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Presentación Fomentando el Hábito de la Lectura Ilustración Blanco y Azul (1)

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"Reading Fluently Does Not Mean Reading Fast"

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"Reading Fluently Does Not Mean Reading Fast"

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Oral Language Skills as a Foundation to Learning to Read

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Oral Language Skills as a Foundation to Learning to Read

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Oral language: The foundations of reading and reading intervention

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TextProject is the only website with student texts and teacher guides based on the science of reading-available for free download. Download our research-based, open-access resources for teachers, teacher educators, parents, tutors, and students.

TextProject is the only website with high-quality student texts and teacher guides that are all available for free download.

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Vocabulary instruction through networks of words

Vocabulary instruction through networks of words

A blog and video series based on evidence from reading research

A blog and video series based on evidence from reading research

Free Classroom Materials for Teaching Reading

Classroom-proven resources including favorite books, reading passages, vocabulary lessons, word pictures, literacy lists & forms.

Free Student Texts

Free texts for reading instruction! TextProject is the sole website with free texts based on the science of reading.

For programs such as BeginningReaders and FYI for Kids, world-renowned researcher and teacher educator, Patricia Cunningham, has written lessons to accompany the texts.

Vocabulary Instruction

Vocabulary is the strongest predictor of reading comprehension. TextProject provides free resources for the four kinds of vocabulary words that contribute to reading comprehension: core, academic, content-area, and literary.

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Strategies, tools, and texts to bring beginning and struggling readers to proficient levels of literacy

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Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) is a scientific investigation of words: how word parts, structure, origