discussion for another day!

What are RAN tasks?

RAN stands for Rapid Automatised Naming. RAN tasks are like a mini-version of the cognitive and linguistic processes involved in reading.

Just like text in a book, a RAN task is presented as an array of items in rows. Only about 5-7 items are used in the task and these items are distributed randomly across 4 or 5 rows with 10 items in each row. The items must be very familiar to the child, such as colours, objects, letters, or digits. If a child doesn't know letters or numbers well, then colours or objects can be named instead.

The objective of the RAN task is for the children to name the items in order as quickly and as accurately as they can while being timed.

Asking the child to perform the task as quickly as they can simulates the ability to recognise and say the items automatically or without conscious thought, similar to mature reading ability.

Time taken is the key measure as it helps us understand a little more about the reading process in the brain.

Why are RAN tasks important in screening for reading difficulty?

RAN tasks share many common processes with reading, such as attention, visual recognition, integration, and retrieval processes.

The RAN task can be viewed as a microcosm of reading, like a surrogate for the reading process in the brain. RAN tasks therefore provide a small but revealing window into a child's reading potential and can be used to screen children as young as 4 years for possible struggles learning to read.

By adding RAN tasks to early screeners, professionals can better identify children at risk of dyslexia and understand the nature and extent of their difficulties. This insight helps us choose appropriate intervention strategies that focus on orthographic mapping, automaticity and reading fluency.

Is RAN research in the Science of Reading?

Yes. Numerous studies have shown strong correlations between people with faster RAN and stronger reading ability. The relationship between RAN tasks and reading is also supported by neuroimaging studies. These studies have shown that similar areas of the brain are activated when mature readers perform RAN tasks and reading tasks. The same areas 'light up', indicating the commonalities between these two activities. When RAN tasks are performed slowly or hesitantly or with many errors, the child has a higher risk of reading difficulties and/or dyslexia.

Can RAN difficulties be helped by intervention?

Despite its diagnostic potential, RAN tasks are not, by themselves, a cure or solution to reading difficulties. At present, there is no known method to directly improve a child's RAN ability. The best approach for supporting children with slower RAN scores is to focus on enhancing their accuracy and automaticity in all other language and literacy areas in an effort to develop a well-connected reading circuit in the brain.

Strengthening all the connections in the child's reading circuit to progressively build their reading skills will help compensate for weak RAN. Understanding the need for carefully planned early intervention for children is vital, especially if weak RAN is accompanied by weak phonological awareness or weak language skills.

Wanting to check RAN?

If you're looking for a quick tool to check RAN, our informal CHIP Screener is a great place to start. CHIPS (Check How I Process) screens all four processing skills known to impact early reading which are: phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, phonological working memory, and RAN. From there you'll be able to make more informed decisions about why the child may be struggling and what intervention is best suited to their profile.

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A review of a recent presentation by Dr Elizabeth Norton By Robyn Monaghan The Reading League Illinois recently ran a session with Dr Elizabeth Norton titled "RAN and the Reading Brain".

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Dr. Linnea Ehri's List of Instructional Guidelines for Enhancing Orthographic Mapping and Word Learning

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Dr. Linnea Ehri's List of Instructional Guidelines for Enhancing Orthographic Mapping and Word Learning

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Dr. Linnea Ehri’s List of Instructional Guidelines for Enhancing Orthographic Mapping and Word Learning

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In a recent discussion with Dr. Linnea Ehri, she wrote up and sent over a document with instructional guidelines that follow from her theory of orthographic mapping and research studies. She gave p…

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Over the years, the Waseca Reading Program has become a standard in many Montessori classrooms. It is structured to provide a systematic and sequential presentation of the phonetic elements used in the English language.

The program uses a four-step approach: after you have introduced a phonetic element, the child uses the movable alphabet to spell, or encode, the word depicted on a picture card. Next, the child decodes the phonetic information by matching a picture card to its label. Then the child further practices decoding by reading the phonogram booklet and doing writing practice.

The picture cards use photographs to illustrate each word. Large print and color-coded highlighting emphasize the phonetic elements found in the word. The frame around the picture and the highlighting are color-coded for nine different phonetic groups. The groups cover the following:

Red focuses on three-letter phonetic words and isolates short vowel sounds

Orange focuses on blends: common beginning blends such as , , and blends; ending blends; and words with both beginning and ending blends

Aqua focuses on the silent e rule as applied to each vowel

Blue explores different phonograms used to make each long vowel sound

Gold explores less common phonetic rules, including spelling variations for the same sounds and hard and soft consonants

(3 to 9 years) Storage sold separately.

Item: 23WRP

584 Picture Cards (including Phonetic Element Cards)

497 Labels

84 Tyvek Phonogram Booklets

Masters for Writing Practice (cursive and print sets)

Updated Guide to Presentation*

Progress Charts*

* a vailable for download in our A-Z PDF library

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Over the years, the Waseca Reading Program has become a standard in many Montessori classrooms. It is structured to provide a systematic and sequential presentation of the phonetic elements used in the English language. The program uses a four-step approach: after you have introduced a phonetic element, the child uses

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Supported Reading in Text: Moving Rapidly from Decodable Books to Trade Books - Ebli Reads

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Once the foundation is firm, which can happen quite quickly with a speech first, Say Spell Read, Speech to Print approach to instruction, expanding student's supported and independent exposure to trade books and more complex text is critical to their further growth in reading.

Orthographic mapping, set for variability, statistical learning, and the self-teaching hypothesis all inform the importance of moving quickly to reading in text, supported and then independently, once a foundation of explicit instruction on decoding is in place.

Below are general explanations of the terms in the above paragraph. After you read them, you may be thinking...whaaat??? I certainly can relate! No need to worry; further along in the blog I will explain the terms in the perspective of how they are applied in reading instruction.
Orthographic Mapping
" Orthographic mapping is the process that all successful readers use to become fluent readers. Through orthographic mapping, students use the oral language processing part of their brain to map (connect) the sounds of words they already know (the phonemes) to the letters in a word (the spellings). They then permanently store the connected sounds and letters of words (along with their meaning) as instantly recognizable words, described as "sight vocabulary" or "sight words".

The Role of Orthographic Mapping in Learning to Read, Keys to Literacy, 2020
Set for Variability
"Set for variability is seen as a process that "cleans up" this mismatch between orthography to phonology conversion and word pronunciation. For example, a young reader may decode wasp to rhyme with clasp, however upon recognizing that / wæsp/ is not a real word, she must then flexibly apply different pronunciations for the letter a to arrive at the word, which is in her listening vocabulary."

The Role of Set for Variability in Irregular Word Reading: Word and Child Predictors in Typically Developing Readers and Students At-Risk for Reading Disabilities, NIH, National Library of Medicine, 2019
Statistical Learning
"Implicit methods that draw on the principles of SL (Statistical Learning) can supplement the much-needed explicit instruction that helps children learn to read. This synergy of methods has the potential to spark innovative practices in literacy instruction and remediation provided by educators and clinicians to support typical learners and those with developmental disabilities."

Reading as Statistical Learning, ASHA WIRE, 2018
Self-Teaching Hypothesis
The self-teaching hypothesis, proposed by David Share, is the idea that once learners have established their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and the essential process of segmenting and blending, they begin to apply this knowledge to new and novel words. Proficient decoders can do this because the reader is able to pay attention to the order and identity of letters and how they map onto the phonological representations, or spoken form of the word.

The Self Teaching Hypothesis, Five from Five

When it comes to choosing text for students to read, there is an abundance of discussion and perceptions around the types of books students can and should be reading. With EBLI, we accelerate the advancement of students into reading trade books, including students in Kindergarten. The research on the topics listed above supports this practice.

The anchor to make this possible is students having a sound foundation in matching sounds in words to the letter(s) that represent these sounds in print. This applies to both the basic and complex level of decoding. Basic level refers to deciphering words with 1 letter spellings representing sounds such as 'hop', 'slip', and 'strap'. Complex level refers to words that contain spellings represented by 2, 3, and 4 letters such as she, high, and thought as well as most multi-syllable words such as funny, hurry, and neighbor.

There are two common types of instructional approaches, both of which have differing types of books for students to read that expand on what is being taught.

Traditional phonics instruction encourages the use of decodable text that utilizes only words using spellings that have been explicitly taught. For example, if the class/student has been explicitly taught s, t, a, n, p, and i, they would read books with these types of sentences: 'Pat sat in a tin. Tim naps.'. This provides a lesson to text match though words to be used are limited. Often decodable text is used for several years of instruction.

Decodable book examples:

With EBLI, we solidly support using decodable books for the first several months of Kindergarten and for a small percentage of students initially who require remediation. However, because of the comprehensive, integrated, sounds-first instructional process used in EBLI, transitioning to reading trade books (books children get from the library or a bookstore) typically happens within weeks or, with emerging readers, sometimes months. Even when we do utilize decodable books, there is flexibility in using books with words that utilize spellings that have not yet been explicitly taught. See Marnie Ginsberg's Is There a Third Way? webinar for insights and information on this speech-first, Say, Spell, Read, linguistic phonics approach.

Balanced Literacy instruction advocates for the use of leveled books from the beginning of kindergarten and beyond. In the earliest levels, students are given books that contain a pattern that has a similar sentence structure and repeated words that are memorized, and requires relying on the picture to figure out the other words in the sentence. Because children at the beginning of Kindergarten would not know how to read camel, walk, or horse, they would require the picture cues or guessing as their main strategy to figure out what the words might be.

Level B example:

With EBLI, we strongly discourage the use of Levels A-D for beginning readers as they often result in students creating inefficient habits such as guessing and looking at the picture which lead to misreading. These habits are then difficult to reverse.

If students have been taught how to accurately decode words with simple and complex code, they are able to move to reading a wide variety of text. If leveled books (beyond level D) are available, books Level E or above can be used in supported and/or independent reading. The goal with EBLI is to move all children into trade books as quickly as possible. This prevents hindered learners by the limited word choice and vocabulary in decodable books. It circumvents students from being locked into levels that prevent them advancing and/ or from choosing text that they are interested in or want to read. Guessing, memorizing, or looking at pictures is avoided in all reading, regardless of the type of text.

When foundational instruction on deciphering the English Alphabetic code (decoding) is taught to students they have the foundation to be well on the road to accurate, automatic reading. It is at this point that implicit learning comes more into play.

Once a learner has had explicit instruction, this knowledge will expand through implicit learning. For example, if they've been explicitly taught beam and teach by matching the sounds in the words to the spellings, those words become orthographically mapped (they can read them automatically without needing to sound them out), they will use that information and apply it to other words with the same pattern such as treat, beach, and please.

With explicit instruction in phoneme manipulation (deleting a sound and replacing it with a different sound) and that the same spelling can represent many sounds: ea represents the sound /ee/ in team, /ai/ in great, /e/ in head, they will be able to implicitly apply this to other words and use set for variability to correct when a sound is misread in a word from their vocabulary. For example, if the word 'great' is read as 'greet' in a sentence such as 'You are great', they will have the skill and knowledge to remove the /ee/ sound and replace it with /ai/, possibly with support at first but typically without prompting.

Statistical learning takes place subconsciously, after and in conjunction with explicit instruction. As Mark Seidenberg says in his book Language at the Speed of Sight, "Explicit instruction and conscious effort are the visible tip of the iceberg; statistical learning is the mass below the surface."(pg 87). When learners are provided with solid, explicit instruction that starts with speech and includes the skills and concepts unique to the code used for reading and spelling, students will automatically expand on this information through statistical learning and self-teaching. At this point, a significant decrease in explicit instruction is needed and instead, more reading in text is what will accelerate reading.

Thanks to the above researched facets on how the brain learns to read, students do not need to be confined to controlled text, either decodable or leveled, and the majority of their learning - expanding their phonological, phonic, vocabulary, morphology, and background knowledge - will happen 'under the surface' or intrinsically.

To hear expanded information on this topic and what it looks like to scaffold instruction that quickly leads to accurate, automatic reading in trade books, check out the Supported Reading in Text free companion webinar to this blog.

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Supported Reading in Text: Moving Rapidly from Decodable Books to Trade Books - Ebli Reads

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How long should students continue reading decodable books? Do they need leveled books? When and how can they move to getting a book from the library or store, advancing to reading whatever they want? The importance of reading in connected text is critical to improving reading.

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It is estimated that approximately 3-10% of children experience significant and persistent word reading difficulties, depending on the individual characteristics of the students and the quality of instruction in each school. However, despite decades of research devoted to reading, there are still many unknowns about the underlying processes involved in word reading development in children and more specifically, the factors that lead to significant word reading difficulty like that experienced by people with dyslexia and other reading disabilities.

Led by principal investigator Dr. Laura Steacy, associate professor of special education and research faculty at the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR), and co-principal investigator and FCRR research faculty Dr. Ashley Edwards, Project FLEX seeks to explore the skills associated with early word reading.

Dr. Ashley Edwards (left) and Dr. Laura Steacy (right)

The project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, will allow Steacy and Edwards to assess a wide variety of young children with different levels of reading skills, ultimately furthering the understanding of reading development.

There is broad consensus among researchers that phonemic awareness, the ability to identify the sounds in words, and phonemic decoding, the ability to connect letters to the sounds they represent, are important underlying factors that support early word reading mastery. There is a growing body of evidence however that supports the theory that there are broader factors associated with successfully learning to read words. Steacy and Edwards hypothesize that a deeper understanding of the broader factors associated with word reading development is critical for advancing developmental word reading theory and the discovery of new predictors of early word reading development that can help to improve on current inaccuracies in the early identification and treatment of individuals who are at risk for word reading difficulties.

Recent studies of grade 2-5 readers suggest that the successful development of word reading skills is related to a child's ability to successfully problem solve the inconsistent letter/sound relationships that frequently occur in English (e.g., pronouncing move vs. love). This ability is referred to as a reader's "set for variability" and is measured using a mispronunciation correction task that requires students to go from the decoded form of a word (e.g., wasp rhyming with clasp) to the word's correct pronunciation. Currently, it is unknown whether set for variability is an important precursor to skilled word reading or a consequence of exposure to text and instruction.

"Developing a deeper understanding of how set for variability is related to early reading development may help us to better identify students at risk for word reading disabilities such as dyslexia. Since current measures do not perfectly predict dyslexia, this additional predictor may lead to better identification practices," states Steacy.

To better understand the skills associated with early word reading, Steacy and Edwards will explore how set for variability and word reading develop together. Additionally, they will explore how well set for variability can be used as an identifier of risk for early word reading difficulties by examining how set for variability performance at the fall of kindergarten contributes to the prediction of word reading at the end of grade 1. Using early kindergarten predictors, Steacy and Edwards will also evaluate the importance of set for variability in predicting the risk of word reading difficulties at the end of grade 1. The findings from this study will help highlight the skills involved in learning to read and inform our understanding of reading development.

Edwards also sees this work as critical for the early identification and treatment of children who are at-risk for struggling to learn to read. "Given the strong correlations between set for variability and word reading, the addition of set for variability to a screening battery may be what is needed to provide adequate screening accuracy for those at risk for word reading difficulties and dyslexia, allowing teachers to intervene earlier for these at-risk students."

Learn more at https://fcrr.org/projects/project-flex.

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New Study Aims to Understand Skills Associated with Early Word Reading

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It is estimated that approximately 3-10% of children experience significant and persistent word reading difficulties, depending on the individual characteristics of the students and the quality of instruction in each school.

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Abstract

Quasiregular orthographies such as English contain substantial ambiguities between orthography and phonology that force developing readers to acquire flexibility during decoding of unfamiliar words, a skill referred to as a "set for variability" (SfV). The ease with which a child can disambiguate the mismatch between the decoded form of a word and its actual lexical phonological form has been operationalized using the SfV mispronunciation task (e.g., the word wasp is pronounced to rhyme with clasp [i.e., /wæsp/] and the child must recognize the actual pronunciation of the word to be /wɒsp/). SfV has been shown to be a significant predictor of word reading variance. However, little is known about the relative strength of SfV as a predictor of word reading compared to other well-established predictors or the strength of this relationship in children with dyslexia. To address these questions, we administered the SfV task to a sample of grade 2-5 children (N=489) along with other reading related measures. SfV accounted for 15% unique variance in word reading above and beyond other predictors, whereas phonological awareness (PA) accounted for only 1%. Dominance analysis indicated SfV is the most powerful predictor, demonstrating complete statistical dominance over other variables including PA. Quantile regression revealed SfV is a stronger predictor at lower levels of reading skill, indicating it may be an important predictor in students with dyslexia. Results suggest that SfV is a powerful and potentially highly sensitive predictor of early reading difficulties and, therefore, may be important for early identification and treatment of dyslexia.

License

CC-By Attribution 4.0 International

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Set for Variability as a Critical Predictor of Word Reading: Potential Implications for Early Identification and Treatment of Dyslexia

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Quasiregular orthographies such as English contain substantial ambiguities between orthography and phonology that force developing readers to acquire flexibility during decoding of unfamiliar words, a skill referred to as a "set for variability" (SfV).

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This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases. See our disclosure policy.

Learn all about the three sounds of suffix -ed, including the rules for when each sound is used within base words. Then grab yourself a free printable poster that will reinforce the rules for correctly pronouncing -ed sound words!

All About Suffix -ED

When you add the suffix -ed to a regular verb, it makes the word past tense. Thankfully, the spelling of past tense -ed is simple enough, so students learn to add the letters - ed to make the verb past tense.

However, pronunciation can be tricky! That's why these spelling rules need to be explicitly taught.

Depending on the base word, we have rules for correctly pronouncing the word. If children learn the rules, they can know how to pronounce the word correctly.

Voiced vs. Voiceless

In order for students to learn these rules, they first need to be familiar with the terms 'voiced' and 'voiceless' sounds.

🗣 Voiced means the vocal cords are turned on.

An easy way to check to see a sound is voiced is to say the sound with your hands on your vocal cords. If you feel the vocal cords vibrating, then the sound is voiced.

Voiced sounds include: a, e, i, o, u, b, d, g, j, l, m, n, r, v, w, y, z, th (the).

👤 Voiceless means that the vocal cords are not turned on and only air comes out when saying the letter sound.

Unvoiced sounds include: f, h, k, p, s, t, x, qu, ch, sh, th (with)

3 Sounds of -ED

Suffix -ed can make three sounds: /ed/ /d/ and /t/. Students should learn the rules for each pronunciation.

Why teach these rules? Learning the -ed rules will help children read words correctly with proper pronunciation, and knowing the rules will also help with spelling.

Often times children may hear a /t/ or /d/ at the end of a past tense verb, so when they attempt to spell the word they add the letter t or the letter d. Knowing that suffix -ed can say all three sounds will help kids to spell words correctly.

1. /ed/

Rule: The /ed/ sound comes after the letter t or d at the end of the base word.

Examples: listed, ended, landed, chatted, twisted, tilted, acted, rented.

2. /d/

Rule: The /d/ sound is made when the final sound of the base word is voiced.

Examples: filmed, grilled, banged, smiled, saved, yelled, raised, sailed.

3. /t/

Rule: The /t/ sound is made when the final sound of the base word is unvoiced.

Examples: masked, hushed, jumped, fished, skipped, asked, kicked.

📃 3 Sounds of -ED Poster

Grab this fun, bright poster that clearly outlines the three ways to pronounce suffix -ed, along with the rules and examples.

👌 Tip: Print on poster-size paper and hang as an anchor for your students. You can also print it on regular paper and staple it inside your student's phonics notebook as a personal reference.

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3 Sounds of Suffix -ED + Free Printable Rules Poster

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Learn the 3 sounds that suffix -ed make, including the rules for when each sound is used within base words. Then grab your free poster!

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This webpage provides an overview of morphology and how to explicitly teach it to support learning.

Hurry, J., Nunes, T., Bryant, P., Pretzlik, U., Parker, M., Curno, T. & Midgely, L. (2005). Transforming research on morphology into teacher practice . Research papers in education , 20(2), 187-206.

This article discusses the importance of transforming the research about the benefits of teaching morphology into teacher practice, and how this might be done most effectively.

This blog article explains aspects of morphology and provides practical ideas on how to teach students about word parts and their meanings.

This research paper provides information about how morphology can be integrated into reading and writing instruction, and provides clarity on how oral and written morpheme instruction supports students to develop their reading and spelling.

This PDF contains ideas for morphology activities, including printable worksheets.

Moats, L. (2020). Speech to print: language essentials for teachers (3rd ed.). Baltimore, Maryland: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

This key text on explicit high-quality literacy instruction includes information on teaching the morphological aspects of words.

Australian Curriculum links

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The Word Matrix:  Pregnant with Possibilities

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STEP Ahead Teaching School Hub have made a recording of the webinar available - click here - the password is: tra.

STEP Ahead Teaching School Hub have made a recording of the webinar available - click here - the password is: tra.

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"From decoding to automaticity - the missing link" - The Reading Ape webinar recording.

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STEP Ahead Teaching School Hub have made a recording of the webinar available - click here - the password is: tra.

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List of Free Decodables

The short vowels skill explainer has everything you need to teach this, including lesson plans, student practice activities, and videos of great classroom instruction.

Review of All Patterns Previously Taught

One-Syllable Magic 'e' (also known as Silent 'e') Words

Related Content

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Reading Universe | Free Decodable Texts for Each Phonics Skill

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Decodable texts are simple passages or books made for beginning readers that offer practice with specific phonics patterns.

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Tami Reis-Frankfort, one of the founders of Phonic Books has been thinking of how to organise a complex Alphabetic Code.
***

The English Alphabetic Code is complex. How can we help children learn a code that has 176+ spellings for 44 sounds that uses only 26 letters of the alphabet?

If we understand the alphabetic code as a writing system that is used to represent sounds in words, then we can narrow down the categories to only 44 sounds (this depends on one's accent). We can organise all the spellings in the code by sound and this way we reduce that amount of learning by teaching words according to categories of sound. This is called a schema when a large body of knowledge is organised and categorised so that the learner can understand what the categories are and how they relate to one another. This is an effective way to build complex knowledge and store it in long term memory in an organised way so that we can find it when we need to retrieve it.

Here is a visual metaphor for the 'Chest of sounds':

We teach children that sounds can be spelled in different ways, and we bunch these spellings together. This is achieved by sorting activities. For example, when we teach children about the alternative spellings for the sound /ae/ - we will start with the more common spellings: ai, ay, a-e, ea and a and as they learn to decode more words we can add the less common spellings, e.g ey (as in 'prey').

Have a peek into the /ae/ drawer in the 'Chest of sounds' below!

This way children know that learning the Alphabetic Code is finite and as they progress, they are simply adding more knowledge onto what they have already learned. An efficient way to understand, connect the parts and store the knowledge of the Alphabetic Code!

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'Chest of sounds' - a useful visual metaphor for understanding the Alphabetic Code - Phonic Books

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Tami Reis-Frankfort, one of the founders of Phonic Books has been thinking of how to organise a complex Alphabetic Code. *** The English Alphabetic Code is complex. How can we help children learn a code that has 176+ spellings for 44 sounds that uses only 26 letters of the alphabet?

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If all the phonemes in English could be represented by one letter, teaching of reading and spelling would be simpler. It is essential that students move beyond simple single letter grapheme-phoneme correspondences and broaden their knowledge (see Moats, 1998).

Phonemes can be represented by more than one grapheme, for example a can be represented by a, ai, ay, ea, a-e, eight and a single grapheme can represent several phonemes. For example the ea grapheme can be used for three phonemes eat, steak, bread.

Explicitly teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences means teaching readers that some graphemes represent more than one phoneme (s/z and c/s, g/j), and a single phoneme can be represented by more than one grapheme (a, a-e, ai, ay, eigh, and so on). Students need to also understand that some graphemes choices are influenced by such things as its position in a word (oi / oy), (dge / ge), or the surrounding phonemes.

When early readers are encouraged to sound out words, they pair the sound of the word with its visual representation. This builds knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and 'legal and illegal' placement in English words. Eg; the gh in 'rough' represents the /f/ phoneme and it never appears at the beginning of a word.

Repeated exposure to the patterns of English using carefully selected decodable texts containing the targeted grapheme-phoneme correspondences is essential for building letter-sound skills for automatic recognition. Readers are gaining an understanding of English spelling patterns and fine tuning these each time they are exposed to text. Learners will need to practice hearing the words, seeing the words and writing the words for them to be permanently stored or 'mapped' and ready for automatic retrieval.

The program or pedagogy that you have in place at your school will determine how you approach reading and spelling. It should allow ample practice of letter-sound associations, build phonemic awareness to an advanced level, and provide opportunities for learners to match phonemes to graphemes in words for automatic retrieval.

Grouping words into lists that have clear and logical grapho-phonological relationships allows early learners to build and internalise important knowledge of English orthography.

Knowledge of spelling conventions including the split vowel digraph are helpful for creating a 'map' between oral phonemes and the letter sequences in a word. If you choose to use a term like silent-e or magic-e, the language used should be consistent across all grades so that students aren't confused by a variety of terms and approaches.

A knowledgeable teacher can help to simplify the learning of the English code. This helps students to quickly and efficiently grasp the patterns of the language and gives them resources for self-teaching to emerge once sufficient phoneme grapheme knowledge has been learned. Some students may work these patterns out for themselves, but many will require explicit teaching to crack the code.

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Spelling rules: Help or hinder learning to read - Five from Five

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To 'e' or not to 'e' - should you teach "bossy -e" and other spelling rules? Does your school use spelling rules to teach students about reading and spelling? Do spelling rules simplify or complicate the learning of English orthography? Teachers traditionally have relied on spelling rules to try to help learners to memorise words for rapid retrieval.

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You are welcome to print copies for non-commercial use, or a limited number for educational purposes, as long as credit is given to Reading Rockets and the author(s). For commercial use, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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Familiarity with Greek and Latin roots, as well as prefixes and suffixes, can help students understand the meaning of new words. This adapted article includes many of the most common examples.

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What is Phonics? Phonics is a method translating the 44+ sounds (phonemes) of spoken English to individual or groups of written letters (graphemes).

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Review Sight Words Made Easy - Ebli Reads

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Sight Words Made Easy by EBLI Do your students/child(ren) guess sight words or confuse words that look alike (i.e. of, off, for, from)? Do you want your learners to read faster and better understand what they read?

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One Sound, Different Spellings Sentences - Phonic Books

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English spelling is complex and one of the hardest things kids need to learn is that sounds in words (phonemes) can be spelled in different ways. Here are our FREE and fun phonic posters that show alternative spellings within a sentence. Each sentence focuses on one sound, e.g.

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Learning the Code by Barbara R. Foorman - The Reading Forum

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This chapter is about how English-speaking children learn to encode and decode their written language, that is, their alphabetic orthography. With the learning loss and growing achievement gap during the COVID-19 pandemic, this topic is highly significant in spite of decades of research and consensus reports documenting the compelling evidence for explicit and systematic teaching of the alphabetic code.

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Learning the Code by Barbara R. Foorman - The Reading Forum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This chapter is about how English-speaking children learn to encode and decode their written language, that is, their alphabetic orthography. With the learning loss and growing achievement gap during the COVID-19 pandemic, this topic is highly significant in spite of decades of research and consensus reports documenting the compelling evidence for explicit and systematic teaching of the alphabetic code.

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Children’s knowledge of letter names and shapes is a strong predictor of their success in learning to read. Knowing letter names is strongly related to children’s ability to remember the forms of written words and their ability to treat words as sequences of letters.

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Word Connections: Open Source Multisyllabic Word Decoding Instruction

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Word Connections: Open Source Multisyllabic Word Decoding Instruction

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This reading intervention was developed and tested by Dr. Jessica Toste and colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin. The program materials were redesigned for open access by the Toste Team in October 2022. We are excited for you to use the Word Connections program! We look forward to continued feedback from teachers and students.

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LANGUAGE! Live Curriculum Clips - LL_Module_0_500 History of English

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This is "LL_Module_0_500 History of English" by Cambium Learning Video on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

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Making Sense of Spelling- TED Talk Video

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Making Sense of Spelling- TED Talk Video

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Here are rules for playing and making your own phonics concentration game. It’s useful and fun for both new and remedial students. You can either make your own cards with 3 X 5 cards or print out the PDF files at the bottom of this page on cardstock. For the files at the bottom, print 3 each of the 1’s and 2’s for the “Concentration Game Back” file, 6 pages total. The lesson numbers are correlated to the free online phonics lessons numbers (The Phonics Page, or TPP) and Blend Phonics (BP) unit numbers.

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Impact of inefficient decoding on reading comprehension

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Impact of inefficient decoding on reading comprehension

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Learn Disabil Res Pract. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 Feb 1.

Published in final edited form as:

doi: 10.1111/ldrp.12024

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension. Participants in the study were first, second, and third graders, totaling 9 cohorts and over 425,000 participants in all. The pattern of results was consistent across all cohorts: Less than one percent of first- through third-grade students who scored as poor in reading comprehension were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Although poor reading comprehension certainly qualifies as a major problem rather than a myth, the term specific reading comprehension disability is a misnomer: Individuals with problems in reading comprehension that are not attributable to poor word recognition have comprehension problems that are general to language comprehension rather than specific to reading. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.

Keywords: reading comprehension, reading disability, specific language impairment

According to the most recently released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, poor reading comprehension is rampant in the United States. A basic level of proficiency is defined as having "partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade" ( NAEP, 2011, p. 6.). In the US, nearly one in every three fourth-grade students and one in four eighth-grade students is below even this basic level. Only about one out of three students score at the proficient or advanced levels at either grade.

Reading comprehension, which has been defined as gaining an understanding of written text through a process of extracting and constructing meaning ( RAND, 2002), is perhaps the one of the most essential academic skills ( Nash & Snowling, 2006; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Although difficulty in decoding the words on a page is a frequent cause of reading comprehension problems, between 10 and 15% of children experience poor comprehension despite maintaining normal levels of reading accuracy and fluency ( Stothard & Hulme, 1995; Yuill & Oakhill, 1991).

One explanation of poor reading comprehension despite normal levels of reading accuracy and fluency is provided by the simple view of reading ( Gough & Tumner, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990), which asserts that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and oral language comprehension skills. According to the simple view of reading, poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding would be attributed to a problem with oral language.

Relations between decoding, oral language, and reading comprehension have been extensively studied, with decoding and oral language explaining unique variance in reading comprehension (e.g., Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2009). For example, Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, and van den Broek (2008) investigated relations among inference-generation, language skills, vocabulary, and comprehension skills across different media (i.e., television, audio, and written modalities) in a longitudinal study of two cohorts of children 4 to 6 years old and 6 to 8 years old. Their findings indicated that inference-making skills generalized across different media and were highly correlated with reading comprehension; however, children's inference-making skills were inconsistently related to vocabulary and not at all related to other language skills-including word identification. These findings are consistent with other investigations ( Kendeou, Lynch, van den Broek, Espin, White, & Kremer, 2005) and suggest that although decoding and oral language skills are highly correlated with reading comprehension, their development is independent.

Reading comprehension disability, a term than has been used to describe readers who struggle with reading comprehension, has been operationally defined in at least four ways: (a) a discrepancy between reading comprehension and word-level decoding ( Nation & Snowling, 1998; Oakhill, Yuill, & Parkin, 1986), (b) discrepancies between reading comprehension and both decoding and chronological age ( Cain, 2003, 2006; Cain & Oakhill, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2011; Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004; Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000; Cain, Oakhill, Barnes, & Bryant, 2001; Oakhill, Hartt, & Samols, 2005; Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, & Holliday, 2008; Yuill & Oakhill, 1988); (c) a discrepancy between reading comprehension and decoding and the requirement that decoding be in the normal range ( Cataldo & Oakhill, 2000), or (d) just scoring below a given percentile on a measure of reading comprehension ( Locascio, Mahone, Eason, & Cutting, 2010; Sesma, Mahone, Levin, Eason, & Cutting, 2009).

Another way to characterize the landscape of reading problems is using a classification system for types of readers adapted from Catts, Adlof, and Weismer (2006). This classification system, which is presented in Table 1 , represents an application of the simple view of reading to reading problems. Adequate readers are characterized by good decoding and comprehension. Poor readers, sometimes referred to as garden-variety poor readers in the research literature ( Stanovich, 1988), are characterized by poor decoding and comprehension. Dyslexia or specific reading disability is characterized by poor decoding but with good comprehension. Specific comprehension disability is characterized by poor comprehension but with good decoding. Students who fall in the quadrant labeled specific comprehension disability were of primary interest in the present study.

Table 1

Good Decoding

Poor Decoding

Good Comprehension

Adequate Reader

Dyslexia (i.e., Specific
Reading Disability)

Poor Comprehension

Specific Comprehension
Disability

Poor Reader

Specifically, the goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension.

Three Competing Hypotheses of Reading Comprehension Disability

Hypothesis 1

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding have comprehension problems that are largely specific to reading. Support for this hypothesis comes from studies that reported minimal or no deficits in vocabulary for students with poor reading comprehension ( Cain, 2006; Nation, Cocksey, Taylor, & Bishop, 2010). One challenge for this hypothesis is that it is difficult to identify a theory of reading that would explain comprehension deficits that are specific only to reading comprehension, as opposed to also affecting oral language comprehension. Although it is conceivable that highly skilled readers such as experienced editors or proof-readers might rely on expertise that has been acquired over the years and is relatively domain specific (Wagner & Stanovich, 1986), this would not seem to be the case for school-age readers. Another difficulty faced by this hypothesis is the substantial body of evidence that individuals who are poor in reading comprehension have various deficits in oral language. We consider this evidence in discussing the second hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding have comprehension problems that are general to oral language comprehension rather than specific to reading. Support for this hypothesis comes from the extensive literature that reports poor performance on a wide variety of measures of oral language for students who are poor at reading comprehension ( Cain & Oakhill, 2006; Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006; Clark et al., 2010; Nation, Clarke, Marshall, & Durand, 2004; Nation & Norbury, 2005; Nation & Snowling, 1997, 1998, 2004; Nation, Snowling, & Clarke, 2007; Ricketts, Bishop, & Nation, 2008; Sesma et al., 2009; Snowling & Hulme, 2012; Stothard & Hulme, 1992, 1995). For example, Nation and Snowling (1997) reported that students with poor reading comprehension had difficulty answering questions about a passage regardless of whether there were asked to read the passage or the passage was read to them. The simple view of reading ( Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) provides a theoretical rationale for this hypothesis. It states that individual differences in reading comprehension are determined by the interaction of individual differences in word recognition and oral language comprehension.

Hypothesis 3

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding represent a mixture of students, many with comprehension problems that are general to oral language and reading but at least some with comprehension problems that are specific to reading. Support for the existence of students whose comprehension problems are general to oral language as well as reading comes from the literature just cited that describes poor performance on various oral language tasks for students with poor reading comprehension. Support for the possible existence of students whose comprehension problems are specific to reading comes from a study of students who were poor at reading comprehension by Catts et al. (2006). The sample from this study was taken from a larger epidemiologic study of language impairments in children ( Tomblin et al., 1997). This made it possible to determine what percentage of the students identified by Catts et al. for their poor reading comprehension met criteria for either specific language impairment (SLI) or nonspecific language impairment (NLI). Criteria for SLI required scoring more than 1.25 standard deviations below the mean on at least two of five language composite scores (vocabulary, grammar, narration, receptive language, expressive language); criteria for NLI added the requirement of a Performance IQ more than 1 standard deviation below the mean ( Tomblin et al., 1997). The results were that only a third of the sample of children with poor reading comprehension met criteria for either SLI or NLI. Similar rates of language impairment for children who were poor at reading comprehension were reported by Nation et al., (2004).

We are not aware of any previous study that is capable of distinguishing these three hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension. It is true that the overwhelming evidence of problems in oral language in children with poor reading comprehension pretty much rules out hypothesis one (i.e., their comprehension problems are specific to reading comprehension). But these studies, which either showed mean differences in oral language skills for students who were good or poor at reading comprehension, or correlations between oral language skills and reading comprehension, cannot distinguish hypotheses two (i.e., comprehension problems are general) and three (i.e., a mixture of general and reading-specific comprehension problems exists). A significant mean difference can be achieved either by a difference that occurs for all members of a sample, or by a difference that occurs for many but not all members of the sample. A significant correlation indicates a group relation between two variables, but does not rule out the existence of a sub-group for whom the overall correlation does not hold.

Being able to distinguish between these three hypotheses has practical implications. For example, if students with poor reading comprehension tend to have comprehension problems that are specific to reading (Hypothesis 1), classroom instruction and/or intervention for these students should focus more on remediating text-based reading skills (e.g., decoding) whereas if students with poor reading comprehension tend to have comprehension problems that are not specific to reading but general to oral language (Hypothesis 2), instruction and intervention would be better suited to target language skills (e.g., oral vocabulary) as opposed to skills that are more specific to text comprehension. In essence, distinguishing the core features of reading comprehension disability would provide teachers with a means of identifying which skills instruction and/or intervention practices should focus on to result in greater gains in student achievement. For students whose comprehension problems are general to reading and oral language, remediation should address language problems that are at a comparably general level. If there are students whose comprehension problems are specific to reading comprehension, a different approach to remediation would be required.

The present study used a large-scale database to address the question of the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension in first, second, and third grades. We approached the data with several specific questions in mind: (1) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension in first, second, and third grades? (2) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension yet maintain adequate levels of decoding? and (3) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension and adequate levels of decoding and who also have adequate vocabulary knowledge?

We first identified students who were poor at reading comprehension. Then we determined how many students who were poor at reading comprehension were at least adequate in decoding. Finally, we determined how many students with poor reading comprehension and at least adequate decoding were also at least adequate in the oral language skill of vocabulary. We did this at three grades because of the likelihood that the task of reading comprehension changes over the first few grades of formal schooling.

Method

Participants

Participants represented a cross-sectional study consisting of three cohorts (2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06 school years) of first (N = 143,672), second (N = 135,943), and third grade students (N = 144,815) attending Reading First schools in Florida. There were slightly more males (52 percent) than females (48 percent). The sample was diverse, with 41 percent white, 32 percent black, 21 percent Hispanic, 4 percent mixed, and 1 percent Hispanic. Approximately 75 percent of participants received free or reduced lunch, and 17 percent were identified as having limited English proficiency. The participants' data were obtained from the state of Florida's Progress Monitoring and Reporting Network (PMRN), which was created to monitor the performance of students in the state's Reading First schools. Reading First was a large, federally funded initiative designed to improve the reading performance of students in high-poverty kindergarten, second-, and third-grade classrooms who were at risk for reading problems. On average, Reading First schools also tended to have lower student achievement. Although the PMRN primarily consists of students from Reading First schools, a small number of non-Reading First schools that voluntarily reported their data were also included in the database.

Measures

The Stanford Achievement Test served as a general measure of comprehension and was administered to all participants across the three grades. Vocabulary knowledge was assessed for first and second graders using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Task; decoding was assessed using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. For third graders, the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test measured vocabulary and decoding skills.

Stanford Achievement Test - Reading Comprehension

The Stanford Achievement Test, Tenth Edition (SAT-10; Harcourt Educational Measurement, 2003) is a group-administered multiple-choice standardized assessment that measures critical reading components including reading comprehension. Reading comprehension was assessed by having students read passages and then answer multiple-choice questions about the passages. Passage questions emphasize a variety of skills, including initial understanding (i.e., explicit comprehension), interpretation (i.e., implicit comprehension), and critical analysis (i.e., a synthesis and evaluation of explicit and implicit information) ( Florida Department of Education, 2006). The SAT-10 has well-established psychometric properties ( Harcourt & Brace, 2004).

Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test - Receptive Vocabulary

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997) is an individually-administered test of receptive vocabulary. Participants were instructed to match a spoken word with one of four presented pictures. Alternate-form reliability exceeds .88 and criterion-related validity coefficients with reading range from .69 to .91 ( Williams & Wang, 1997).

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills -Nonsense Word Fluency

The Nonword Fluency (NWF) subtest of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills - Sixth Edition (DIBELS; Good & Kaminsky, 2002) is a set of 60 single-syllable pseudo-words (e.g., jav) with short vowel sounds. Examinees are asked to read them aloud, and their score was the number of correct pronunciations in a one-minute time interval. Alternate-form reliability exceeds .8 and criterion-related validity coefficients with reading range from .4 to .9 ( Speece et al., 2003; Good et al., 2004).

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test - Reading Vocabulary

The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test - Fourth Edition (GMRT-4; MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dreyer, 2000) is a group-administered standardized assessment that was used to measure reading vocabulary in the third grade sample. Participants were provided with a word embedded in text that was minimally suggestive as to not reveal meaning and were required to select the word or sentence that means the same as the test word. Kuder-Richardson reliability values are high for both forms of the assessment (K-R 20 = .91 - .96; MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dreyer, 2008).

Procedure

Trained school- and district-level assessment teams administered all measures, and no classroom teachers were involved in the assessment process. The assessments were administered during April and May, near the end of the school year.

Results and Discussion

A three-step procedure was used to analyze each cohort and grade. The first step was to identify students who were poor at reading comprehension according to the operational definition of scoring at or below the 5 th percentile on SAT-10 Reading Comprehension. The 5 th percentile was chosen to identify students with relatively severe problems in reading comprehension. The second step was to identify students who were poor at reading comprehension but adequate in decoding. The procedure we used for the second step was different for the third-grade cohorts compared to both the first- and second-grade cohorts. For first and second grade, identified students who were flagged in step one because of poor reading comprehension who also scored at or above the 25 th percentile on DIBELS NWF met the criterion for being poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding. The third and final step was to identify the students who were flagged in step 2 as poor at reading comprehension although adequate in decoding who also were adequate in vocabulary, as determined by scoring at or above the 25 th percentile on the PPVT. At third grade, Gates-MacGinitie Reading Vocabulary served the dual role of a measure of vocabulary and of decoding. Consequently, the second and third steps used for first and second grade were replaced by a single step in third grade of identifying students who were poor at reading comprehension yet who scored at or above the 25 th percentile on Reading Vocabulary.

We recognize that our choice of the 5 th and 25 th percentiles is somewhat arbitrary. We chose a lenient criterion (i.e., 25 th percentile) of adequate decoding and vocabulary to maximize our sensitivity to detect students who were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding and vocabulary. To determine the extent to which the pattern of results was sensitive to the specific percentiles used, we carried out analyses using other percentile ranks (e.g., poor reading comprehension defined by scoring at or below the 10 th percentile, and adequate decoding and vocabulary defined by scoring at or above the 40 th percentile). We found that the overall pattern of results was remarkably similar.

Results are presented in Table 2 . Across the three first-grade cohorts, roughly 3 to 5 percent of students met the criterion for having poor reading comprehension. This makes sense given that our criterion was scoring at or below the 5 th percentile. Less than 1 percent of first-grade students scored both below the 5 th percentile in reading comprehension and above the 25 th percentile in decoding. This indicates that decoding is an important limiting factor on reading comprehension in first grade. Finally, only approximately 0.1 percent of the sample was poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, a result that replicated across the three cohorts.

Table 2

First-Grade Students ( N = 143,671)

Yet Adequate Decoding and
Vocabulary

23 (0.07%)

69 (0.16%)

81 (0.13%)

Second-Grade Students ( N = 135,943)

Yet Adequate Decoding and
Vocabulary

72 (0.22%)

70 (0.17%)

93 (0.15%)

Third-Grade Students ( N = 144,815)

Yet Adequate Decoding and
Vocabulary

34 (0.09%)

137 (0.32%)

138 (0.21%)

For the three second-grade cohorts, there was one immediate difference in the results for second grade compared to first grade. Whereas nearly all first-grade students who were poor in reading comprehension were also poor in decoding, approximately half of the second-grade students who were poor at reading comprehension were adequate in decoding. However, when the additional criterion of being adequate in vocabulary was applied, the results were identical. Less than one percent of the sample was poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, and this result was replicated across the three cohorts.

Turning to third grade, because of the combined second and third steps required by the use of Reading Vocabulary as a measure of both vocabulary and decoding, we cannot separate students who are adequate in decoding from those who were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Again, the results were remarkably similar. Less than one percent of the sample was poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, and this result was replicated across the three cohorts.

We converted our percentages to proportions to calculate standard errors and then converted back to percentages. The purpose for doing so was to provide standard errors (i.e., estimates of how much variability would be expected over repeated random sampling from the same population) for our estimates of the percentage of readers who are poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Combining the three first-grade cohorts, only 0.12 percent of the sample was poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. The standard error was 0.01 percent, yielding a confidence interval from 0.11 to 0.13 percent. Comparable values for second and third grade were 0.17 (0.16-0.18) and 0.21 (0.20-0.22) percent respectively. Combining all grades and cohorts yielded an overall percentage of 0.17 (0.16-0.18).

General Discussion

The pattern of results was clear across nine cohorts and three grades, totaling more than 425,000 students in all. Well under one percent of first- through third-grade students were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at both decoding and vocabulary.

Returning to our three hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension, the results provide support for the hypothesis that the comprehension problem of early elementary students who are poor at reading comprehension tend to have deficits in oral language (i.e., vocabulary knowledge). The hypothesis that students with poor reading comprehension are a mix of individuals, some of whom have comprehension problems that result from limited oral language skills and others of whom have comprehension problems that are specific to reading, was not supported based on the fact that well below one percent of students who were poor at reading comprehension turned out to be adequate at both decoding and vocabulary.

Beginning in second grade, there is evidence of a mixture of different types of students with poor reading comprehension, but the mixture does not concern whether comprehension problems extend to both oral language and reading. Rather, the mixture is of students who are poor at reading comprehension and poor at decoding or poor at reading comprehension despite being adequate at decoding. This result is consistent with evidence from other studies that the transition from first to second grade is marked by a greater influence of oral language skills on reading comprehension ( Kim, Wagner, & Lopez, 2012).

Our results suggest that students with poor reading comprehension who are adequate decoders really have language comprehension problems in the form of poor vocabulary knowledge. We did not have other measures of oral language so we cannot determine whether the oral language problems of the students in our sample extended beyond vocabulary knowledge. However, evidence from other studies suggests that this might be the case. Catts et al. (2006) reported that one third of their students who were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding met eligibility criteria for language impairment. In addition, they indicated that students who did not meet eligibility for language impairment still had sub-clinical levels of poor language skills. In fact, their poor reading comprehension group scored at the 20 th percentile on vocabulary and at the 30 th percentile in grammatical understanding on average. Similar results were reported by Nation et al. (2004). Both Catts et al. and Nation et al. speculated that sub-clinical levels of language impairment, which they referred to as hidden language impairments because they do not meet typical eligibility criteria, could by themselves, or in combination with other processing deficits, play an important role in reading comprehension difficulties.

Cain and Oakhill (2009) reviewed the literature for three kinds of studies with causal implications about the origin of reading comprehension problems: comprehension-age matched comparison studies, training studies, and longitudinal correlational studies. They concluded that there is evidence for causal influences on reading comprehension for inference making, comprehension monitoring, and understanding story structures. It is unlikely that limitations in inference making, comprehension monitoring, or understanding story structure are specific to reading. Hulme and Snowling (2011) commented, "In our view, many of these other putative causes may reduce to basic limitations in oral language comprehension, which are the direct cause of these children's reading comprehension difficulties" (p. 141).

Our results are consistent with the simple view of reading ( Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) in that nearly all cases of poor reading comprehension were associated with inadequate decoding, oral language (i.e., vocabulary), or both. Our results also support Catt's et al.'s (2006) recommendation to use a framework based on the simple view (see Table 1 ) when assessing and intervening with poor readers. When assessing poor readers, it is important to target oral language and decoding in addition to reading connected text for meaning because students' poor reading comprehension scores alone are not sufficiently informative for the purposes of remediation. It would be important to identify how much of the poor reading comprehension is attributable to poor decoding and to poor oral language skills such as limited vocabulary knowledge.

It is also important to consider developmental differences. Because of the nature of early reading and early reading comprehension assessments, it is likely that students in first grade who are poor in reading comprehension will also be poor in word recognition. It also is the case that difficulty decoding the words on the page is a profound limitation on reading comprehension. However, it is important to assess oral language as well as decoding because although poor decoding may be a limiting factor on reading comprehension, unaddressed deficits in oral language skills for students who have them will limit their reading comprehension even if their decoding skills improve upon intervention. Given this, students with reading comprehension disability would benefit from interventions that incorporate components of reading fluency (i.e., activities requiring simultaneous decoding and text comprehension) ( NICHD, 2000) in addition to components of oral language like vocabulary, semantics, and syntactic understanding (i.e., grammar) ( Snow, Burns, & Griffith, 1998).

It is important to acknowledge several limitations of our study. The population from which our sample was drawn was from Reading First schools. These schools served a larger percentage of low SES students than typical public schools in the US. It is important to replicate this study with samples drawn from non-Reading First schools. Second, our measures were relatively brief and our measure of oral language comprehension was limited to receptive vocabulary. Third, comprehension abilities in the early grades (e.g., first grade) are often assessed using an oral-format as opposed to a written format as used in the present study (i.e., SAT-10) because with a text-based measure, it is difficult to determine whether students are doing poorly because they do not comprehend the passage or because they are unable to read the question. Further, it is important to replicate this study using a broader array or oral language skills to better determine the extensiveness of the oral language comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in decoding.

In conclusion, although poor reading comprehension certainly qualifies as a major problem rather than a myth, the term specific reading comprehension disability is a misnomer: Individuals with problems in reading comprehension that are not attributable to poor word recognition have comprehension problems that are general to language comprehension rather than specific to reading.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant P50 HD052120 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.

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Specific Reading Comprehension Disability: Major Problem, Myth, or Misnomer?

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The goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension. Participants in the study were first, second, and third graders, totaling 9 cohorts and ...

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For skilled readers, silently reading text feels no more demanding than listening to an audiobook and in many ways can be easier: passages can be reread, and unknown words' spellings may indicate morphology and give clues to meaning. This automatic process, whereby the working memory is liberated to concentrate almost entirely on the meaning the author was attempting to convey contrasts with the stuttering, painful progress of the beginning reader. Contrast that again with the infant who cannot read but may be able to recognise the Coca-Cola logo and the complexity of learning to read becomes almost overwhelming. Add to that the responsibility of primary school teachers (and sadly many secondary teachers) of ensuring that all children attain automatic word recognition that gifts the capacity to read for meaning, and perhaps pleasure, and we have a cognitive gordian knot.

MODELS OF SKILLED READING

For skilled readers, silently reading text feels no more demanding than listening to an audiobook and in many ways can be easier: passages can be reread, and unknown words' spellings may indicate morphology and give clues to meaning. This automatic process, whereby the working memory is liberated to concentrate almost entirely on the meaning the author was attempting to convey contrasts with the stuttering, painful progress of the beginning reader. Contrast that again with the infant who cannot read but may be able to recognise the Coca-Cola logo and the complexity of learning to read becomes almost overwhelming. Add to that the responsibility of primary school teachers (and sadly many secondary teachers) of ensuring that all children attain automatic word recognition that gifts the capacity to read for meaning, and perhaps pleasure, and we have a cognitive gordian knot.

MODELS OF SKILLED READING

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Theoretical models of reading - better informed but none the wiser?

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For skilled readers, silently reading text feels no more demanding than listening to an audiobook and in many ways can be easier: passages can be reread, and unknown words' spellings may indicate morphology and give clues to meaning.

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Aouad, J. and Savage, R. (2009). The component structure of preliteracy skills: Further evidence for the simple view of reading. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 24 (2), 183-200.

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

Gough, P., Hoover, W., and Patterson, C. (1996). Some observations on a simple view of reading. In C. Cornoldi and J. Oakhill (eds.), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention (pp. 1-13). Mahway, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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

Hoover, W. and Gough, P. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127-160.

*Kamhi, A. (2007). Knowledge deficits: the true crisis in education. ASHA Leader, 12 (7), 28-29.

*These articles are short and easy to read.

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The Simple View of Reading is a formula demonstrating the widely accepted view that reading has two basic components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. Research studies show that a student's reading comprehension score can be predicted if decoding skills and language comprehension abilities are known.

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Begeny, J.C. and Greene, D.J. (2014) Can Readability Formulas Be Used to Successfully Gauge Difficulty of Reading Materials? Psychology in the Schools, 51: 198-215. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.21740

Capper, E. Children's perceptions of wider reading: to what extent do 7- and 8-year-old children read beyond the scheme books? Education 3-13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education
Volume 41 (2013) Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2012.710104

Cheatham, J.P., Allor, J.H. (2012) The influence of decodability in early reading text on reading achievement: a review of the evidence. Reading and Writing, 25, 2223-2246 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-011-9355-2

Dixon, B. (2016) What happened to the 'D' word? LDA Bulletin, Volume 48, No. 3, 28-29. Spring 2016.

Mesmer, H.A.E. (2005) Text Decodability and the First-grade Reader, Reading & Writing Quarterly, 21:1, 61-86 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1080/10573560590523667

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What Are Decodable Books and Why Are They Important?

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Decodable books play an important role in phonics instruction and building confidence in young readers. Learn more about decodable books, how they differ from predictable texts, and how to select high-quality texts that align with the scope and sequence of your phonics program.

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Fifty years ago, when I was becoming a teacher, reading instruction consisted of a ubiquitous classroom practice: placing students in instructional groups according to their reading level. These groups were sometimes known by various colors or animals. I distinctly remember the redbirds, the bluebirds, and the buzzards among the most popular appellations. Today, although groups are now labeled with letters (Level G, Level L, etc.) and ornithological monikers are out of fashion, assigning students to instructional groups according to their reading levels is still a common practice in classrooms across the country.

A recent survey aimed at identifying the most popular current programs used to teach reading ¹ found that one common feature of all the top sellers was that they organize their teaching around leveled books. Other recent surveys show that teaching reading with leveled books is on the increase and that teachers believe it is endorsed or supported by their state educational standards, ² though, in most cases, it is not.

But how effective is such teaching? Does it work?

On the surface, those are easy questions. Leveled readers obviously work. Most American students are learning to read, at least at basic levels, ³ and since most are being taught with leveled books, there must be some potency in the approach.

But the real question isn't whether children can learn from leveled books, but whether such leveling confers any learning advantages. Might students do even better if taught with books they can't already read so well? That's the real question. In this article, I examine the research on leveled reading approaches and offer more effective ways that classroom teachers can ensure their students acquire the skills and knowledge they need to not only read a text but also comprehend it. First, I provide a brief history lesson in how we got here.

Teaching with Gradually More Difficult Texts

The idea of testing students to place them in different levels of text for instruction was first recommended more than 100 years ago, ⁴ and an early survey indicated that 58 percent of primary-grade reading instruction was already being delivered in small ability-based groups and that 42 percent of the teachers were adjusting text levels to facilitate learning. ⁵ They may not have referred to these texts as "leveled readers," and no company that published basal readers had yet coined the term "guided reading," but the practices of that time were markedly similar to those of today.

During the 20th century, research identified text features that correlate with reading comprehension, ⁶ and publishers started to control these features to a degree previously unimagined. One reading program I remember from my childhood bragged that it never introduced more than one new word per page, and any word that was introduced was repeated 15 times over the following pages. That's why those texts could be so mind-numbingly repetitive: "Oh. Oh. Oh. Look, Jane, look." If learning to read meant learning words-and at least since the time of Horace Mann that's been an idea held by many-then the accumulation of words gradually from selection to selection was how someone would best advance in learning to read.

But such tight readability controls made beginning reading texts so artificial that they eventually elicited an adverse reaction. The most remarkable of these reactions was the adoption of "whole language" policies by California in the 1980s. ⁷ These reforms required that the texts used to teach reading not be designed for reading instruction, and severely limited the text revisions that could be made for pedagogical purposes. What this meant was that for a brief period of time, even the beginning reading materials got much harder, ⁸ perhaps so hard for beginning readers that they represented a significant impediment to learning. ⁹ If the old basal readers were easier than necessary, these new books were decidedly too hard for the beginners, and they provided teachers with little or no guidance on how to teach with texts that the older students couldn't read successfully on their own. Exacerbating the effects of these harder books was that California's policies simultaneously discouraged phonics and spelling-instruction that could have helped students to better read the challenging materials, and the term "whole language" often came to mean "whole class" instruction in many schools. ¹⁰ Perhaps the thinking was, why group for instruction if nobody could read the books anyway?

It was in this environment that Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell published their landmark book in 1996, Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children. There was nothing terribly original in their presentation, but they rediscovered and championed a set of teaching procedures that in the not-too-distant past had been widely used to facilitate reading instruction. They recognized that texts varied in difficulty and that one could guide student progress successfully across a gradually harder progression of books. To do this successfully, they asserted that teachers would need to group children, matching different books to students based on their varied levels of reading. Their approach offered immediate relief for those beginning reading classes where easier books made sense, but even in the grades beyond, the shift was welcome because of the lack of any pedagogical support for teaching challenging books. Fountas and Pinnell's approach, although reminiscent of earlier popular instructional practices, differed from them in one important regard: because of the burgeoning availability of high-quality children's trade books, they could propose doing this without textbooks.

In the Fountas and Pinnell version of guided reading, teachers assess students to determine their reading levels and then assign them books that they can read with a high degree of accuracy and comprehension. Over time, if retesting shows improvement, the students are switched to more demanding books. When it doesn't work so well, students may languish for long periods at their current levels. Such languishment has been enough of a problem that in the second edition of their book, they recommend moving students up sometimes even when the testing shows no evident improvement. (This seems to me like a judicious amendment to the original plan, but it raises the question about why these students can be expected to learn from the harder books when it is assumed that no one else would be able to.) Currently, this approach to reading, in which leveled books are matched to student reading levels for reading instruction, predominates in U.S. classrooms.

Determining Text Levels

There are basically two ways to determine how difficult texts may be and to set their levels: quantitative readability measures and qualitative judgments about texts. Although they approach the task differently, the purpose of both is to array texts on a continuum of difficulty.

The quantitative study of readability identifies text features that may affect comprehension and then tries to array these features in an algorithm that will allow accurate predictions of text difficulty. It turns out that accurate predictions can be obtained with only two text variables: vocabulary and sentence complexity. Such formulas are imperfect, but reasonably accurate. They aren't able to make fine distinctions, and until recently, haven't been able to measure beginning text levels very well. Nevertheless, quantitative readability algorithms are able to provide a largely reliable and accurate scientifically derived text gradient.

Still, it is important to remember that readability was not developed to match books to students in a way that would facilitate learning. Readability measures predict comprehension, not reading progress. The idea of using these kinds of measures to establish which books would best promote learning to read came later.

With the advent of computer technology, readability measurement has improved. ¹¹ The newer readability measures that have emerged are now widely used by researchers and publishers and were employed by the Common Core State Standards to specify text level aspirations for the various grade levels. Despite all this, when teachers speak of "leveling" books, they are most likely referring to Fountas and Pinnell levels.

Researchers provide a useful history of the development of this qualitative leveling system. ¹² Basically, an early version of the approach was developed for use with Reading Recovery, ¹³ a short-term reading intervention for first-graders who have difficulty learning to read, and Fountas and Pinnell refined and expanded this system to apply to texts from beginning readers through eighth-grade texts. Texts are evaluated by judges who place them on a multipoint continuum (from A to Z) based on 10 criteria: genre/forms, text structure, content, themes and ideas, language and literary features, sentence complexity, vocabulary, words, illustrations, and book and print features. ¹⁴

No studies have evaluated the reliability of these judgments, but a couple of small studies suggest that the Fountas and Pinnell gradient correlates reasonably well with the better-validated quantitative readability measurements. ¹⁵ Publishers have now leveled tens of thousands of books using this scheme. But given its complexity-the simultaneous qualitative evaluations of 10 factors with no explicit prioritization rules-it is unclear how accurate these levels may be (a point Fountas and Pinnell themselves make ¹⁶). Clearly, this approach lacks the scientific rigor of the quantitative approaches and may result in varied book placements depending on who makes the judgments. But until more evidence is available, let's at least for the sake of argument accept that these levels are sufficiently accurate to consider their use.

To sum up, there are two approaches to setting text levels-one based on a great deal of scientific evidence and one less well understood. Nevertheless, existing data suggest that both can place texts on a reasonable comprehensibility continuum, from easy to difficult. The problem is that research does not support the idea that either approach can identify from which texts students will learn best. The point of leveling is both to establish a text gradient and to place students in the appropriate text along that gradient. The latter is the issue to which we now turn.

Book Levels That Promote Learning

More than 70 years ago, Emmett Betts published an influential textbook on the teaching of reading. ¹⁷ Betts claimed all readers have three reading levels: independent, instructional, and frustration. According to Betts, the independent level refers to texts that readers can handle on their own without assistance. Instructional-level texts are a bit harder, but not so hard that students can't improve their reading from working with them under the guidance of a good teacher. And, frustration level? These books would be so difficult that learning would be unlikely even with supportive teaching.

Betts wrote that the way to determine these levels was to have students read from the books aloud and answer comprehension questions. Instructional-level texts, according to Betts, were those that could be read with 95-98 percent accuracy (in terms of word reading) and understood with 75-89 percent comprehension-the criteria that continue to be used today. Instructional-level texts generate small numbers of mistakes and misunderstandings, which can then presumably be addressed successfully through instruction and practice. Betts claimed that research supported the idea of matching books to students in this way to optimize learning. This instructional-level scheme is what is used today in most popular reading programs.

It's easy to understand why someone might propose (or adopt) such an approach. It is incredibly frustrating when students can't read a text very well. At a time when teachers were limited to one grade-level text for reading, there would be plenty of students who wouldn't be able to read it proficiently. Under those circumstances, teachers would gladly embrace the idea of working only with books that children could already read well. But as gratifying as the idea of teaching students at their instructional levels may have been, there are legitimate questions about the degree of effectiveness of this approach. When there is so little to learn from a particular text, it is possible that progress will be needlessly slow moving.

Despite Betts' original claims and the current popularity of leveling, research evidence has not been especially supportive of the approach. The study Betts referred to as the source of the instructional-level criteria was a doctoral dissertation of one of his students, ¹⁸ and that study neither matched books to students for instruction nor evaluated learning. Betts' doctoral student simply checked to see how many oral reading errors fourth-graders could make and still maintain 75-89 percent reading comprehension; that was the source of the 95-98 percent accuracy criterion. Years later, the researchers were questioned about the source of comprehension numbers, and they couldn't remember from whence those had come. ¹⁹ Not a very substantial basis for such a widely recommended instructional practice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, William Powell challenged Betts' criteria, though he fully accepted the kind of evidence Betts had used to set them. ²⁰ Powell thought Betts got the numbers wrong. To that end, he conducted studies in which children from grades 1-8 were evaluated in much the same way as in Betts' doctoral student's study. Powell found a couple of interesting things. He reported different instructional levels for different grades; that is, some children could tolerate more disfluency and still comprehend what they were reading. He also reported that some students could tolerate quite a bit of disfluency, suggesting Betts was placing students in books that were too easy.

Later, another study tested how well second-graders could read the books they were taught with, and then measured how much they learned. The researcher found that texts that could be read with about 85 percent accuracy and less than 50 percent comprehension led to the biggest learning gains. In other words, students learned more from books that were at their "frustration levels."

Over the past few decades, there have been several direct tests of the instructional level, and these have all ended with one of two outcomes. Instructional-level texts either have provided no learning advantages or have done harm. One example of the latter is another study with second-graders. ²¹ This study was the first randomized control trial of this practice. Students were tested and, using Betts' criteria, randomly assigned to one of three treatments. One group worked with texts at their instructional levels, one worked with texts two grades above this, and the third worked with books four grades above. Students read in pairs, practicing reading fluency with a partner. At the end of the school year, the students placed in books above their instructional level had made significantly bigger learning gains than those placed in the books supposed to facilitate their learning. This study was later replicated with third-graders. ²² Other studies again found big learning advantages from working with books at the children's grade levels rather than reading levels. ²³ Even students with learning disabilities have been found to obtain no benefit from these text placements. ²⁴

Betts saw a problem-students being taught from books that many couldn't read-and he proposed a solution, moving students to books that they could. Another solution, one he apparently didn't entertain, was that teachers could adjust their instruction in particular ways to facilitate students' interactions with these hard-to-read books. As a recent study found-this one with high school students-most students who were asked to read grade-level materials were able to learn more than those placed in the easier books. ²⁵

Basically, what this research reveals is that limiting students to texts they can already read well reduces their opportunity to learn-by limiting their exposure to sophisticated vocabulary, rich content, and complex language. With knowledge of the research on effective reading instruction, skilled teachers can facilitate students' productive interactions with harder text.

But what has happened since states started requiring that students be taught to read more challenging text?

In 2010, the majority of states adopted the Common Core State Standards. These standards, for the first time ever, set text levels that students were supposed to be able to read by the time they reached particular grade levels. The levels were set high to enable students to reach levels of proficiency that would ensure later life success.

States may have thought they had accomplished something pretty big by adopting those standards, and likewise district administrators may have thought they had dealt successfully with the complex text requirements when they purchased new textbooks matched to these new requirements. However, according to national surveys, ²⁶ all that has happened is that teachers, seeing that more of their students are now struggling with these newer texts, have increasingly relied on the idea of instructional-level teaching, and more and more are placing students in below-grade texts for reading instruction.

A More Effective Approach

As a teacher, I always taught with leveled books and worked hard to match texts to students in the ways described here. However, as I've learned of the research, I've gone a very different way-except with beginning readers. I know of no studies with kindergartners or first-graders showing that they should be trying to read particularly demanding texts (in contrast, there is a benefit to teachers reading aloud demanding texts to build young children's knowledge and vocabulary).

I've come to think of reading as the ability to make sense of the ideas presented in text, by taking advantage of the affordances and overcoming the barriers included in the text. Learning to read means becoming aware of these text features-and learning how to deal with them. Instructional-level texts are usually too easy to provide students with the opportunities to confront text features that they cannot already manage.

Affordances or barriers-and these are basically the same things-are features that authors build into their texts to facilitate communication. A particular text feature serves as an affordance if it does that, and-for some readers-it may serve as a barrier to understanding. For example, an author might aim for clarity and accuracy through apt diction, and for readers who know the meanings of the words so chosen, this can be a powerful text affordance. But for readers with more limited vocabularies? That potential affordance may become an unfortunate barrier for them.

It's not, however, as simple an equation as instructional-level theory makes out. It is not that some students have better vocabularies, so we should let them work with the relatively difficult books (the ones with the rich content and complex language), and that the other students-those who know fewer words-should be segregated into easier and more limited texts. That approach can have some unfortunate implications for students who are minorities and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. ²⁷

What if, instead of segregating them into what some students call the "stupid books," we placed them in books with demanding vocabulary and taught dictionary skills, use of context, and morphology? What if we taught them when it was essential to figure out an unknown word meaning and when they might be able to soldier on successfully without doing that?

And, of course, vocabulary is just one of many such text features. Studies have long shown that teaching students how to disentangle the grammar of some sentences, ²⁸ how to take advantage of the cohesive links across a passage, ²⁹ and how to identify and use a text's organizational structure ³⁰ all can improve reading comprehension. Teaching students to negotiate these features of a text only makes sense if students are to be confronted by challenging texts, and none of them have value for students reading, what for them, are easy books.

If we are serious about raising reading achievement, we must think hard about whether it makes sense to continue teaching students to read books they can already understand so well. These easier books make learning unnecessary and, without adequate challenge, may even drain the fun out of learning. That doesn't mean that every selection used for reading instruction must significantly challenge students, only that grade-level texts should be part of the instructional mix.

Instead of a steady diet of instructional-level texts, students should be reading a range of texts in their classrooms. Some proponents of leveled reading claim they too support this idea, but they propose that instructional-level texts should be the focus of small-group teaching. I recommend just the opposite, having students reading really demanding texts when the teacher is close by and ready to help, and less demanding ones when on their own or when a teacher just isn't going to be available.

But this is not just an avenue to higher achievement (though research suggests that it could be), it is also an issue of equity. If fourth-graders are taught from a second-grade book, when will they have the opportunity to confront the language and ideas of fourth-grade books? This is a cruel math problem that tells students they are best served by books that don't match their interests, their curiosity, or their social aspirations. Leveled reading emphasizes students' current limitations, rather than increasing their possibilities, especially for the least advantaged of our students. We can do better.
Timothy Shanahan is a distinguished professor emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the founding director of its Center for Literacy. Previously, he was the director of reading for Chicago Public Schools. A past president of the International Literacy Association, he was the chair of the National Early Literacy Panel and a member of both the National Reading Panel and the English Language Arts Work Team for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. He writes about education at www.shanahanonliteracy.com.
Endnotes

1. S. Schwartz, "The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren't Backed by Science," Education Week, December 3, 2019.
2. D. Griffith and A. Duffet, Reading and Writing Instruction in America's Schools (Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); and J. Kaufman et al., Changes in What Teachers Know and Can Do in the Common Core Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).
3. National Assessment of Educational Progress, Results from the 2019 Mathematics and Reading Assessments (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2019).
4. L. Zirbes, "Diagnostic Measurement as a Basis for Procedure," Elementary School Journal 18, no. 7 (1918): 505-522.
5. W. Theisen, "Provisions for Individual Differences in the Teaching of Reading," Journal of Educational Research 2, no. 2 (1920): 560-571.
6. G. Klare, The Measurement of Readability (Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1963).
7. California State Board of Education, English-Language Arts Framework for California Public Schools, Kindergarten through Grade 12 (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 1987).
8. E. Hiebert, "Changing Readers, Changing Texts: Beginning Reading Texts from 1960 to 2019," Journal of Education 195, no. 3 (2015): 1-13.
9. E. H. Hiebert and C. W. Fisher, "The Critical Word Factor in Texts for Beginning Readers," Journal of Educational Research 101, no. 1 (2007): 3-11.
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25. S. Lupo et al., "An Exploration of Text Difficulty and Knowledge Support on Adolescents' Comprehension," Reading Research Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2019): 457-479.
26. D. Griffith and A. Duffett, Reading and Writing Instruction in America's Schools (Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); and V. Opfer, J. Kaufman, and L. Thompson, Implementation of K-12 State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts and Literacy: Findings from the American Teacher Panel (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016).
27. A. Sørenson and M. Hallinan, "Effects of Ability Grouping on Growth in Academic Achievement," American Educational Research Journal 23, no. 4 (1986): 519-542.
28. V. Mih and C. Mih, "Reducing Children's Reading Comprehension Difficulties through a Training for Enhancing Sentence Organization Skills," Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 3 (2012): 387-401.
29. J. Irwin, "Linguistic Cohesion and the Developing Reader/Writer," Topics in Language Disorders 8, no. 3 (1988): 14-23.
30. K. Wijekumar, B. Meyer, and P. Lei, "Web-Based Text Structure Strategy Instruction Improves Seventh Graders' Content Area Reading Comprehension," Journal of Educational Psychology 109, no. 6 (2017): 741-760.

[Illustrations by Angela Hsieh]

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Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

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Fifty years ago, when I was becoming a teacher, reading instruction consisted of a ubiquitous classroom practice: placing students in instructional groups according to their reading level. These groups were sometimes known by various colors or animals. I distinctly remember the redbirds, the bluebirds, and the buzzards among the most popular appellations.

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What we know about decodable texts (Mesmer)

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What we know about decodable texts (Mesmer)

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Teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences - Five from Five

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Written English is a code for speech. Spoken English has approximately 44 speech sounds that combine to make thousands of words but we only have 26 letters with which to represent them in writing. The individual speech sounds that make up words are called phonemes.

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The self teaching hypothesis - Five from Five

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What is the self teaching hypothesis? The average skilled adult reader can instantly recognise between 30,000 and 70,000 words. It is impossible to teach a student this many words by rote; at best a teacher could teach them several hundred. So how did they learn them?

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Abstract

Purpose

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) use phonological awareness assessments in many ways. This study examines the usefulness of these assessments in kindergarten and 2nd grade.

Method

Measures of phonological awareness and letter identification were administered in kindergarten, and measures of phonological awareness, phonetic decoding (i.e., nonword reading), and word reading were administered in 2nd and 4th grades to a sample of 570 children participating in a longitudinal study of reading and language impairments.

Results

A path analysis indicated that kindergarten measures of phonological awareness and letter identification provided information to the prediction of 2nd-grade reading. In 2nd grade, measures of reading offered information to the prediction of 4th-grade reading. Additionally, a reciprocal relationship was found between phonological awareness and word reading, with kindergarten phonological awareness predicting 2nd-grade word reading and, conversely, 2nd-grade word reading predicting 4th-grade phonological awareness.

Clinical Implications

Phonological awareness assessment provides information about reading in kindergarten but loses its predictive power at 2nd grade. At that time, phonological awareness and word reading become so highly correlated that phonological awareness does not add information to the prediction of 4th-grade reading.

Keywords: phonological awareness, assessment, reciprocal relationship, prediction, early reading

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are actively involved in the development of literacy skills and in the remediation of literacy problems ( American Speech-Language-Hearing Association [ASHA], 2001). In particular, SLPs have an important role in the assessment of phonological awareness due to their knowledge of phonetics and phonological disorders ( Catts, 1991). Phonological awareness has been shown to be a primary factor underlying early reading achievement ( Ehri, et al., 2001). Additionally, deficits in phonological awareness have been linked to reading disabilities ( Lyon, Shaywitz, & Shaywitz, 2003).

The assessment of phonological awareness during preschool and kindergarten provides critical insight into the skills that children use to learn to read ( Adams, 1990). Lonigan, Burgess, and Anthony (2000) demonstrated that phonological awareness, when compared to many other predictors, was the most stable and robust indicator of later reading in a group of children who were followed from late preschool into kindergarten and first grade. In another data set, Catts, Fey, Zhang, and Tomblin (2001) found that a kindergarten measure of phonological awareness was one of five factors that predicted the presence of a reading disability in second grade. Numerous other studies have documented the robust relationship between early phonological awareness and subsequent reading achievement ( Calfee, Lindamood, & Lindamood, 1973; Lonigan, et al., 2000; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994; Wagner et al., 1997).

Once children begin reading, however, the best indicator of current and future reading may simply be reading itself ( Bell, McCallum, & Cox, 2003). This possibility has led reading researchers to question the usefulness of phonological awareness assessments once a certain level of reading achievement has been attained. Wagner and his colleagues ( Wagner et al., 1997) considered this issue using a large, longitudinal data set. They examined the amount of information that a measure of phonological awareness could add to the prediction of reading once a measure of current word reading and vocabulary was considered. Results indicated that from kindergarten to second grade, phonological awareness predicted 23% unique variance in later word reading; from first to third, 8%; and from second to fourth, only 4%. The authors concluded that phonological awareness measures in the primary grades offered a small but statistically significant amount of information to the prediction of future word reading beyond that provided by a measure of current word reading. However, in a later review of this work, Torgesen (1999) concluded that the limited amount of information gained from the assessment of phonological awareness beyond second grade may not warrant the use of a phonological awareness assessment given the amount of time needed to administer, score, and interpret such an assessment.

The reduction in the amount of information offered by phonological awareness assessments once reading is underway may be explained, at least in part, by the reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and reading. Initially, phonological awareness influences reading; but, once reading is underway, the process of learning to read influences phonological awareness. In support of the reciprocity between reading and phonological awareness, research has shown that reading instruction with an emphasis on decoding printed words highlights the sound structure of language and facilitates children's performance on tests of phonological awareness ( Lundberg & Hoien, 1991; McGuinness, McGuinness, & Donohue, 1995; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987). Because of this relationship, phonological awareness may become so highly correlated with word reading that it may offer little unique information to the prediction of reading once a measure of reading is available. At such time, tests of word reading may provide a majority of the information when predicting future reading, leaving no information to be accounted for by phonological awareness.

Study Questions

The present study investigated the usefulness of phonological awareness assessments in the prediction of reading in the early school grades. First, we sought to determine if phonological awareness, measured in kindergarten, would predict word reading in second grade beyond a measure of letter identification. Because most kindergarten children cannot decode words, a measure of letter identification was used in this grade as an indication of literacy experience. Indeed, letter identification has been found to be highly predictive of later word reading (see Scarborough, 1998, for a review). We hypothesized that both letter identification and phonological awareness would be significant predictors of second-grade word recognition.

Second, we sought to determine if phonological awareness, measured in second grade, would predict word reading in fourth grade beyond a measure of second-grade word reading. We predicted that second-grade phonological awareness would provide very little or no significant information toward the prediction of fourth-grade word reading once second-grade word reading was known. Related to this question, we also determined if a measure of second-grade nonword reading (i.e., phonetic decoding) would predict fourth-grade word reading beyond a measure of second-grade word reading. Similar to a measure of phonological awareness in kindergarten, phonetic decoding provides insight into the skills that children use to read words ( Adams, 1990; Bell et al., 2003). We predicted that a second-grade measure of phonetic decoding would predict fourth-grade word reading beyond a measure of secondgrade word reading.

Finally, this study extends the work of Wagner et al. (1997) and others in several ways. First, we used a large, well-selected sample of children. Data from such a study add to the generalizability of findings to the population at large. Second, in our study, we evaluated the unique variance associated with phonetic decoding and phonological awareness in word reading. Previous studies have combined phonetic decoding with other word reading skills and have not allowed for the comparison of the unique contribution of phonetic decoding and phonological awareness to word reading.

Method

Participants

The participants in this investigation were a subsample of children who had taken part in an epidemiologic study of language impairments in kindergarten children ( Tomblin, 1995). The epidemiologic study used a stratified cluster sample of more than 7,000 children, stratified by residential setting (i.e., rural, urban, suburban) and cluster sampled by school building. Out of this sample, 328 children with language impairment and/or nonverbal impairments in kindergarten consented to participate in a follow-up longitudinal investigation of language and reading development ( Tomblin, 1995).1 Additionally, a random sample of those children without language impairments was recruited. The final longitudinal sample included 604 children (328 with language impairment; 276 unimpaired). All of the participants, regardless of language or nonverbal abilities, were monolingual English speakers with normal hearing and no history of significant emotional or neurological disorders. Furthermore, no child had been diagnosed with autism or mental retardation at the beginning of the longitudinal study. Over the course of the longitudinal study, 34 children left the study, leaving 570 children with complete data sets through fourth grade.

These 570 children comprised the sample for the present study.2 Due to the participant selection procedure previously described, the sample contained higher percentages of children with language and nonverbal impairments than those found in the original epidemiologic study. Therefore, we employed a weighting procedure, described in the analysis section below, to ensure that our results were representative of the original epidemiologic sample.

Materials

In kindergarten, participants were administered tests of phonological awareness and letter identification, and in second and fourth grades, participants were administered tests of phonological awareness, phonetic decoding, and word reading. Table 1 provides a summary of the assessments described below and the grades at which these assessments were administered.

Table 1

Grade

Construct

Assessment

K, 2nd, 4th

Phonological awareness

Catts Deletion Task ( Catts et al., 2001)

K

Letter identification

Letter Identification subtest of the Woodcock Reading
Mastery Tests-Revised (WRMT-R; Woodcock, 1987)

2nd, 4th

Phonetic decoding

Word Attack subtest of the WRMT-R

2nd, 4th

Word reading

Word Identifi cation subtest of the WRMT-R

Phonological awareness

The phonological awareness task was a measure of syllable/phoneme deletion ( Catts et al., 2001) that was adapted from Rosner's Auditory Analysis Test ( Rosner & Simon, 1971). In this task, participants are asked to delete a syllable or phoneme from a word and say the remaining sound sequence. In kindergarten, the task consisted of 3 practice items and 21 test items. Thirteen of the items required deletion of the initial syllable in either a compound word (e.g., "Say baseball without the 'base'") or a two-syllable word (e.g., "Say baby without the 'ba'"). The remaining eight items required deletion of the first sound in a one-syllable word (e.g., "Say fat without the /f/"). In second and fourth grades, nine items were added to increase the task difficulty to a grade-appropriate level. Four of these new items required deletion of the final sound in a one-syllable word (e.g., "Say find without the /d/"), and five required deletion of a middle sound from a one-syllable word (e.g., "Say wives without the /v/"). In each grade, the task was discontinued after six consecutive errors. To quantify each participant's performance on the phonological awareness task in kindergarten, raw scores were converted to z scores based on the mean and standard deviation from the original study sample ( N = 604). This procedure was also used in second and fourth grade ( N = 570). The kindergarten version of this task may be found in its entirety in Catts et al. (2001).

Letter identification

Because relatively few kindergarten children can decode nonwords ( Wagner et al., 1997), the Letter Identification subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised (WRMT-R; Woodcock, 1987) was used in kindergarten as an early estimate of alphabetic knowledge and literacy experience. In this task, the participants were asked to name upper and lower case letters printed in various fonts. Standard scores were assigned using the grade-based assessment norms from the test manual because letter-name knowledge is largely dependent on instruction ( Adams, 1990).

Word reading

To assess word reading in second and fourth grades, the Word Identification subtest of the WRMT-R was administered to each of the participants. In this task, the participants orally read real words, decreasing in frequency of occurrence from highly frequent words such as "go" to increasingly less frequent words such as "quench." Again, because of reliance on instruction, standard scores were assigned using the grade-based assessment norms from the test manual.

Phonetic decoding

In second and fourth grades, the Word Attack subtest of the WRMT-R was administered to measure phonetic decoding. This task required participants to orally decode nonwords increasing in length and complexity. The first and least complex item on the subtest requires the child to read the nonword "ree." An example of a more complex item is "untroikest." Standard scores were assigned using the grade-based assessment norms from the test manual because instruction plays a major part in learning to phonetically decode words ( Adams, 1990).

Procedures

Test administration

Testing was conducted by trained examiners with undergraduate or graduate degrees in speech-language sciences/pathology or education. The battery of tests was completed during two 2-hr sessions at each grade level-kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade.

Weighting of scores

Table 2 shows the distribution of weighted scores for the measures in our analysis ( N = 570). The phonological awareness tasks at each grade are presented as raw scores for ease of interpretation; the letter identification, word reading, and phonetic decoding tasks are represented by standard scores, with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.3 As noted above, the sample of children used in this study had a higher prevalence of children with language impairments than the general population. To improve the representativeness of our data, we used weighted scores that took into consideration prevalence rates for language impairments and other characteristics in the general population; these data were taken from the original epidemiologic study (discussed in detail in Tomblin et al., 1997). Based on these data, each participant's scores were weighted according to the likelihood that a participant with his or her gender, language, and nonverbal IQ profile would have been part of the representative sample seen in the epidemiologic study. For example, the epidemiologic study estimated that boys with a language impairment and low nonverbal IQ composed 3.5% of the general population. In our sample ( N = 570), however, these children composed 7.7%. To ensure that participants from this group did not contribute disproportionately to our results, their scores were adjusted by a constant that was equal to the expected prevalence of these children (3.5%) divided by their actual prevalence in our sample (7.7%; constant = .454). A similar procedure was used to weight the scores of other participants based on their specific characteristics. (For further details concerning the weighting procedure and evidence of its effectiveness, see Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 1999; Tomblin, Zhang, Buckwalter, & O'Brien, 2003.)

Results

Path Analysis

Path analysis was used to analyze the data because of its ability to examine complex relationships between multiple measures ( Pedhazur, 1997). Path analysis is similar to regression analysis with one main exception. In path analysis, an estimate of measurement error for each measure can be included by using an estimate of the reliability of that measure. This error estimate allows for a more robust test of the relationships between measures when comparing analyses that assume no error in the measurements. Similar to regression analysis, path analysis determines the amount of unique variance that one measure accounts for in another. Whereas in regression, this unique variance is represented by a partial correlation, in path analysis, this unique variance is represented by a path coefficient. Using path analysis, models of both direct and indirect influence are constructed to represent hypothesized relationships among measures. Once a model shows a good fit to the data, based on the chi-square fit statistic, various relationships within the model may be examined.

Our proposed model, shown in Figure 1 , involved measurement at three time points. In kindergarten, measures of phonological awareness and letter identification were entered into the model. In second and fourth grade, measures of phonological awareness, phonetic decoding, and word reading were entered. Initially, all measurements were proposed to be related to the measurements directly preceding them in time. Each specified relationship is indicated by a line ending in an arrow, which represents the direction of the relationship. For example, kindergarten phonological awareness was proposed to account for second-grade phonological awareness, phonetic decoding, and word reading. As shown in Figure 1 , three lines originate from kindergarten phonological awareness predicting second-grade phonological awareness, phonetic decoding, and word reading, respectively. Double arrowed lines represent the covariance associated with measurements co-occurring in time (e.g., phonological awareness and letter identification in kindergarten).

For each specified relationship, a path coefficient is obtained and examined for significance using a z test. This statistic was used to determine if the path coefficient was significantly different from 0. If the path coefficient was not significantly different from 0, then the path was removed from the model. In Figure 1 , only one path was removed because it was not statistically significant. That path is represented by a dotted line. Paths may also be added to a model if they are found to be significant. In our model, no paths were added beyond the ones initially specified.

Model Statistics

The path model was tested using the covariance matrix associated with our measurements employing the LISREL 8.54 ( Joreskog & Sorbom, 2003) program with maximum likelihood estimation. The correlations are shown in Table 3 , with the split-half reliability for each measure shown on the diagonal. These reliabilities served as an estimate of measurement error. Model fit was assessed using the minimum fit function chi-square statistic ( Joreskog & Sorbom, 2003). The chi-square statistic is the most familiar and stringent model statistic. Our final model (i.e., Figure 1 ) had a chi-square value of 10.34, with 7 degrees of freedom ( p = 0.17). This statistic indicated that the data did not significantly deviate from the proposed model and that an excellent to outstanding fit of the model to the data was found ( Joreskog & Sorbom, 2003).

Study Questions

The results for each study question will be described using a simplification of the model shown in Figure 1 (see Figure 2 ). First, we sought to determine if phonological awareness, measured in kindergarten, would predict word reading in second grade beyond a measure of letter identification. In line with our hypothesis, we found that a kindergarten measure of phonological awareness accounted for unique variance in second-grade word reading (β = .37; path 2) beyond that accounted for by letter identification (β = .44; path 1).

Second, we examined whether phonological awareness, measured in second grade, would predict word reading in fourth grade beyond a measure of second-grade word reading. As predicted, a second-grade measure of phonological awareness added no information (β = ns; path 5) to the prediction of fourth-grade word reading beyond that provided by the second-grade measure of word reading (β = .77; path 3).

Next, we determined if a measure of second-grade phonetic decoding would predict fourth-grade word reading beyond a measure of second-grade word reading. We predicted that a measure of phonetic decoding would provide significant information to the prediction of fourthgrade word reading beyond that provided by a second-grade measure and this prediction was validated. Second-grade phonetic decoding predicted a small but significant amount of variance in fourth-grade reading (β = .15; path 4) beyond second-grade word reading (β = .77; path 3).

Considering that phonological awareness contributed significant information to the prediction of word reading from kindergarten to second grade but not from second to fourth, we examined the potential reciprocity between phonological awareness and word reading across these grades to better understand our results. We hypothesized that kindergarten phonological awareness would be more strongly related to second-grade word reading than kindergarten letter identification would be to second-grade phonological awareness. We expected that the inverse would be shown from second to fourth grade; that is, second-grade word reading would be more strongly related to fourth-grade phonological awareness than second-grade phonological awareness would be to fourth-grade word reading. This finding would shed light on the limited information offered by second-grade phonological awareness to the prediction of fourth-grade word reading by indicating that initially, phonological awareness influenced word reading and then, word reading influenced phonological awareness. Figure 3 contains data pertinent to this question. The results show that our hypothesis was confirmed. Kindergarten phonological awareness and second-grade word reading were more strongly correlated (β = .37; path 1) than kindergarten letter identification and secondgrade phonological awareness (β = .19; path 2; Δχ ²(1, n = 570) = 14.52, p < .05). In contrast, second-grade word reading and fourth-grade phonological awareness were correlated (β = .21; path 3), whereas second-grade phonological awareness and fourth-grade word reading were not significantly correlated (β = ns; path 4).

Finally, SLPs assess and treat children who have, or are suspected to have, deficient speech, language, and/or reading skills. In this study, we examined our questions using a sample of children with a wide range of skills, from high to low language functioning. We acknowledge that the majority of the children in our sample will not likely be evaluated by an SLP because the majority of our sample exhibited typical reading/language development. In an attempt to better approximate the children most likely to be seen by an SLP, we reexamined our study questions in two subsamples of below-average readers; one subsample included those who scored below the 40th percentile on the Oral Reading Accuracy Index of the Gray Oral Reading Tests-Third Edition ( Wiederholt & Bryant, 1994), a measure of word reading, and the other subsample included a more impaired group who scored below the 25th percentile on the same measure. The results from these subsamples were essentially the same as those obtained using our full sample. Only one difference was apparent in the analyses using the subsamples: Kindergarten phonological awareness and second-grade word reading were no longer more strongly correlated than kindergarten letter identification and second-grade word reading. Overall, these findings indicate that our results are consistent with those of children at the lower end of the normal distribution (i.e., those likely to be seen by an SLP); although these findings do not directly determine if there is a level of word reading at which phonological awareness may still contribute unique variance to its prediction.

Discussion

This study investigated the usefulness of phonological awareness assessments in the prediction of word reading during the early school grades. We found that a measure of phonological awareness in kindergarten predicted secondgrade word reading beyond a measure of letter identification. This pattern was not the case from second to fourth grade, when a second-grade measure of phonological awareness did not provide unique information to the prediction of fourth-grade word reading beyond that provided by second-grade measures of word reading and phonetic decoding. In an attempt to understand the loss of unique information gained from phonological awareness in second grade, we examined the relationship between phonological awareness and word reading. We found that phonological awareness predicted word reading from kindergarten to second grade, whereas from second to fourth grade, this relationship reversed; second-grade word reading predicted fourth-grade phonological awareness. This finding was consistent with a reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and word reading. These results have several clinical implications.

First, our findings converge with a large body of research indicating that the measurement of phonological awareness in kindergarten adds useful information to the prediction of word reading ( Ehri et al., 2001). This information is beyond that which can be gained from other strong kindergarten literacy predictors such as letter identification. Therefore, measures of phonological awareness should be included when assessing kindergarten children to determine future reading outcomes and/or risk for reading disability. SLPs have the skills needed to assess and interpret measures of phonological awareness in kindergarten and should play a significant role in this process.

Second, our results indicate that beyond kindergarten (at least by second grade), a measure of phonological awareness may offer little unique information to the prediction of word reading. We found that by second grade, the best predictor of word reading is word reading itself. Therefore, rather than use a measure of phonological awareness at this time, a measure of word reading should be used to make predictions about future reading outcomes. Because we also found that phonetic decoding provided unique information beyond that obtained from word reading, a measure of this ability might also be included in assessments of reading outcome. Such a measure provides useful information concerning how children are using their orthographic knowledge and phonological awareness to read novel printed words.

Although this study specifically addressed the use of phonological awareness assessments when predicting word reading, the results could be extended to concurrent assessments directed at determining the underlying nature of a reading problem and/or assessing treatment progress. Using path analysis, we were only directly able to address issues of prediction. However, our model provides some suggestions concerning the possible nature of concurrent relationships. As shown in Figure 1 , concurrent measures of phonetic decoding and word reading were more highly related than were those involving phonological awareness and word reading (.88 vs. .65 in second grade and .63 vs. .28 in fourth grade). Of course, these data do not speak to the unique contribution of concurrent measures of phonetic decoding versus phonological awareness to word reading. However, in an earlier study using these same data, we employed hierarchical regression analyses to examine concurrent relationships ( Catts & Hogan, 2002). This study showed that concurrent measures of phonetic decoding accounted for a considerable amount of the unique variance in word reading, whereas phonological awareness added little or no unique variance at second and fourth grades.

Before proceeding, it should be noted that our results concerning phonological awareness assessment may be dependent on the way in which we measured phonological awareness. Recall that our measure was one involving syllable/phoneme deletion. This measure was chosen because of its close relationship to word reading ability ( Torgesen et al., 1994). It is possible that if another measure of phonological awareness was used (e.g., phoneme segmentation), the results could have differed. Further research is necessary to address this issue.

The results of our study suggest that at least by second grade, measures of phonetic decoding may provide more unique information about concurrent word reading than will phonological awareness, as measured in this study. Again, the reason for this finding may be the reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and reading. This relationship ensures that by second grade, measures of phonetic decoding and phonological awareness tap somewhat similar skills and knowledge. That is, measures of phonological awareness and phonetic decoding essentially become overlapping assessments, each providing information about orthographic and phonological knowledge and skills. However, because measures of phonetic decoding overlap more with word reading, such measures typically will be a better choice for reading-related assessments than will measures of phonological awareness. A test of phonetic decoding provides information about how a child uses his or her orthographic knowledge and phonological awareness to decode novel words. For example, a measure of phonetic decoding allows educators to determine if a child can decode simple consonant-vowel-consonant words but has trouble decoding more complex words-an ability directly related to early word reading. Additionally, such an assessment provides the opportunity to gain pertinent information regarding the child's phonological awareness. For example, the child may skip over a sound, leave off ending sounds, or have trouble blending sounds together to form a word because he or she lacks the necessary phonological awareness to do so. This type of information is relevant to determining the underlying nature of a reading disability and/or assessing treatment progress.

Even in light of our results and the above discussion, it is conceivable that phonological awareness probes may still be helpful to determine more specific intervention goals and assess treatment progress in second grade and beyond for some children. For example, when planning specific intervention goals, an SLP may suspect that a child has difficulty segmenting sounds in initial blends based on the types of words that the child incorrectly decoded on a phonetic decoding assessment (e.g., "blue" was read as "bue"). Further in-depth exploration of the child's ability to segment initial blends using a phonological awareness probe of this skill will likely aid in intervention planning. Likewise, an SLP working with a child to improve his ability to blend printed words containing stop consonants (e.g., "/b/ /o/ /t/ goes together to make 'boat'") may find that a probe of this skill offers important additional information about the effects of treatment beyond that provided by a test of word reading or phonetic decoding. These uses seem appropriate as long as the relationship between reading and phonological awareness is considered and the phonological awareness assessment (or probe) is not the primary assessment of reading outcomes for the reasons described above.

Even though phonetic decoding assessments have typically been administered by reading specialists, it is not outside of an SLP's scope of practice to administer and interpret such an assessment ( ASHA, 2001). Tests of phonetic decoding measure children's knowledge of English orthography as a phonetic transcription, and in some cases, specific nonwords additionally assess morphological knowledge (e.g., "gaked" and "mancingful," from the WRMT-R Word Attack subtest). SLPs have phonetic transcription skills as well as knowledge of phonological development. These skills and knowledge provide the foundation for transcribing and analyzing decoding errors using information on sound contrasts, phonological processes, and sound development. Reading specialists and classroom teachers greatly enhance their ability to understand decoding breakdowns through collaboration with SLPs. As such, SLPs should collaborate with reading specialists and classroom teachers to enhance the understanding of word reading problems. This collaboration is necessary to provide the most effective assessment and treatment for children with reading disabilities ( Snow, Scarborough, & Burns, 1999).

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (P05-DC02726; T32-DC000052; P30-DC005803; P30- HD02528). The authors would like to thank J. Bruce Tomblin, Marc Fey, Holly Storkel, Xuyang Zhang, Gail Gillon, Paula Buckwalter, Marlea O'Brien, Connie Ferguson, Jodi Schwartz, Amy Kundel, Jacqueline Daniels, and Angela Muller for their valuable contributions. We are particularly appreciative of the time and effort provided by the parents and children involved in this study.

Footnotes

¹Of the 328 children, 123 children had language impairment only (i.e., specific language impairment), 103 children evidenced nonverbal impairments only, and 102 children showed language and nonverbal impairments (i.e., nonspecific language impairment). For a detailed account of criteria for classification of these impairments, see Tomblin et al. (1997).

² Although our sample included missing data for 34 children due to attrition from kindergarten to second grade, a multiple EM imputation procedure was also employed as a secondary analysis to estimate these missing data. The results of the study were unchanged when using the data set containing the full sample of 604 children.

³ Table 2 shows that our sample (after weighting scores) performed above the normative mean (i.e., 100) on the Letter Identification subtest in kindergarten and the Word Identification subtest in second grade. However, the sample performed below the mean on the second- and fourth-grade measures of phonetic decoding and on the fourth-grade Word Identification subtest. The latter finding may be the result of our sample receiving reading instruction that involved less emphasis on phonetics than that found in the WRMT-R normative sample.

References

Catts HW, Hogan TP. At what grades should we assess phonological awareness?; Poster presented at the annual convention of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association; Atlanta, GA. 2002, November. [Google Scholar]

Joreskog KG, Sorbom D. [LISREL [Computer software] SSI; Lincolnwood, IL: 2003. Google Scholar]

Tomblin JB, Records N, Buckwalter P, Zhang X, Smith E, O'Brien M. Prevalence of specific language impairment in kindergarten children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 1997;40:1245-1260. [[PMC free article] [PubMed] Google Scholar]

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The Relationship Between Phonological Awareness and Reading: Implications for the Assessment of Phonological Awareness

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Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) use phonological awareness assessments in many ways. This study examines the usefulness of these assessments in kindergarten and 2nd grade.Measures of phonological awareness and letter identification were administered ...

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Read all of the posts by Mark Seidenberg on Reading Matters

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The Science of Reading and Leveled Readers

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The Science of Reading and Leveled Readers are the crux of the reading wars. If your school district is requiring you to use leveled readers as part of your reading instruction, there are ways that you can incorporate the science of reading within these texts. Do Leveled Readers align with the Science of Reading?

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Efficacy of Phonics Instruction (Post NRP Research)

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Efficacy of Phonics Instruction (Post NRP Research)

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Learn Disabil Res Pract. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 Feb 1.

Published in final edited form as:

doi: 10.1111/ldrp.12024

Abstract

The goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension. Participants in the study were first, second, and third graders, totaling 9 cohorts and over 425,000 participants in all. The pattern of results was consistent across all cohorts: Less than one percent of first- through third-grade students who scored as poor in reading comprehension were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Although poor reading comprehension certainly qualifies as a major problem rather than a myth, the term specific reading comprehension disability is a misnomer: Individuals with problems in reading comprehension that are not attributable to poor word recognition have comprehension problems that are general to language comprehension rather than specific to reading. Implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.

Keywords: reading comprehension, reading disability, specific language impairment

According to the most recently released results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, poor reading comprehension is rampant in the United States. A basic level of proficiency is defined as having "partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade" ( NAEP, 2011, p. 6.). In the US, nearly one in every three fourth-grade students and one in four eighth-grade students is below even this basic level. Only about one out of three students score at the proficient or advanced levels at either grade.

Reading comprehension, which has been defined as gaining an understanding of written text through a process of extracting and constructing meaning ( RAND, 2002), is perhaps the one of the most essential academic skills ( Nash & Snowling, 2006; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000). Although difficulty in decoding the words on a page is a frequent cause of reading comprehension problems, between 10 and 15% of children experience poor comprehension despite maintaining normal levels of reading accuracy and fluency ( Stothard & Hulme, 1995; Yuill & Oakhill, 1991).

One explanation of poor reading comprehension despite normal levels of reading accuracy and fluency is provided by the simple view of reading ( Gough & Tumner, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990), which asserts that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and oral language comprehension skills. According to the simple view of reading, poor reading comprehension despite adequate decoding would be attributed to a problem with oral language.

Relations between decoding, oral language, and reading comprehension have been extensively studied, with decoding and oral language explaining unique variance in reading comprehension (e.g., Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2009). For example, Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, and van den Broek (2008) investigated relations among inference-generation, language skills, vocabulary, and comprehension skills across different media (i.e., television, audio, and written modalities) in a longitudinal study of two cohorts of children 4 to 6 years old and 6 to 8 years old. Their findings indicated that inference-making skills generalized across different media and were highly correlated with reading comprehension; however, children's inference-making skills were inconsistently related to vocabulary and not at all related to other language skills-including word identification. These findings are consistent with other investigations ( Kendeou, Lynch, van den Broek, Espin, White, & Kremer, 2005) and suggest that although decoding and oral language skills are highly correlated with reading comprehension, their development is independent.

Reading comprehension disability, a term than has been used to describe readers who struggle with reading comprehension, has been operationally defined in at least four ways: (a) a discrepancy between reading comprehension and word-level decoding ( Nation & Snowling, 1998; Oakhill, Yuill, & Parkin, 1986), (b) discrepancies between reading comprehension and both decoding and chronological age ( Cain, 2003, 2006; Cain & Oakhill, 1999, 2000, 2006, 2011; Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004; Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000; Cain, Oakhill, Barnes, & Bryant, 2001; Oakhill, Hartt, & Samols, 2005; Weekes, Hamilton, Oakhill, & Holliday, 2008; Yuill & Oakhill, 1988); (c) a discrepancy between reading comprehension and decoding and the requirement that decoding be in the normal range ( Cataldo & Oakhill, 2000), or (d) just scoring below a given percentile on a measure of reading comprehension ( Locascio, Mahone, Eason, & Cutting, 2010; Sesma, Mahone, Levin, Eason, & Cutting, 2009).

Another way to characterize the landscape of reading problems is using a classification system for types of readers adapted from Catts, Adlof, and Weismer (2006). This classification system, which is presented in Table 1 , represents an application of the simple view of reading to reading problems. Adequate readers are characterized by good decoding and comprehension. Poor readers, sometimes referred to as garden-variety poor readers in the research literature ( Stanovich, 1988), are characterized by poor decoding and comprehension. Dyslexia or specific reading disability is characterized by poor decoding but with good comprehension. Specific comprehension disability is characterized by poor comprehension but with good decoding. Students who fall in the quadrant labeled specific comprehension disability were of primary interest in the present study.

Table 1

Good Decoding

Poor Decoding

Good Comprehension

Adequate Reader

Dyslexia (i.e., Specific
Reading Disability)

Poor Comprehension

Specific Comprehension
Disability

Poor Reader

Specifically, the goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension.

Three Competing Hypotheses of Reading Comprehension Disability

Hypothesis 1

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding have comprehension problems that are largely specific to reading. Support for this hypothesis comes from studies that reported minimal or no deficits in vocabulary for students with poor reading comprehension ( Cain, 2006; Nation, Cocksey, Taylor, & Bishop, 2010). One challenge for this hypothesis is that it is difficult to identify a theory of reading that would explain comprehension deficits that are specific only to reading comprehension, as opposed to also affecting oral language comprehension. Although it is conceivable that highly skilled readers such as experienced editors or proof-readers might rely on expertise that has been acquired over the years and is relatively domain specific (Wagner & Stanovich, 1986), this would not seem to be the case for school-age readers. Another difficulty faced by this hypothesis is the substantial body of evidence that individuals who are poor in reading comprehension have various deficits in oral language. We consider this evidence in discussing the second hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding have comprehension problems that are general to oral language comprehension rather than specific to reading. Support for this hypothesis comes from the extensive literature that reports poor performance on a wide variety of measures of oral language for students who are poor at reading comprehension ( Cain & Oakhill, 2006; Cain & Oakhill, 2011; Cain, Oakhill, & Lemmon, 2004; Catts, Adlof, & Weismer, 2006; Clark et al., 2010; Nation, Clarke, Marshall, & Durand, 2004; Nation & Norbury, 2005; Nation & Snowling, 1997, 1998, 2004; Nation, Snowling, & Clarke, 2007; Ricketts, Bishop, & Nation, 2008; Sesma et al., 2009; Snowling & Hulme, 2012; Stothard & Hulme, 1992, 1995). For example, Nation and Snowling (1997) reported that students with poor reading comprehension had difficulty answering questions about a passage regardless of whether there were asked to read the passage or the passage was read to them. The simple view of reading ( Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) provides a theoretical rationale for this hypothesis. It states that individual differences in reading comprehension are determined by the interaction of individual differences in word recognition and oral language comprehension.

Hypothesis 3

Students with poor reading comprehension not attributable to poor decoding represent a mixture of students, many with comprehension problems that are general to oral language and reading but at least some with comprehension problems that are specific to reading. Support for the existence of students whose comprehension problems are general to oral language as well as reading comes from the literature just cited that describes poor performance on various oral language tasks for students with poor reading comprehension. Support for the possible existence of students whose comprehension problems are specific to reading comes from a study of students who were poor at reading comprehension by Catts et al. (2006). The sample from this study was taken from a larger epidemiologic study of language impairments in children ( Tomblin et al., 1997). This made it possible to determine what percentage of the students identified by Catts et al. for their poor reading comprehension met criteria for either specific language impairment (SLI) or nonspecific language impairment (NLI). Criteria for SLI required scoring more than 1.25 standard deviations below the mean on at least two of five language composite scores (vocabulary, grammar, narration, receptive language, expressive language); criteria for NLI added the requirement of a Performance IQ more than 1 standard deviation below the mean ( Tomblin et al., 1997). The results were that only a third of the sample of children with poor reading comprehension met criteria for either SLI or NLI. Similar rates of language impairment for children who were poor at reading comprehension were reported by Nation et al., (2004).

We are not aware of any previous study that is capable of distinguishing these three hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension. It is true that the overwhelming evidence of problems in oral language in children with poor reading comprehension pretty much rules out hypothesis one (i.e., their comprehension problems are specific to reading comprehension). But these studies, which either showed mean differences in oral language skills for students who were good or poor at reading comprehension, or correlations between oral language skills and reading comprehension, cannot distinguish hypotheses two (i.e., comprehension problems are general) and three (i.e., a mixture of general and reading-specific comprehension problems exists). A significant mean difference can be achieved either by a difference that occurs for all members of a sample, or by a difference that occurs for many but not all members of the sample. A significant correlation indicates a group relation between two variables, but does not rule out the existence of a sub-group for whom the overall correlation does not hold.

Being able to distinguish between these three hypotheses has practical implications. For example, if students with poor reading comprehension tend to have comprehension problems that are specific to reading (Hypothesis 1), classroom instruction and/or intervention for these students should focus more on remediating text-based reading skills (e.g., decoding) whereas if students with poor reading comprehension tend to have comprehension problems that are not specific to reading but general to oral language (Hypothesis 2), instruction and intervention would be better suited to target language skills (e.g., oral vocabulary) as opposed to skills that are more specific to text comprehension. In essence, distinguishing the core features of reading comprehension disability would provide teachers with a means of identifying which skills instruction and/or intervention practices should focus on to result in greater gains in student achievement. For students whose comprehension problems are general to reading and oral language, remediation should address language problems that are at a comparably general level. If there are students whose comprehension problems are specific to reading comprehension, a different approach to remediation would be required.

The present study used a large-scale database to address the question of the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension in first, second, and third grades. We approached the data with several specific questions in mind: (1) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension in first, second, and third grades? (2) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension yet maintain adequate levels of decoding? and (3) What is the proportion of students who have poor comprehension and adequate levels of decoding and who also have adequate vocabulary knowledge?

We first identified students who were poor at reading comprehension. Then we determined how many students who were poor at reading comprehension were at least adequate in decoding. Finally, we determined how many students with poor reading comprehension and at least adequate decoding were also at least adequate in the oral language skill of vocabulary. We did this at three grades because of the likelihood that the task of reading comprehension changes over the first few grades of formal schooling.

Method

Participants

Participants represented a cross-sectional study consisting of three cohorts (2003-04, 2004-05, 2005-06 school years) of first (N = 143,672), second (N = 135,943), and third grade students (N = 144,815) attending Reading First schools in Florida. There were slightly more males (52 percent) than females (48 percent). The sample was diverse, with 41 percent white, 32 percent black, 21 percent Hispanic, 4 percent mixed, and 1 percent Hispanic. Approximately 75 percent of participants received free or reduced lunch, and 17 percent were identified as having limited English proficiency. The participants' data were obtained from the state of Florida's Progress Monitoring and Reporting Network (PMRN), which was created to monitor the performance of students in the state's Reading First schools. Reading First was a large, federally funded initiative designed to improve the reading performance of students in high-poverty kindergarten, second-, and third-grade classrooms who were at risk for reading problems. On average, Reading First schools also tended to have lower student achievement. Although the PMRN primarily consists of students from Reading First schools, a small number of non-Reading First schools that voluntarily reported their data were also included in the database.

Measures

The Stanford Achievement Test served as a general measure of comprehension and was administered to all participants across the three grades. Vocabulary knowledge was assessed for first and second graders using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Task; decoding was assessed using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. For third graders, the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test measured vocabulary and decoding skills.

Stanford Achievement Test - Reading Comprehension

The Stanford Achievement Test, Tenth Edition (SAT-10; Harcourt Educational Measurement, 2003) is a group-administered multiple-choice standardized assessment that measures critical reading components including reading comprehension. Reading comprehension was assessed by having students read passages and then answer multiple-choice questions about the passages. Passage questions emphasize a variety of skills, including initial understanding (i.e., explicit comprehension), interpretation (i.e., implicit comprehension), and critical analysis (i.e., a synthesis and evaluation of explicit and implicit information) ( Florida Department of Education, 2006). The SAT-10 has well-established psychometric properties ( Harcourt & Brace, 2004).

Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test - Receptive Vocabulary

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition (PPVT-III; Dunn & Dunn, 1997) is an individually-administered test of receptive vocabulary. Participants were instructed to match a spoken word with one of four presented pictures. Alternate-form reliability exceeds .88 and criterion-related validity coefficients with reading range from .69 to .91 ( Williams & Wang, 1997).

Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills -Nonsense Word Fluency

The Nonword Fluency (NWF) subtest of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills - Sixth Edition (DIBELS; Good & Kaminsky, 2002) is a set of 60 single-syllable pseudo-words (e.g., jav) with short vowel sounds. Examinees are asked to read them aloud, and their score was the number of correct pronunciations in a one-minute time interval. Alternate-form reliability exceeds .8 and criterion-related validity coefficients with reading range from .4 to .9 ( Speece et al., 2003; Good et al., 2004).

Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test - Reading Vocabulary

The Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test - Fourth Edition (GMRT-4; MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dreyer, 2000) is a group-administered standardized assessment that was used to measure reading vocabulary in the third grade sample. Participants were provided with a word embedded in text that was minimally suggestive as to not reveal meaning and were required to select the word or sentence that means the same as the test word. Kuder-Richardson reliability values are high for both forms of the assessment (K-R 20 = .91 - .96; MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dreyer, 2008).

Procedure

Trained school- and district-level assessment teams administered all measures, and no classroom teachers were involved in the assessment process. The assessments were administered during April and May, near the end of the school year.

Results and Discussion

A three-step procedure was used to analyze each cohort and grade. The first step was to identify students who were poor at reading comprehension according to the operational definition of scoring at or below the 5 th percentile on SAT-10 Reading Comprehension. The 5 th percentile was chosen to identify students with relatively severe problems in reading comprehension. The second step was to identify students who were poor at reading comprehension but adequate in decoding. The procedure we used for the second step was different for the third-grade cohorts compared to both the first- and second-grade cohorts. For first and second grade, identified students who were flagged in step one because of poor reading comprehension who also scored at or above the 25 th percentile on DIBELS NWF met the criterion for being poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding. The third and final step was to identify the students who were flagged in step 2 as poor at reading comprehension although adequate in decoding who also were adequate in vocabulary, as determined by scoring at or above the 25 th percentile on the PPVT. At third grade, Gates-MacGinitie Reading Vocabulary served the dual role of a measure of vocabulary and of decoding. Consequently, the second and third steps used for first and second grade were replaced by a single step in third grade of identifying students who were poor at reading comprehension yet who scored at or above the 25 th percentile on Reading Vocabulary.

We recognize that our choice of the 5 th and 25 th percentiles is somewhat arbitrary. We chose a lenient criterion (i.e., 25 th percentile) of adequate decoding and vocabulary to maximize our sensitivity to detect students who were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding and vocabulary. To determine the extent to which the pattern of results was sensitive to the specific percentiles used, we carried out analyses using other percentile ranks (e.g., poor reading comprehension defined by scoring at or below the 10 th percentile, and adequate decoding and vocabulary defined by scoring at or above the 40 th percentile). We found that the overall pattern of results was remarkably similar.

Results are presented in Table 2 . Across the three first-grade cohorts, roughly 3 to 5 percent of students met the criterion for having poor reading comprehension. This makes sense given that our criterion was scoring at or below the 5 th percentile. Less than 1 percent of first-grade students scored both below the 5 th percentile in reading comprehension and above the 25 th percentile in decoding. This indicates that decoding is an important limiting factor on reading comprehension in first grade. Finally, only approximately 0.1 percent of the sample was poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, a result that replicated across the three cohorts.

Table 2

First-Grade Students ( N = 143,671)

Yet Adequate Decoding and
Vocabulary

23 (0.07%)

69 (0.16%)

81 (0.13%)

Second-Grade Students ( N = 135,943)

Yet Adequate Decoding and
Vocabulary

72 (0.22%)

70 (0.17%)

93 (0.15%)

Third-Grade Students ( N = 144,815)

Yet Adequate Decoding and
Vocabulary

34 (0.09%)

137 (0.32%)

138 (0.21%)

For the three second-grade cohorts, there was one immediate difference in the results for second grade compared to first grade. Whereas nearly all first-grade students who were poor in reading comprehension were also poor in decoding, approximately half of the second-grade students who were poor at reading comprehension were adequate in decoding. However, when the additional criterion of being adequate in vocabulary was applied, the results were identical. Less than one percent of the sample was poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, and this result was replicated across the three cohorts.

Turning to third grade, because of the combined second and third steps required by the use of Reading Vocabulary as a measure of both vocabulary and decoding, we cannot separate students who are adequate in decoding from those who were adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Again, the results were remarkably similar. Less than one percent of the sample was poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary, and this result was replicated across the three cohorts.

We converted our percentages to proportions to calculate standard errors and then converted back to percentages. The purpose for doing so was to provide standard errors (i.e., estimates of how much variability would be expected over repeated random sampling from the same population) for our estimates of the percentage of readers who are poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. Combining the three first-grade cohorts, only 0.12 percent of the sample was poor at reading comprehension yet adequate in both decoding and vocabulary. The standard error was 0.01 percent, yielding a confidence interval from 0.11 to 0.13 percent. Comparable values for second and third grade were 0.17 (0.16-0.18) and 0.21 (0.20-0.22) percent respectively. Combining all grades and cohorts yielded an overall percentage of 0.17 (0.16-0.18).

General Discussion

The pattern of results was clear across nine cohorts and three grades, totaling more than 425,000 students in all. Well under one percent of first- through third-grade students were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at both decoding and vocabulary.

Returning to our three hypotheses about the nature of the comprehension problem of students with poor reading comprehension, the results provide support for the hypothesis that the comprehension problem of early elementary students who are poor at reading comprehension tend to have deficits in oral language (i.e., vocabulary knowledge). The hypothesis that students with poor reading comprehension are a mix of individuals, some of whom have comprehension problems that result from limited oral language skills and others of whom have comprehension problems that are specific to reading, was not supported based on the fact that well below one percent of students who were poor at reading comprehension turned out to be adequate at both decoding and vocabulary.

Beginning in second grade, there is evidence of a mixture of different types of students with poor reading comprehension, but the mixture does not concern whether comprehension problems extend to both oral language and reading. Rather, the mixture is of students who are poor at reading comprehension and poor at decoding or poor at reading comprehension despite being adequate at decoding. This result is consistent with evidence from other studies that the transition from first to second grade is marked by a greater influence of oral language skills on reading comprehension ( Kim, Wagner, & Lopez, 2012).

Our results suggest that students with poor reading comprehension who are adequate decoders really have language comprehension problems in the form of poor vocabulary knowledge. We did not have other measures of oral language so we cannot determine whether the oral language problems of the students in our sample extended beyond vocabulary knowledge. However, evidence from other studies suggests that this might be the case. Catts et al. (2006) reported that one third of their students who were poor at reading comprehension yet adequate at decoding met eligibility criteria for language impairment. In addition, they indicated that students who did not meet eligibility for language impairment still had sub-clinical levels of poor language skills. In fact, their poor reading comprehension group scored at the 20 th percentile on vocabulary and at the 30 th percentile in grammatical understanding on average. Similar results were reported by Nation et al. (2004). Both Catts et al. and Nation et al. speculated that sub-clinical levels of language impairment, which they referred to as hidden language impairments because they do not meet typical eligibility criteria, could by themselves, or in combination with other processing deficits, play an important role in reading comprehension difficulties.

Cain and Oakhill (2009) reviewed the literature for three kinds of studies with causal implications about the origin of reading comprehension problems: comprehension-age matched comparison studies, training studies, and longitudinal correlational studies. They concluded that there is evidence for causal influences on reading comprehension for inference making, comprehension monitoring, and understanding story structures. It is unlikely that limitations in inference making, comprehension monitoring, or understanding story structure are specific to reading. Hulme and Snowling (2011) commented, "In our view, many of these other putative causes may reduce to basic limitations in oral language comprehension, which are the direct cause of these children's reading comprehension difficulties" (p. 141).

Our results are consistent with the simple view of reading ( Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) in that nearly all cases of poor reading comprehension were associated with inadequate decoding, oral language (i.e., vocabulary), or both. Our results also support Catt's et al.'s (2006) recommendation to use a framework based on the simple view (see Table 1 ) when assessing and intervening with poor readers. When assessing poor readers, it is important to target oral language and decoding in addition to reading connected text for meaning because students' poor reading comprehension scores alone are not sufficiently informative for the purposes of remediation. It would be important to identify how much of the poor reading comprehension is attributable to poor decoding and to poor oral language skills such as limited vocabulary knowledge.

It is also important to consider developmental differences. Because of the nature of early reading and early reading comprehension assessments, it is likely that students in first grade who are poor in reading comprehension will also be poor in word recognition. It also is the case that difficulty decoding the words on the page is a profound limitation on reading comprehension. However, it is important to assess oral language as well as decoding because although poor decoding may be a limiting factor on reading comprehension, unaddressed deficits in oral language skills for students who have them will limit their reading comprehension even if their decoding skills improve upon intervention. Given this, students with reading comprehension disability would benefit from interventions that incorporate components of reading fluency (i.e., activities requiring simultaneous decoding and text comprehension) ( NICHD, 2000) in addition to components of oral language like vocabulary, semantics, and syntactic understanding (i.e., grammar) ( Snow, Burns, & Griffith, 1998).

It is important to acknowledge several limitations of our study. The population from which our sample was drawn was from Reading First schools. These schools served a larger percentage of low SES students than typical public schools in the US. It is important to replicate this study with samples drawn from non-Reading First schools. Second, our measures were relatively brief and our measure of oral language comprehension was limited to receptive vocabulary. Third, comprehension abilities in the early grades (e.g., first grade) are often assessed using an oral-format as opposed to a written format as used in the present study (i.e., SAT-10) because with a text-based measure, it is difficult to determine whether students are doing poorly because they do not comprehend the passage or because they are unable to read the question. Further, it is important to replicate this study using a broader array or oral language skills to better determine the extensiveness of the oral language comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension yet adequate in decoding.

In conclusion, although poor reading comprehension certainly qualifies as a major problem rather than a myth, the term specific reading comprehension disability is a misnomer: Individuals with problems in reading comprehension that are not attributable to poor word recognition have comprehension problems that are general to language comprehension rather than specific to reading.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant P50 HD052120 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.

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Specific Reading Comprehension Disability: Major Problem, Myth, or Misnomer?

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The goal of the present study was to test three competing hypotheses about the nature of comprehension problems of students who are poor in reading comprehension. Participants in the study were first, second, and third graders, totaling 9 cohorts and ...

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Teaching Reading is Rocket Science- Moats

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Teaching Reading is Rocket Science- Moats

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Scaffolded Reading of Content-Area Texts- Fisher/Frey

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Scaffolded Reading of Content-Area Texts- Fisher/Frey

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If you want to store a large, complex system such as the English spelling system in a finite human brain, you have to organise it well. To organise something, you first need an organising principle...

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Hi everyone! Today I'm going to talk about a multi-sensory spelling strategy called S.O.S. The S.O.S. (Simultaneous Oral Spelling) strategy is a commonly used technique used as one way to help improve a dyslexic reader's ability to spell. It has been researched that by using a multi-sensory approach to practice spelling, the dyslexic learner would have build better phonological awareness, which is a huge weakness. S.O.S. uses visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning modalities all the same time in during spelling dictation. It takes a great deal of focus and concentration, but once children know the steps involved, they can move through the process easily. If you have struggling readers due to weak phonological awareness and are also poor spellers, this strategy may work very well for them.

These are the 6 steps:

The teacher dictates a word to the student(s). Total face contact is necessary so the child sees the formation of the word on the adult's lips.

The student repeats the word back out loud.

Starting with the thumb, the child sounds out the word out loud, holding up one finger for each sound. Make sure they are saying each sound out loud. Step 3 is a critical step. You'll be able to tell which sounds the student hears right away. If a child really struggles with this step, I use a sound slider technique. I have a row of blank Elkonin boxes typed up on a blank card. Then I hand them plastic counters to literally slide one counter up into each box for every sound they hear. Sometimes I see children that can't break beginning or final consonant blends apart, so they need this support.This may be just the thing needed if you have someone with weak phonemic awareness.

Starting with the thumb, students will finger spell the word, holding up one finger for each letter. Make sure they are saying the letters out loud. Again, you'll be able to assess whether your student(s) is applying the phonics and spelling strategies you've taught them. I notice a lot of self talk and reflection during this step. You can really see those wheels turning in their minds! This step tells me whether they need more practice with a particular phonogram or spelling pattern in future lessons.

Now comes the writing part. The student will write the word out loud as they write it on their dictation paper. They see and hear the word as they write, which is one of the hallmarks of multi-sensory teaching.

Finally, the student reads the word out loud. This is an important time for them to do a quick self reflection on whether the word looks right to them. Always place that ownership on the child! One self checking strategy I have my kids use is C.O.P.S.

Here is a sample page that will be included in brand new product,

The Essential Set of Orton-Gillingham Materials.

You may be wondering after reading all these steps two things:

1. How many words do you give? Answer: I usually give anywhere from 8-12 words.

2. How long does this take? Typically, it will take about 10 minutes max.

You the teacher should always make a judgement call about a child's comfort level. If they are really struggling and frustrated, cut the dictation short. That tells you right away adjustments in pacing need to be made.

I am a real stickler for a child following these steps correctly EVERY time. I give gentle reminders, but the minute you let up on one step, I find they develop their own variations. Those habits can be hard to break.

If you enjoyed reading about this strategy and would like to try it out, I've created a set of task cards with the 6 steps written on them, as well as a recording sheet. This product is available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store:

Thank you so much for reading my post today! Have you used the S.O.S. strategy before? I've love to hear from you in the comments below.

The Orton-Gillingham Manual by Anna Gillingham and Bessie Stillman, 1997

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Hi everyone! Today I'm going to talk about a multi-sensory spelling strategy called S.O.S. The S.O.S. (Simultaneous Oral Spelling) strategy is a commonly used technique used as one way to help improve a dyslexic reader's ability to spell. It has been researched

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Supported Reading in Text: Moving Rapidly from Decodable Books to Trade Books - Ebli Reads

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Once the foundation is firm, which can happen quite quickly with a speech first, Say Spell Read, Speech to Print approach to instruction, expanding student's supported and independent exposure to trade books and more complex text is critical to their further growth in reading.

Orthographic mapping, set for variability, statistical learning, and the self-teaching hypothesis all inform the importance of moving quickly to reading in text, supported and then independently, once a foundation of explicit instruction on decoding is in place.

Below are general explanations of the terms in the above paragraph. After you read them, you may be thinking...whaaat??? I certainly can relate! No need to worry; further along in the blog I will explain the terms in the perspective of how they are applied in reading instruction.
Orthographic Mapping
" Orthographic mapping is the process that all successful readers use to become fluent readers. Through orthographic mapping, students use the oral language processing part of their brain to map (connect) the sounds of words they already know (the phonemes) to the letters in a word (the spellings). They then permanently store the connected sounds and letters of words (along with their meaning) as instantly recognizable words, described as "sight vocabulary" or "sight words".

The Role of Orthographic Mapping in Learning to Read, Keys to Literacy, 2020
Set for Variability
"Set for variability is seen as a process that "cleans up" this mismatch between orthography to phonology conversion and word pronunciation. For example, a young reader may decode wasp to rhyme with clasp, however upon recognizing that / wæsp/ is not a real word, she must then flexibly apply different pronunciations for the letter a to arrive at the word, which is in her listening vocabulary."

The Role of Set for Variability in Irregular Word Reading: Word and Child Predictors in Typically Developing Readers and Students At-Risk for Reading Disabilities, NIH, National Library of Medicine, 2019
Statistical Learning
"Implicit methods that draw on the principles of SL (Statistical Learning) can supplement the much-needed explicit instruction that helps children learn to read. This synergy of methods has the potential to spark innovative practices in literacy instruction and remediation provided by educators and clinicians to support typical learners and those with developmental disabilities."

Reading as Statistical Learning, ASHA WIRE, 2018
Self-Teaching Hypothesis
The self-teaching hypothesis, proposed by David Share, is the idea that once learners have established their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and the essential process of segmenting and blending, they begin to apply this knowledge to new and novel words. Proficient decoders can do this because the reader is able to pay attention to the order and identity of letters and how they map onto the phonological representations, or spoken form of the word.

The Self Teaching Hypothesis, Five from Five

When it comes to choosing text for students to read, there is an abundance of discussion and perceptions around the types of books students can and should be reading. With EBLI, we accelerate the advancement of students into reading trade books, including students in Kindergarten. The research on the topics listed above supports this practice.

The anchor to make this possible is students having a sound foundation in matching sounds in words to the letter(s) that represent these sounds in print. This applies to both the basic and complex level of decoding. Basic level refers to deciphering words with 1 letter spellings representing sounds such as 'hop', 'slip', and 'strap'. Complex level refers to words that contain spellings represented by 2, 3, and 4 letters such as she, high, and thought as well as most multi-syllable words such as funny, hurry, and neighbor.

There are two common types of instructional approaches, both of which have differing types of books for students to read that expand on what is being taught.

Traditional phonics instruction encourages the use of decodable text that utilizes only words using spellings that have been explicitly taught. For example, if the class/student has been explicitly taught s, t, a, n, p, and i, they would read books with these types of sentences: 'Pat sat in a tin. Tim naps.'. This provides a lesson to text match though words to be used are limited. Often decodable text is used for several years of instruction.

Decodable book examples:

With EBLI, we solidly support using decodable books for the first several months of Kindergarten and for a small percentage of students initially who require remediation. However, because of the comprehensive, integrated, sounds-first instructional process used in EBLI, transitioning to reading trade books (books children get from the library or a bookstore) typically happens within weeks or, with emerging readers, sometimes months. Even when we do utilize decodable books, there is flexibility in using books with words that utilize spellings that have not yet been explicitly taught. See Marnie Ginsberg's Is There a Third Way? webinar for insights and information on this speech-first, Say, Spell, Read, linguistic phonics approach.

Balanced Literacy instruction advocates for the use of leveled books from the beginning of kindergarten and beyond. In the earliest levels, students are given books that contain a pattern that has a similar sentence structure and repeated words that are memorized, and requires relying on the picture to figure out the other words in the sentence. Because children at the beginning of Kindergarten would not know how to read camel, walk, or horse, they would require the picture cues or guessing as their main strategy to figure out what the words might be.

Level B example:

With EBLI, we strongly discourage the use of Levels A-D for beginning readers as they often result in students creating inefficient habits such as guessing and looking at the picture which lead to misreading. These habits are then difficult to reverse.

If students have been taught how to accurately decode words with simple and complex code, they are able to move to reading a wide variety of text. If leveled books (beyond level D) are available, books Level E or above can be used in supported and/or independent reading. The goal with EBLI is to move all children into trade books as quickly as possible. This prevents hindered learners by the limited word choice and vocabulary in decodable books. It circumvents students from being locked into levels that prevent them advancing and/ or from choosing text that they are interested in or want to read. Guessing, memorizing, or looking at pictures is avoided in all reading, regardless of the type of text.

When foundational instruction on deciphering the English Alphabetic code (decoding) is taught to students they have the foundation to be well on the road to accurate, automatic reading. It is at this point that implicit learning comes more into play.

Once a learner has had explicit instruction, this knowledge will expand through implicit learning. For example, if they've been explicitly taught beam and teach by matching the sounds in the words to the spellings, those words become orthographically mapped (they can read them automatically without needing to sound them out), they will use that information and apply it to other words with the same pattern such as treat, beach, and please.

With explicit instruction in phoneme manipulation (deleting a sound and replacing it with a different sound) and that the same spelling can represent many sounds: ea represents the sound /ee/ in team, /ai/ in great, /e/ in head, they will be able to implicitly apply this to other words and use set for variability to correct when a sound is misread in a word from their vocabulary. For example, if the word 'great' is read as 'greet' in a sentence such as 'You are great', they will have the skill and knowledge to remove the /ee/ sound and replace it with /ai/, possibly with support at first but typically without prompting.

Statistical learning takes place subconsciously, after and in conjunction with explicit instruction. As Mark Seidenberg says in his book Language at the Speed of Sight, "Explicit instruction and conscious effort are the visible tip of the iceberg; statistical learning is the mass below the surface."(pg 87). When learners are provided with solid, explicit instruction that starts with speech and includes the skills and concepts unique to the code used for reading and spelling, students will automatically expand on this information through statistical learning and self-teaching. At this point, a significant decrease in explicit instruction is needed and instead, more reading in text is what will accelerate reading.

Thanks to the above researched facets on how the brain learns to read, students do not need to be confined to controlled text, either decodable or leveled, and the majority of their learning - expanding their phonological, phonic, vocabulary, morphology, and background knowledge - will happen 'under the surface' or intrinsically.

To hear expanded information on this topic and what it looks like to scaffold instruction that quickly leads to accurate, automatic reading in trade books, check out the Supported Reading in Text free companion webinar to this blog.

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Supported Reading in Text: Moving Rapidly from Decodable Books to Trade Books - Ebli Reads

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How long should students continue reading decodable books? Do they need leveled books? When and how can they move to getting a book from the library or store, advancing to reading whatever they want? The importance of reading in connected text is critical to improving reading.

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Phonics is certainly fundamental to reading fluency but there seems to be a missing link.

The phonological component is the primary means for acquiring orthographic representations (Share, 1995). Nonetheless, it is the frequency of exposure to a word and the successful identification of it that develops the word recognition process. If the word is familiar it will be read automatically and if not, the reader will phonologically decode it. What is being built by the reader is not a bank of memorised shapes that they identify and associate with meanings but the capacity to recognise logical and acceptable letter patterns and link them to semantic and morphological knowledge: Reicher's (1969) word superiority effect (More here - https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/10/02/First-there-was-the-word-and-the-word-became-Godbut-what-about-the-letters)

Phonics is certainly fundamental to reading fluency but there seems to be a missing link.

The phonological component is the primary means for acquiring orthographic representations (Share, 1995). Nonetheless, it is the frequency of exposure to a word and the successful identification of it that develops the word recognition process. If the word is familiar it will be read automatically and if not, the reader will phonologically decode it. What is being built by the reader is not a bank of memorised shapes that they identify and associate with meanings but the capacity to recognise logical and acceptable letter patterns and link them to semantic and morphological knowledge: Reicher's (1969) word superiority effect (More here - https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2018/10/02/First-there-was-the-word-and-the-word-became-Godbut-what-about-the-letters)

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Totally automatic - the sticking point between phonics and fluency.

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Phonics is certainly fundamental to reading fluency but there seems to be a missing link. Children learn how to read fluently at different rates and with differing levels of difficulty (Snowling and Hume, 2005) and while some attain fluency relatively easily, others encounter complications and struggle to attain the ability to decode swiftly and automatically.

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Many teachers have already reorganized our leveled libraries because we learned that, according to Fountas and Pinnell , "levels have no place in classroom libraries." Sorting books into bins labeled by theme or topic is time-consuming, but it's not a difficult task. We immediately see that offering students more choice in their reading materials and teaching them to monitor their own reading for accuracy and comprehension is rewarding. However, books at the lower levels, "predictable books," pose a challenge that is not so easily solved.

Problems with predictable books

Predictable books are designed to teach children not to depend on decoding to tackle unfamiliar words - they are purpose-written to teach children to predict, or guess words - so what children do with low-level books is not actually reading. Some students climb up the levels by transitioning away from picture-cues and predictable sentences, but others hold tightly to the guessing strategies that are reinforced by predictable books, and time with these books actually slows their decoding progress. For beginning readers, decodable books provide a more reliable path towards authentic texts, and using them for phonics instruction and fluency practice offers a "helps all, harms none" approach to teaching reading. But what, then, should we do with all our predictable books?!

Rethinking the instructional purpose

To repurpose predictable books for activities other than reading, we need to look at them with fresh eyes and new criteria. More important than the level stamped on the back cover is the contents inside.

We can ask ourselves, What are the features of this individual book that make it a useful teaching tool? A single book may have more than one useful feature and it might be repurposed for any number of language development, writing, or art activities.

We've listed out some of the features you might look for in predictable books and have drafted example activities to help with lesson planning.

1. Re(write) the book

In the Level A book below, the pattern is I can see a [story word].

Using Post-it® tape, cover all words except for the story words. Covering the punctuation and extending the tape on the other side of the story word will allow for more flexibility in student-generated sentences.

Model the activity by thinking aloud about a sentence that describes the first page of the book. Have students repeat back the sentence you say. Using the tools available to students in the classroom (word wall, sound spelling-cards, etc.) have students "help" you write the sentence.

For subsequent pages, encourage students to be creative in their sentences so that they get the opportunity to apply a variety of high-frequency words and phonics to compose a book that is more interesting than the original.

As students develop more independence and confidence with the activity, rewriting books can become a Literacy Center or independent activity.

Post-it® tape is removable, so the same book can be used by multiple students. Different versions of the same book may make for a fun series in Author's Chair .

2. That's a different story

Depending on your students' writing abilities, you can invite them to dictate a story they infer from the pictures or they can rewrite the book themselves.

To begin the lesson, read the book aloud while showing the pictures. (Consider using a document camera to ensure all students can see.) At the end of the story, have students turn to a partner to talk about what happened in the story. Allow enough time for the partner discussion so that students feel compelled to elaborate.

Allow a few students to share their thinking with the whole class and, as they do, flip to the illustrations that correspond with what the volunteers share. Point out features of the illustrations that support what students say.

Explain that most of what students said about the book came from the illustrations because the words don't do very much to help the story. Tell students that the book deserves new words and that they are going to decide what the words will be.

For dictation, display the first illustration and ask students to turn and talk with a partner to tell what happened (or is happening) in the picture. Select one student to share with the class as you transcribe what they say. You can take the dictation on Post-it® notes directly in the book or write on chart-paper and invite students to help you sound out or write some of the words. Repeat this procedure for the remaining illustrations. Then, read the newly written story aloud to the class.

If your students are able to complete the writing independently, you can give them booklets to write in (with or without photocopied illustrations) or simply a sheet of lined paper. To scaffold the activity, you can display the first page of the book and model where in the booklet or on the sheet of paper students will write. The whole class can write one story, students can be encouraged to write their own versions, or a combination of both (some students writing independently, others engaging in guided writing) might be best to address the various writing abilities of your students. Depending on how much time is available after the activity, students can share what they wrote for one page or for their whole book.

3. What's that you said?

To introduce this activity, read the book aloud and allow students time to see each illustration. (Projecting the book with a doc cam works well for this.) Then, flip back to the first illustration and ask students to share what they notice about the picture.

Once a few volunteers have had time to share their observations, prompt students to think about what the characters might be saying or thinking. For example, you might say "Taco is saying ' Woof!,' but I wonder what the squirrel is saying."

As a volunteer shares an idea, record the thought inside a speech bubble drawn on a Post-it® note. Explain the function of a speech bubble - it lets the reader see the exact words a character is saying so they can imagine the conversation. Position the speech bubble on the picture and then reread the page.

For subsequent pages, invite students to share what they believe a character might be saying. You can have them dictate to you or they can make their own speech bubbles on Post-it® notes. You might even consider having them write directly in photocopies of books.

Depending on students' level of language development and experience with comic-style texts, you might use the opportunity to teach the difference between speech and thought bubbles and then incorporate thought bubbles into the activity.

4. Putting the parts (of speech) together

Multiple books on the same topic or with similar predictable patterns make good use of a GLAD Sentence Patterning chart because the same chart can be added to during a series of lessons.

Both books titled At the Park are Level A, but the language demands of the two texts are quite different. One book follows the pattern I can [simple verb], where the present tense verb is the story word. In the other book, the story words are gerunds (swinging, riding) that are part of verb phrases (am swinging, am riding) and the verb phrase is followed by the prepositional phrase "at the park."

Modeling how to add on to simple sentences can help students construct more precise sentences both orally and in their writing.

The first lesson

Using a GLAD sentence patterning chart, show students the parts of the sentences that remain the same from page to page (in At the Park the noun and subject of the sentence, I, is constant) and the parts that change from page to page (the verbs of At the Park change; swing, ride, kick).
Sentence patterning chart
Have students share ideas for how they can add to the simple sentences. For some books, it might make sense to add adjectives or adverbs. At the Park works well for exploring prepositional phrases ("with my dad", "on my bike" "off the play structure.")

Record students' ideas on the sentence patterning chart (see above) and/or use Post-it® notes to add directly to the book (see below).

Students can use the Sentence Patterning Chart to say, write, and draw fun new sentences. A student volunteer can use a Post-it® note in each column to flag the components of the chart that they would like to use and then speak their complete sentence aloud. For example, students might construct:
I jump with my dad.
I ride off the play structure.
I slide on my bike.
The subsequent lesson

Display another book on the same topic or with a similar grammatical structure. Have students share the similarities they see between the two books.

If the sentences in the second book are more complex than the first, point out and explain the differences. For example, in the second version of At the Park, the prepositional phrase ["at the park"] remains the same, but on each page there is a new gerund [swinging, riding, jumping]. Explain that the verbs have the ending -ing because they come after the word "am."

Provide the rationale for the grammatical structure, for example ,"In this book, the boy tells what he does at the park at the same time he is doing it."

Read the book aloud while adding the new words to the Sentence Patterning Chart. Students can then use any grammatical combination from the chart to say, write, and draw new sentences.
I am jumping with my dad.
I am hiding behind the tree.
I am sliding off the play structure.
The new sentences can be used to create a class book or each student might write their own to add to the classroom library.

5. Take two

Sentence combining works best with books that have paired sentences, usually two parallel sentences found on each spread or page.

In the Level A book Friends, the paired sentences are across each spread:

Orson has a big [story word]. Taco has a little [story word].

In the Level B book, Mom and Kayla, the paired sentences are on a single page:

Mom has a [story word]. Kayla has a [story word], too.

Determine the grammatical construction you'd like to teach to build upon your students' oral or written abilities.

Examples
Adding a conjunction to link the sentences

Simple: Orson has a big [story word] and Taco has a little [story word].

Complex: Both dogs have [plural story word], but Orson's is big and Taco's is little.

Replacing a repeated noun with a prop word

Orson has a big [story word] and Taco has a little one.
Adding pronouns to generalize

Simple: Both of them have [plural story word].

Complex: Both of them have [plural story word], but they are different sizes.

Write the sentence frame on a sentence strip or chart paper, but do not display it in the first steps of the lesson.

Begin the lesson

Show a page or spread from the predictable book. Point to and read a sentence pair aloud.
"Orson has a big collar." "Taco has a little collar."
Have students discuss what is the same and what is different about the two sentences. You might write down what students share.
For example: "Both sentences talk about dogs and their collars." "Both sentences say, '__ has a __.'" "One sentence is about the big dog and the other is about the little one."
Model by thinking aloud about how to combine the two sentences.

Write your combined sentence on the board and have students chorally recite the sentence with you, as you point to the words.

Discuss whether and how the combined sentence retains the meaning of the original sentences.

Display the sentence frame and have students read it chorally with you.

Show a new spread in the predictable book and invite a student to complete the sentence frame with the new story word(s).

Repeat this procedure until all students have had sufficient practice and can say or write a sentence with the grammatical construction you've taught.

6. A big improvement

Prepare the text prior to your lesson by writing the questions you will ask and the engagement strategies you will use on Post-it® notes, which you can place on the appropriate pages of the book.

White Post-it® tape can be used to cover over punctuation on pages later in the book or on student copies so that students have the opportunity to discuss marks that are "missing" on a page, and to add the feature(s) to the book with a pen. Or you can unveil the feature by peeling off the tape to reveal punctuation beneath.

During the lesson

Read the first page aloud to students and ask questions that will allow them to apply what they know about spoken language before they see the text.

For example, with the first page of ( Ant Can't, above) you could ask " What did the bird say? What did the ant say? How do you know? "

On the next page (below), you can draw students' attention to reviewing previously taught written conventions, by asking questions such as " What does bee ask? What endmark is used to show there's a question? "

Then you can extend the learning by pointing out the new convention you plan to teach: " How do we know Ant is talking? What punctuation is used around Ant's words? "

The remaining pages of the text can be used to reinforce the convention you'd like to see students' apply to their own writing.

For the last page or two of the predictable book, you may want to have students add the "missing" punctuation to the page by writing on the Post-it tape you placed prior to the lesson. Students can tell what is "missing" on the page and then you can have a volunteer pull off the Post-it® tape in a grand reveal.

To support application of the convention, you may want to give students a photocopy of a page or two of the book so each child can "write in the book" before they then look in their own written pieces for opportunities to apply the convention.

7. You can spell that again!

For this activity, the best texts to use have a single sentence per page and a pattern that includes recently taught high-frequency words.

Use small Post-it® notes, or cut larger ones down to size, so that the targeted words can be covered without obscuring the rest of the text.

The targeted words will be slightly visible, which will offer a scaffold for when students write the words.

Once they have been taught the procedure, students can complete each step of the lesson during Literacy Centers. A single student can do all the steps for a single book, or children at the center can rotate books after each step.
When you first introduce the activity, explain the routine by briefly modeling each of the steps:
1. Look carefully at each page. If you see one of your targeted words, say the word and cover it with a Post-it® note.

2. Optional: (Swap books with a classmate when you are both done covering your target words.)

3. You can peek under the Post-it® notes if you aren't sure about the word, but say the word and its letters as you write: " Look, L-o-o-k, Look." " My, m-y, my. "
After you have written all the targeted words in the book:
4. Optional: (Swap books with a classmate when you are both finished writing your target words.)

5. Pull off the Post-it® notes, reading each one aloud.

6. Optional: Organize the Post-it® notes to graph the high-frequency words and determine which word appeared most frequently.

8. Turn the page

Books that have a cumulative pattern work best for this activity because they provide many opportunities for repetition. For example, in the Level A book, Waking Up!, each page introduces a new farm animal and all previously introduced animals appear in the background.

To begin the activity, read the first page aloud, show the accompanying picture. You might seize the opportunity to have students share the word for the image in their home language. Then, introduce the targeted English vocabulary word. With the book Waking Up!, you might point to the picture, and have them repeat after you, " cow. "

Then, introduce a sentence frame and have the students finish the frame with the targeted vocabulary. For example, " Here is the cow. "

Then, show the next page of the book. Ask a question, such as " Where is the cow?" and invite a student to point to the picture and say the sentence they practiced aloud, " Here is the cow. "

Repeat the procedure for subsequent pages to ensure students are confident saying the sentence.

Then, flip back in the book to introduce the second vocabulary word on the first page it appears and introduce the word. You might use the same sentence frame, " Here is the pig." or, if students are ready, introduce a new frame, " Look at the pig."

Then, invite a student to repeat the new sentence while pointing to the page.

Prompt for the previous sentence by asking a question like, " Where is the cow? "

As you share the rest of the book, you can alternate your prompts - " Where is the cow?" " Do you see a pig? " - and add in new vocabulary and sentence frames to ensure students respond in complete sentences and extend their language as they are ready.

9. Picture this!

Low-level books (A-D) that are focused on themes your class is already studying, may work well for this activity because the pictures tend to be easy to identify.

With younger students learning about modes of transportation, you might select topic-related words less likely to be in students' spoken vocabulary, such as trolley or snowmobile. With older students studying a similar topic, you might also look for opportunities to teach morphology using words students can read, such as unicycle, bicycle, and tricycle, which include the meaningful word parts uni-, bi-, tri-, and cycle.

Depending on your students' language skills, you might provide sentence frames to have them describe the targeted vocabulary words or have them use the picture and their knowledge of the object to co-construct a definition. For example, " A bicycle has two wheels and you peddle to make the bike move. "

10. A (labeled) picture is worth a thousand words

Students can practice their fine motor skills while cutting out pictures and words from the books. Once they have cut out the items they want for their collage, you or a volunteer can check to ensure that the work has been done carefully.

Then, students can be given glue sticks and blank paper to finish their collages.

When students have finished their pieces, you might invite them to talk about their creations in an "Artist's Chair" or with partners. Discussing labelled collages offers an opportunity to use academic sentence frames such as:

" The theme I chose is ___. "

" I selected __ because __. "

" Something I appreciate about your work is __. "

Onward and upward!

Predictable books are not the best tool for teaching students how to read, but they can be put to good use in class discussions, ELD or writing lessons, literacy centers, and art. The activities we've shared are just a starting place and we'd love to hear what other ideas you have for using predictable books.

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What Can I Do With All These Predictable Books?

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Many teachers have already reorganized our leveled libraries because we learned that, according to Fountas and Pinnell , "levels have no place in classroom libraries." Sorting books into bins labeled by theme or topic is time-consuming, but it's not a difficult task.

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Collection of Infographics about Phonics

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Collection of Infographics about Phonics

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Phonics explained infographics - Phonic Books

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Some easy-to-understand infographics to explain some of the common terms and phrases used in the teaching of Phonics.

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Many children with literacy difficulties find it hard to blend phonemes together. Word Chains games allow a child to focus on sounds without the distraction of graphemes, as each sound is represented by a counter. A single phoneme is changed and the child 're-blends' to make a new word. The Word Chain lists progress from simple CVC words, like 'dog' and 'cat', to more complex words with initial and final blends, like 'stand' and 'crisp'. This allows targeted practice of a very specific skill in just a few minutes.

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Blending Phonemes - Word Chains - Dyslexic Logic

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Resources and word-chains (also called word ladders or word chains) to support teaching blending skills for children with poor phonological awareness, from basic CVC blends to CCVCC words with long and short medial vowels.

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Why Word Chaining Should Be A Part Of Every Literacy Lesson

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Word chaining and the building of words should be a part of every literacy lesson for beginning readers. When students build words based on the sound symbols explicitly taught, they engage in the orthographic mapping process.

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Ten Important Research Findings by Wiley Blevins

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Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing- Engaging all Language Skill Areas in Reading Instruction

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Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing- Engaging all Language Skill Areas in Reading Instruction

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Iowa Reading Reseach Center - The University of Iowa

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Read It, Say It, Hear It, Write It: Instructional Routines That Engage the Four Language Skill Areas

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It is vital that all literacy instructional routines include synthetic and analytic practice activities that engage all four language skill areas.

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Receptive and Expressive Language Skills in Reading Instruction

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Receptive and Expressive Language Skills in Reading Instruction

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The eventual decline of the Roman empire resulted in a waning of the dominance of Latin across Europe as it retreated to Rome along with its armies, its legislators and its administrators. Local, tribal languages that had been submerged but not overwhelmed by the Roman tongue were free to re-emerge, expand and dilute the dominance of Latin (Crystal, 1995).

Their time in the sun was, nonetheless, short-lived. The retreat of a dominant, longstanding and stable military and administrative superpower created power vacuums across northern Europe. These vacuums were filled by new, aggressive, expansionist military powers, and with their successful military victories came their languages and a further diluting influence on regenerating local tongues.

The development of English, its vast lexicon, the difficulties encoding its diverse cocktail of sounds derived from many languages, hundreds of years of multifarious, random and unaccountable spellings all shoehorned into an alphabetic code of just twenty-six symbols have resulted in a multi-layered, phonetic complexity that can appear chaotic and bewildering. Modern English has the most complex phonetic code of any alphabetic language (McGuinness, 1997). It takes a child, on average, three and a half years to learn to decode English compared to the four months it takes to learn to decode the almost entirely phonetic languages of Italian and Spanish (Dehaene, 2016). Italy reports considerably fewer cases of dyslexia and Italians who struggle with reading are far advanced in decoding their language when compared to their English-speaking counterparts (Paulesu, 2001). This complexity is almost entirely a result of indiscriminate twists of historical fate.

So where did it all go wrong? If the Romans had remained in Britain, today we may well be speaking something close to the phonetically logical modern Italian. However, in the fifth century, with the northern tribes of the Scots and the Picts rampaging southwards, the Britons appealed to the Romans for protection. The Romans, who had deserted Britain to protect Rome from their own barbarian invasion had no capacity or resources for assistance. The Celtic tribes then appealed to the nations of north-eastern Europe and received support from the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes. These nations fulfilled their military brief; and some. Liking what they found in fertile Britain, they decided to remain, and in the words of the Venerable Bede (2013, p46) they '...began to increase so much that they became terrible to the natives themselves that had invited them.' The Celtic tribes once again found themselves dominated by a militarily superior and administratively adept interloper. The Britons fought back, but the imposition of Anglo-Saxon power was never in doubt as wave after wave of immigrants crossed the North Sea to join the fight. Over a period of a hundred years the Germanic tribes had settled as far north as the highlands and had either destroyed or pushed back to the very edges of the island the Celtic tribes. The invaders now referred to the Celts as 'foreigners' (Crystal, 1995). The Celts referred to all of the invaders with the moniker 'Saxons'. These Saxons brought with them a language that would subsume and dominate the reviving Celtic tongue. By the end of the fifth century the foundation was established for the emergence of the English language (Crystal, 1995).

The encoding of Anglo-Saxon had been achieved through a runic alphabet that the invaders brought with them from Europe (Crystal, 2012). This was perfectly serviceable until the arrival of Augustine and the Roman Christian missionaries who required the recording of letters, administrative documents, prayers and homilies in this new language they encountered (Crystal, 2012). The runic alphabet, with its associations with mysticism, charms and pagan practices was anathema to the purposes of these early Christian monks. They decided to use the Roman alphabet with its twenty-three letters which had served the Old World more than adequately for many hundreds of years (Wolman, 2014). And here is where the problems begin.

Anglo-Saxon had at least thirty-seven phonemes. To enable the encoding and decoding of these sounds either required more letters, a utilisation of a combination of letters to represent phonemes or some letters representing more than one sound (Crystal, 2014). The early Christian monks were not linguists and they decided to utilise all of the strategies, adding four new letters to the Roman alphabet to accommodate the dichotomy of sound to symbol correspondence. Thus, two of the fundamental weaknesses and complexities of decoding modern English were embedded into Old English: some letters represented more than one sound and some sounds could be represented by more than one letter (McGuiness, 1999).

Nonetheless, although complex, the system was functional and by the ninth century, through the rise of the Kingdom of Wessex in southern England under Alfred the Great, had started to gain a standardised traction (Grant, 1986). Following Alfred's defeat of the Danes his power was assured. But Alfred was more than a great warrior. Stung by the loss of a linguistic heritage through the Vikings' attempts to destroy the developing English language by book-burning, Alfred endeavoured to have the great written works translated into English (Smyth, 1995). Furthermore, he made a commitment to education in the language and of the language, writing that young freemen in England should be taught 'how to read written English well' (Bragg, 2011). As a result, the monks at Alfred's power base in Winchester translated a multitude of religious and legal writings into the evolving language simultaneously standardising much of the orthography and logography of Old English (Crystal, 2014).

By the time Harold Godwinson was crowned King in 1066, Anglo Saxon English was well-established across much of what is England today. It was a largely phonetic language that followed the generalised rule of sound to spelling correspondence. As a result, it was relatively simple to decode and encode. Had modern English evolved directly from it, children today would find learning to read English a far simpler and faster proposition. However, another twist of historical linguistic fate awaited the language.

The Normans invaded.

Perhaps if Harold had not had to defeat the Vikings at the battle of Stamford Bridge and march two hundred and fifty miles south in two weeks, his army would have had the energy to repel the Normans (Wolman,2014), and we would today teach our children to decode a phonetic language in the four months it takes the Finns to teach their children (Dehaene, 2006). However, Harold was defeated, William I was crowned king, French became the official language of England and the seeds of linguistic complexity were sown thus ensuring it would take English speaking children in the twenty-first century three and a half years to learn to decode the most complicated alphabetic language on earth (Dehaene, 2006).

Had French subsumed and subjugated the language of Old English in the manner that the Normans overwhelmed the Saxons, then French would have become the universally spoken tongue and much phonetic complexity would have been avoided. But the Norman conquerors were happy to keep State, Church and people separate and, in the centuries following the Norman conquest, England became a trilingual country (Crystal, 2012). French was the language of law and administration; Latin the language of the Church and English the language of the street and the tavern (Bragg, 2003). As a result, Old English, the language of the oppressed, started to evolve and shift as it absorbed and mutated thousands of French words and their spellings. The result was a subverted but enriched language that became almost unrecognisable from Old English (Wolman, 2014); a language that, nonetheless remained the language of the oppressed. With such low social status, the language stood little chance of survival.

Upward social mobility for English came in the form of a flea.

In 1350 almost a third of the population of England were wiped out by the Black Death (Gottfried, 2010). Areas of high population density, towns and church communities suffered particularly with the result that the upper echelons of society and church were decimated. The majority of survivors were those living in isolation in rural settings: the dregs of society (Bragg, 2003); and they spoke English. This had a two-fold influence on the integration of English into the ruling classes. Firstly, the Norman masters began taking English-speaking wives whose children learned both English and French. Secondly, the English-speaking peripheral class started to buy and farm the cheap land that flooded the market as a result of the mass mortality (Bragg, 2003). As a consequence, English first leaked into the ruling class and then flooded into the upper strata of society. By the late fourteenth century Richard II was conducting state affairs in English, Chaucer had written the bestselling Canterbury Tales in English and in 1385 John de Wycliffe translated the Bible into the language. English was no longer the vulgar language of the underclass. It was here to stay.

The language gained further traction through its adoption and use by the Chancery court at Westminster (Wolman, 2014) who needed to communicate the formal orders of the King's court in the language of those for whom it was intended: English. This more formal utilisation required a greater standardisation of the language and a more consistent orthography to ensure the documentation was imbued with sufficient regal authority and for ease of replication. That meant that a far greater regularity in the spelling of words was required; 'receive' had forty alternative iterations (Scragg, 2011). This was the start of formalisation of the encoding of this mongrel of a language and the essence of its modern complex code. These decisions were, nonetheless, not being made by linguists with an understanding of the etymology of the words they were standardising, but by overworked scribes seeking quick solutions often based on personal whim and anecdotal evidence (Crystal, 2014). Nonetheless, the amount of documentation available for reading was minimal as it was all hand-written, and, as a result, very few members of society had any course to read. Whilst this was the case, standardisation of the encoding of Middle English was within the control of a few influential scribes in Westminster. They were not to hold the power for long.

Had the standardisation of English spelling remained in the hands of these few scribes then a regularity may have evolved rapidly, but when William Caxton imported Guttenberg's printing technology to London in the late fifteenth century the Middle English alphabetic code was thrown into chaos (Barber, Beal and Shaw, 2013).

Writing could now be reproduced on an industrial scale by the setting of type and its printing on to paper. Thus, decisions as to spelling and orthography fell to the typesetters. Their focus was not on accuracy but on speed, economy and the aesthetic of the page (Wolman, 2014). Readers preferred justified type which meant type-setters often omitted letters at the end of a line to ensure visual appeal (Wolman, 2014). Furthermore, the vast majority of the early typesetters were Flemish immigrants who had English as a second or third language. With pronunciation of words varying across counties and districts, and setters working at speed with tiny metal type, the same word could be spelled differently on the same page (Barber, Beal and Shaw, 2013). Caxton, as the forerunner, became the arbiter of standardised spelling, but he was not a linguist and took a 'best fit' approach to the crystallisation of the orthography. He did, nonetheless, contribute greatly to the initial calibration of English spelling (Bragg, 2003).

As books became more widely available and read among a growing literate class, printing presses sprung up in all major towns and English spelling became more and more erratic further aggravated by the multiplicity of regional accents and thus pronunciation. This was exacerbated by the renaissance and the view that Latin and French etymology, with their richer literary traditions and history, were superior to middle English. Thus, the Latin roots of some words were preferred over their Saxon derivations. Old English differentiated long and short vowel sounds through double consonants preceding the vowel, but Latin roots (with single letter to sound correspondence) did not require the differentiation (Crystal, 2014). Numerous scribes and printers thus eschewed the parvenu double consonant in preference to the 'superior' single consonant. The need for the untangling of the English alphabetic code became more and more urgent and demanded.

Standardisation of spelling and pronunciation was attempted but with little success. In 1569 London lawyer John Hart published his orthography in an attempt to establish a consistency in spelling. Privileging pronunciation, he attempted to classify 'proper speech', but his attempts gained little traction as 'proper' English was not the English spoken by many in the country and hence ignored. Without authority, standardisation could never tame the shape-shifting beast that was the English language. The power was in the hands of the printers and they were beholden to their owners and their readers. As such, the sixteenth century and seventeenth century language shapers had no institutional authority, unlike the French and Italians who had academies to authorise and solidify spelling and pronunciation. John Dryden's attempts to establish consistency through the creation of an English academy failed and by the eighteenth century the English language was, in the words of Samuel Johnson (2016, p134), 'in a state of anarchy'. It was the work of this remarkable scholar that set the English language on the road to alphabetic consistency, tethered the language with a hawser of standardisation and established the regularity required for effective instruction. In terms of today's pedagogy relating to the teaching of the reading and writing of English it was a Copernican moment.

Johnson's stratagem had three strands: to standardise spelling; to standardise pronunciation and to provide categorical definitions of words. Untangling the complexities of the phonic coding that had erupted over the centuries and simplifying it to ensure the language could be easily deciphered and taught was not a priority. It was not even a consideration. When Johnson was uncertain of a standardised spelling, he always reverted to the original derivation and etymological root of the word rather than to its simplest phonic form. Nonetheless, this was at least a consistent approach. In eight years, Johnson produced a dictionary containing 43,000 words; an undertaking that took a cadre of scholars at the French academy eighty years to achieve with their language. English today, spoken, read and written across the world, has drifted remarkably little since then. The English phonic code, although excruciatingly complex, convoluted and complicated had at last been anchored. It would take many more years before it was identified, acknowledged, unravelled, stratified and presented in a format that could ensure that it could be effectively taught.

The eventual decline of the Roman empire resulted in a waning of the dominance of Latin across Europe as it retreated to Rome along with its armies, its legislators and its administrators. Local, tribal languages that had been submerged but not overwhelmed by the Roman tongue were free to re-emerge, expand and dilute the dominance of Latin (Crystal, 1995).

Their time in the sun was, nonetheless, short-lived. The retreat of a dominant, longstanding and stable military and administrative superpower created power vacuums across northern Europe. These vacuums were filled by new, aggressive, expansionist military powers, and with their successful military victories came their languages and a further diluting influence on regenerating local tongues.

The development of English, its vast lexicon, the difficulties encoding its diverse cocktail of sounds derived from many languages, hundreds of years of multifarious, random and unaccountable spellings all shoehorned into an alphabetic code of just twenty-six symbols have resulted in a multi-layered, phonetic complexity that can appear chaotic and bewildering. Modern English has the most complex phonetic code of any alphabetic language (McGuinness, 1997). It takes a child, on average, three and a half years to learn to decode English compared to the four months it takes to learn to decode the almost entirely phonetic languages of Italian and Spanish (Dehaene, 2016). Italy reports considerably fewer cases of dyslexia and Italians who struggle with reading are far advanced in decoding their language when compared to their English-speaking counterparts (Paulesu, 2001). This complexity is almost entirely a result of indiscriminate twists of historical fate.

So where did it all go wrong? If the Romans had remained in Britain, today we may well be speaking something close to the phonetically logical modern Italian. However, in the fifth century, with the northern tribes of the Scots and the Picts rampaging southwards, the Britons appealed to the Romans for protection. The Romans, who had deserted Britain to protect Rome from their own barbarian invasion had no capacity or resources for assistance. The Celtic tribes then appealed to the nations of north-eastern Europe and received support from the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes. These nations fulfilled their military brief; and some. Liking what they found in fertile Britain, they decided to remain, and in the words of the Venerable Bede (2013, p46) they '...began to increase so much that they became terrible to the natives themselves that had invited them.' The Celtic tribes once again found themselves dominated by a militarily superior and administratively adept interloper. The Britons fought back, but the imposition of Anglo-Saxon power was never in doubt as wave after wave of immigrants crossed the North Sea to join the fight. Over a period of a hundred years the Germanic tribes had settled as far north as the highlands and had either destroyed or pushed back to the very edges of the island the Celtic tribes. The invaders now referred to the Celts as 'foreigners' (Crystal, 1995). The Celts referred to all of the invaders with the moniker 'Saxons'. These Saxons brought with them a language that would subsume and dominate the reviving Celtic tongue. By the end of the fifth century the foundation was established for the emergence of the English language (Crystal, 1995).

The encoding of Anglo-Saxon had been achieved through a runic alphabet that the invaders brought with them from Europe (Crystal, 2012). This was perfectly serviceable until the arrival of Augustine and the Roman Christian missionaries who required the recording of letters, administrative documents, prayers and homilies in this new language they encountered (Crystal, 2012). The runic alphabet, with its associations with mysticism, charms and pagan practices was anathema to the purposes of these early Christian monks. They decided to use the Roman alphabet with its twenty-three letters which had served the Old World more than adequately for many hundreds of years (Wolman, 2014). And here is where the problems begin.

Anglo-Saxon had at least thirty-seven phonemes. To enable the encoding and decoding of these sounds either required more letters, a utilisation of a combination of letters to represent phonemes or some letters representing more than one sound (Crystal, 2014). The early Christian monks were not linguists and they decided to utilise all of the strategies, adding four new letters to the Roman alphabet to accommodate the dichotomy of sound to symbol correspondence. Thus, two of the fundamental weaknesses and complexities of decoding modern English were embedded into Old English: some letters represented more than one sound and some sounds could be represented by more than one letter (McGuiness, 1999).

Nonetheless, although complex, the system was functional and by the ninth century, through the rise of the Kingdom of Wessex in southern England under Alfred the Great, had started to gain a standardised traction (Grant, 1986). Following Alfred's defeat of the Danes his power was assured. But Alfred was more than a great warrior. Stung by the loss of a linguistic heritage through the Vikings' attempts to destroy the developing English language by book-burning, Alfred endeavoured to have the great written works translated into English (Smyth, 1995). Furthermore, he made a commitment to education in the language and of the language, writing that young freemen in England should be taught 'how to read written English well' (Bragg, 2011). As a result, the monks at Alfred's power base in Winchester translated a multitude of religious and legal writings into the evolving language simultaneously standardising much of the orthography and logography of Old English (Crystal, 2014).

By the time Harold Godwinson was crowned King in 1066, Anglo Saxon English was well-established across much of what is England today. It was a largely phonetic language that followed the generalised rule of sound to spelling correspondence. As a result, it was relatively simple to decode and encode. Had modern English evolved directly from it, children today would find learning to read English a far simpler and faster proposition. However, another twist of historical linguistic fate awaited the language.

The Normans invaded.

Perhaps if Harold had not had to defeat the Vikings at the battle of Stamford Bridge and march two hundred and fifty miles south in two weeks, his army would have had the energy to repel the Normans (Wolman,2014), and we would today teach our children to decode a phonetic language in the four months it takes the Finns to teach their children (Dehaene, 2006). However, Harold was defeated, William I was crowned king, French became the official language of England and the seeds of linguistic complexity were sown thus ensuring it would take English speaking children in the twenty-first century three and a half years to learn to decode the most complicated alphabetic language on earth (Dehaene, 2006).

Had French subsumed and subjugated the language of Old English in the manner that the Normans overwhelmed the Saxons, then French would have become the universally spoken tongue and much phonetic complexity would have been avoided. But the Norman conquerors were happy to keep State, Church and people separate and, in the centuries following the Norman conquest, England became a trilingual country (Crystal, 2012). French was the language of law and administration; Latin the language of the Church and English the language of the street and the tavern (Bragg, 2003). As a result, Old English, the language of the oppressed, started to evolve and shift as it absorbed and mutated thousands of French words and their spellings. The result was a subverted but enriched language that became almost unrecognisable from Old English (Wolman, 2014); a language that, nonetheless remained the language of the oppressed. With such low social status, the language stood little chance of survival.

Upward social mobility for English came in the form of a flea.

In 1350 almost a third of the population of England were wiped out by the Black Death (Gottfried, 2010). Areas of high population density, towns and church communities suffered particularly with the result that the upper echelons of society and church were decimated. The majority of survivors were those living in isolation in rural settings: the dregs of society (Bragg, 2003); and they spoke English. This had a two-fold influence on the integration of English into the ruling classes. Firstly, the Norman masters began taking English-speaking wives whose children learned both English and French. Secondly, the English-speaking peripheral class started to buy and farm the cheap land that flooded the market as a result of the mass mortality (Bragg, 2003). As a consequence, English first leaked into the ruling class and then flooded into the upper strata of society. By the late fourteenth century Richard II was conducting state affairs in English, Chaucer had written the bestselling Canterbury Tales in English and in 1385 John de Wycliffe translated the Bible into the language. English was no longer the vulgar language of the underclass. It was here to stay.

The language gained further traction through its adoption and use by the Chancery court at Westminster (Wolman, 2014) who needed to communicate the formal orders of the King's court in the language of those for whom it was intended: English. This more formal utilisation required a greater standardisation of the language and a more consistent orthography to ensure the documentation was imbued with sufficient regal authority and for ease of replication. That meant that a far greater regularity in the spelling of words was required; 'receive' had forty alternative iterations (Scragg, 2011). This was the start of formalisation of the encoding of this mongrel of a language and the essence of its modern complex code. These decisions were, nonetheless, not being made by linguists with an understanding of the etymology of the words they were standardising, but by overworked scribes seeking quick solutions often based on personal whim and anecdotal evidence (Crystal, 2014). Nonetheless, the amount of documentation available for reading was minimal as it was all hand-written, and, as a result, very few members of society had any course to read. Whilst this was the case, standardisation of the encoding of Middle English was within the control of a few influential scribes in Westminster. They were not to hold the power for long.

Had the standardisation of English spelling remained in the hands of these few scribes then a regularity may have evolved rapidly, but when William Caxton imported Guttenberg's printing technology to London in the late fifteenth century the Middle English alphabetic code was thrown into chaos (Barber, Beal and Shaw, 2013).

Writing could now be reproduced on an industrial scale by the setting of type and its printing on to paper. Thus, decisions as to spelling and orthography fell to the typesetters. Their focus was not on accuracy but on speed, economy and the aesthetic of the page (Wolman, 2014). Readers preferred justified type which meant type-setters often omitted letters at the end of a line to ensure visual appeal (Wolman, 2014). Furthermore, the vast majority of the early typesetters were Flemish immigrants who had English as a second or third language. With pronunciation of words varying across counties and districts, and setters working at speed with tiny metal type, the same word could be spelled differently on the same page (Barber, Beal and Shaw, 2013). Caxton, as the forerunner, became the arbiter of standardised spelling, but he was not a linguist and took a 'best fit' approach to the crystallisation of the orthography. He did, nonetheless, contribute greatly to the initial calibration of English spelling (Bragg, 2003).

As books became more widely available and read among a growing literate class, printing presses sprung up in all major towns and English spelling became more and more erratic further aggravated by the multiplicity of regional accents and thus pronunciation. This was exacerbated by the renaissance and the view that Latin and French etymology, with their richer literary traditions and history, were superior to middle English. Thus, the Latin roots of some words were preferred over their Saxon derivations. Old English differentiated long and short vowel sounds through double consonants preceding the vowel, but Latin roots (with single letter to sound correspondence) did not require the differentiation (Crystal, 2014). Numerous scribes and printers thus eschewed the parvenu double consonant in preference to the 'superior' single consonant. The need for the untangling of the English alphabetic code became more and more urgent and demanded.

Standardisation of spelling and pronunciation was attempted but with little success. In 1569 London lawyer John Hart published his orthography in an attempt to establish a consistency in spelling. Privileging pronunciation, he attempted to classify 'proper speech', but his attempts gained little traction as 'proper' English was not the English spoken by many in the country and hence ignored. Without authority, standardisation could never tame the shape-shifting beast that was the English language. The power was in the hands of the printers and they were beholden to their owners and their readers. As such, the sixteenth century and seventeenth century language shapers had no institutional authority, unlike the French and Italians who had academies to authorise and solidify spelling and pronunciation. John Dryden's attempts to establish consistency through the creation of an English academy failed and by the eighteenth century the English language was, in the words of Samuel Johnson (2016, p134), 'in a state of anarchy'. It was the work of this remarkable scholar that set the English language on the road to alphabetic consistency, tethered the language with a hawser of standardisation and established the regularity required for effective instruction. In terms of today's pedagogy relating to the teaching of the reading and writing of English it was a Copernican moment.

Johnson's stratagem had three strands: to standardise spelling; to standardise pronunciation and to provide categorical definitions of words. Untangling the complexities of the phonic coding that had erupted over the centuries and simplifying it to ensure the language could be easily deciphered and taught was not a priority. It was not even a consideration. When Johnson was uncertain of a standardised spelling, he always reverted to the original derivation and etymological root of the word rather than to its simplest phonic form. Nonetheless, this was at least a consistent approach. In eight years, Johnson produced a dictionary containing 43,000 words; an undertaking that took a cadre of scholars at the French academy eighty years to achieve with their language. English today, spoken, read and written across the world, has drifted remarkably little since then. The English phonic code, although excruciatingly complex, convoluted and complicated had at last been anchored. It would take many more years before it was identified, acknowledged, unravelled, stratified and presented in a format that could ensure that it could be effectively taught.

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Why English is just so darned difficult to decode - a short history...

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The eventual decline of the Roman empire resulted in a waning of the dominance of Latin across Europe as it retreated to Rome along with its armies, its legislators and its administrators.

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The Problem We Must Solve

How to unlock strong literacy for all children-regardless of their backgrounds-to help open doors of opportunity as well as a lifelong joy for reading.

Montessori For All blended its knowledge from high-performing public schools with its deep roots in Montessori to design an accelerated Reading Remediation Pathway to help kindergartners read at a 1st grade level by the end of kindergarten and elementary children grow at least 1.5 years in a single school year.

The Montessori Reading Acceleration Pathway incorporates the Science of Reading with Montessori principles to offer a systematic, streamlined curriculum to move children from letter sounds to reading books in ten months or less.

This pathway is an effective tool for all teachers in primary or elementary communities, SPED, or interventionist programs.

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Reading Remediation Pathway Community of Practice

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The Montessori Reading Remediation Pathway incorporates phonics-based research with Montessori principles to offer a systematic, streamlined curriculum.

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Montessori for All Reading Acceleration Pathway Website

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Montessori for All Reading Acceleration Pathway Website

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Reading Acceleration Pathway Community of Practice – Montessori For All

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Teachers, interventionists, and administrators who join the Community of Practice will have access to five webinars throughout the upcoming school year, coaching, weekly emails, and a private Facebook group focused on:

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Many people have been talking about the need for phonics instruction, but most of these conversations come to a screeching halt after talking about instruction in basic decoding skills. Instruction in multisyllabic word reading, or teaching students to read words with more than one syllable, is a crucial bridge between basic phonics and fluent word reading. It is also a major stumbling block for older readers who are still working on foundational reading skills. How to practically teach students to read long words has also been largely left out of the national conversation on the science of reading.

Marissa Filderman and Jessica Toste, two university professors who research multisyllabic word reading interventions, joined us to discuss what we know about teaching students to read long words. Marissa is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and researches literacy interventions for students with and at risk for learning disabilities, with an emphasis on data-based decision-making. Jessica is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She focuses on effective interventions for students with and at risk for reading disabilities, as well as how to intensify interventions through data-based instruction.

Misconceptions in multisyllabic reading

As Marissa and Jessica note, there are several misconceptions about multisyllabic reading and how to approach teaching young children how to read longer, more difficult words.

The first misconception is that instruction should center primarily on syllables. Marissa recommends not getting too hung up on syllable rules because many of them "are very rigid and they don't always apply." For example, teaching students to divide a word with a VCV pattern (like pilot or travel) before the first consonant and pronouncing the first vowel as a long vowel only works about half the time, according to research on the usefulness of syllable division patterns by Devin Kearns. "It can be more confusing for a reader who already has a lot of difficulty with just decoding in general to also think about those rules," Marissa adds.

"There's also often a misconception that foundational reading instruction and knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondence and decoding skills translate automatically into multisyllabic word reading," Jessica says. But a young reader having a good grasp of the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes isn't enough.

Foundational reading skills, including phonics and word recognition, are critical but they are not enough on their own. Jessica explains that kids need to be helped in taking decoding to the next level: "Students really need to be taught, and students who struggle especially need to be taught-explicitly-how those skills scale up. They've been effective for them before. Now how can they use those skills to move from identifying and pronouncing individual letter sounds to identifying and pronouncing word parts to read more complex words? Students need this continued instruction as the words they are being exposed to become more complex and don't always follow the rules they've been practicing in previous instruction."

Another misconception is that foundational skills never need revisiting. That may be true for some students, but definitely not all. "There's a careful balance we have to find with ongoing foundational skills instruction," Jessica explains. For some students, "we need to continue to review vowel patterns and practice flexing vowel sounds while supporting students in decoding multisyllabic words. They need continued practice with those grapheme-phoneme correspondences so that they can apply them fluently and automatically every time they're reading a word."

Finally, there is sometimes confusion about the role of reading longer texts, as opposed to reading multisyllabic words in isolation. "It's important to always read connected text in reading instruction, to always move from isolated word reading to connected text, even if you only have time for a few sentences to read at the end of a lesson," Jessica advises.

6 ways to help kids with multisyllabic word reading

The following six strategies can help you approach multisyllabic word reading with your students:

1. Ensure students have prerequisite skills. The first step in approaching multisyllabic words with your students is to confirm they're ready for the added level of complexity. "Make sure students have prerequisite skills, that they know vowel sounds and consonant sounds, and that they can recognize most grapheme correspondences," Marissa says.

2. Focus on affixes. Marissa recommends explicitly teaching the pronunciation and meaning of affixes. "And continue to review all the affixes you've taught regularly," she adds. Teaching students to quickly identify and "peel off" prefixes and suffixes within words can help students begin to recognize both pronunciation and meaning of larger chunks as they encounter more unfamiliar words.

3. Practice chunking. Because syllable rules can be inconsistent and confusing, Marissa recommends chunking, either by using the vowel in a word or the morpheme. "Students might use the short or the long form of that vowel sound to read the word," Marissa says. Teachers can also help students chunk by using morphemes and affixes. "One of the most important things when focusing on multisyllabic words is really building morphological knowledge through breaking words into meaningful parts to make them easier to read," Marissa explains. The "peel off" strategy is useful when chunking, too.

4. Make a game of reading multisyllabic words. It's easy for multisyllabic reading instruction to get a little dry, so Marissa recommends getting playful. "After having structured practice with assembling and blending word parts to read multisyllabic words, I like to gamify this," she says. "Students can play with the words in a sort of game format that's fun, fast paced, and engaging. [...] Introduce a select number of base words you think might work in your particular instructional context. Have students attach or build onto those base words with prefixes or suffixes. Have them point and say each word part and then blend the word parts and say the whole word."

5. Move on to fluency when kids are ready. "For word reading fluency practice," Marissa advises, "I like to use targeted word lists until students get really comfortable. I recommend you focus on certain patterns that you want to work with in those word lists, or certain affixes. Your word list can become more complex as you go." Some of that playful approach she mentioned earlier can work well with fluency, too. "There can be a timed component of this practice as well, if that's helpful to students. Or you can have a tracking component where they track their own performance every time they read a word list and see if their fluency is improving over time."

6. Practice words in context. Just as Jessica noted, students need time to practice reading more than just isolated words. "Just like with any foundational skills instruction lesson, we always move from reading practice with words in isolation to words in connected text, and doing a lot of practice with connected text," Marissa says. "This can look like sentences where the affixes you're learning appear and multisyllabic words that you've been practicing move into passages as well."

Serving students well

The crucial bridge for students from basic phonics to fluent word reading often goes overlooked. Consider reaching out to your leaders for any additional support you might need for your students. I recommend the following:

Ensure your school has materials to help students read long words. The lessons Jessica uses in her research are available for free online, and they have been shown to be effective for older students who need more instruction in advanced word reading.

Request professional learning opportunities around advanced word reading, and job-embedded coaching to answer ongoing questions and help you strengthen your practice. NWEA offers a professional learning workshop titled "Grades K-5: Building Fluent Readers" that's a great place to start.

Explore assessment options. If older students are not meeting benchmarks on your school's reading comprehension assessment, consider using a follow-up assessment, like MAP® Reading Fluency™, that can help you better understand if students are struggling with word recognition or language comprehension. If students are having difficulty with word recognition in the upper grades, make sure their intervention addresses this in a systematic way.

Reading long words fluently opens the doors to a limitless world of learning opportunities through rich and complex texts for students. To hear more from Marissa and Jessica, watch our videos.

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6 strategies for teaching multisyllabic word reading - Teach. Learn. Grow.

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Instruction in multisyllabic word reading is a bridge between phonics and fluent word reading. Research points to effective strategies.

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Are you looking for decodable text to use in your class? There are plenty of options out there. Some may be too difficult for your students, while others might not go deep enough.

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The OnTrack Reading Multisyllable Method is free for you to use. It is a decoding strategy for reading multisyllabic words that struggling readers often attempt to read by guessing. This strategy teaches your child to read longer words by first breaking them up into chunks, and then efficiently testing the vowel sounds in each of the chunks. This overview describes the steps to implement the multisyllable curriculum. The associated worksheets and word lists are also free, and can be downloaded from the following pages as they are needed.

Should You Use Only the Multisyllable Curriculum?

This free multisyllable curriculum is part of the broader OnTrack Reading Phonics Program which is detailed in our Advanced Code Phonics Workbook and its accompanying Instruction Manual.

If your child is already familiar with the phonics code and can read one-syllable words fluently without sounding them out one by one, you might consider bypassing the workbook. Instead, focus on the OnTrack Reading Multisyllable Method presented in the following pages. (See the sidebar menu for an overview of the topics covered.)

How Can I Determine if My Child Knows Enough Phonics to Skip the Workbook?

If you're uncertain, take advantage of the free Phonics Assessment Tests offered on this site, particularly the Code Knowledge Test. This will indicate if your child has a strong grasp of the English phonics code, potentially allowing them to bypass the workbook.

However, if your student has difficulty reading basic one-syllable or two-syllable words, or isn't confident with words featuring vowel digraphs (like ow, ou, ea, ie, oy, oi, etc.), it's recommended to use the workbook. It offers a thorough foundation in phonics and covers the essential phonemic skills of blending, segmenting, and phoneme manipulation.

The Logic Underlying the Design of the Multisyllable Curriculum

Linguists recognize that a natural break in spoken syllables normally occurs immediately after the vowel sound

A few years back, someone posted a comment about verbal syllables on a website that I found interesting. The comment: Linguists recognize that a natural break in spoken syllables normally occurs immediately after the vowel sound. Essentially, I took that comment and developed a multisyllable decoding method around it. I've used the resulting method with almost 200 clients since then, fine-tuning it as I went. It works exceptionally well because it's based upon what a child actually hears when a word is pronounced.

All that is required of a child is to apply a single rule to break a multisyllable word down into something approaching syllables, while applying three easy-to-learn exceptions, and to then learn to test various options for the vowel sounds in a systematic manner. This process is described in detail on the next pages, but first it's helpful to understand why present methods are so confusing to many children, and especially to struggling readers.

The Problem with Traditional Syllables

Noah Webster made some poor decisions when it came to how he arbitrarily set syllable boundaries

Where most multisyllable instruction goes awry is in adopting the written syllables as they have long been defined in Webster's dictionary. Unfortunately, Noah Webster made some poor decisions when it came to how he arbitrarily set syllable boundaries, decisions that have only recently begun to be reversed. The result of one such decision leads many curriculum designers to try to teach a young child to break syllables in words like rabbit and common between the doubled consonants, resulting in rab-bit and com-mon. In fact, there is only one /b/ sound in rabbit and one /m/ sound in common and it is potentially confusing to a young child to be told that he should be hearing two.

Webster also insisted on forming syllables based on whether they should be open or closed. A closed syllable has a consonant sound following a short vowel sound, whereas an open syllable ends with a long vowel sound. As a result, many curriculum designers expect a child to know that vapor is broken into two as va-por, but that rapid is rap-id. They explain that closed syllables carry short vowel sounds, and open syllables carry long vowel sounds. What's left unexplained is how to determine whether to close any particular syllable or leave it open, as well as what to do about words like father (fa-ther) where the vowel sound is neither long nor short. Needless to say, such an approach can confuse a first grader.

The Natural Break: After the Vowel Sound

In fact, the natural break in the spoken words, using the above examples, is after the vowel sound in each case ( ra-bbit, co-mmon, va-por, ra-pid and fa-ther.) To convince yourself of this, just read the five words out loud, pausing very briefly at each break as indicated. Do this two or three times to feel the natural cadence. Now read these dictionary defined breaks (rab-bit, com-mon, va-por, rap-id, fa-ther.) Notice how awkward it is to pause on three of the examples now? This is because the natural spoken syllable break is after the vowel sound.

One important exception occurs, however. When the next spoken syllable would have to begin with an awkward blend, one or even two consonant sounds are naturally tacked on to the preceding syllable. Thus, constant is broken in spoken syllables not as co-nstant, but rather as con-stant because nst is not a permitted blend in English. Sometimes two sounds have to be moved, as with gently. It breaks apart naturally not as ge-ntly nor as gen-tly, but as gent-ly, because neither ntl nor tl are permissible beginning blends in English words.

The word "constant" is broken up in spoken syllables not as co-nstant, but rather as con-stant because "nst" is not a permitted blend in English.

These breaks happen quite naturally in spoken syllables because only a limited number of specific consonant combinations are used to begin English words, and this limitation extends to the internal syllables as well. Any child, even though completely unaware of syllable rules, will tend to naturally chunk constantly as con-stant-ly once he knows what you mean by asking him to break the word up into chunks. Co-nsta-ntly will never occur to him, nor will con-stan-tly.

The OnTrack Reading Method Uses Chunks, Not Syllables

For instructional purposes, it wouldn't do to redefine the word syllable for each child. And we are talking about spoken syllables anyway, so the way to handle it is to define a new word that means chunks of sound, and that word in this curriculum is just chunk. You just explain to your child that longer words are composed of chunks, illustrate the concept, and then mention that if he ever takes a syllable test and uses chunks instead he will fail it.

My students learn that longer words are composed of several chunks and that each chunk has exactly one vowel sound in it. This is the one thing chunks and syllables have in common; each has exactly one vowel sound, so a five syllable word will have exactly five vowel sounds and it will divide into exactly five chunks

Support for Chunking from an Unexpected Source

The pronunciations of the above examples, "rabbit", "common" and "rapid", now show the breaks located at ra-bbit, co-mmon and ra-pid.

Unlike all previous editions, The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 11th Edition, copyright 2005, supports the above chunking strategy to a large degree. The pronunciations of the above examples, rabbit, common and rapid, now show the breaks at ra-bbit, co-mmon and ra-pid. (The syllable breaks remain unchanged; it's the pronunciation guide that follows each word that has changed.) The only discrepancy I can now find between the natural linguistic break and the Merriam-Webster pronunciation guide occurs when a chunk begins with one of the blends beginning with the letter s, such as sc ( mas-cot), sk ( mus-ket) and st (cas-ting) and then only when the blend is preceded by a short vowel sound. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether or not a child will get the correct word if he chunks them ma-scot, mu-sket and ca-sting, respectively, assuming that he does as instructed and tries First Vowel Sounds (short vowel sounds) on his first attempt at each word.

The next page describes The Main Rule and Three Exceptions that form the basis of the OnTrack Reading Multisyllable Method.

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Multisyllable Method Overview: Decoding Multisyllabic Words

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This free decoding strategy for reading multisyllabic words teaches a child to break longer words into chunks and then test the vowel sound in each chunk.

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Reading Strategies Bookmarks - SPELD NSW

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SPELD NSW Literacy Resources support all students learning to read. These downloadable and printable bookmarks support word reading skills.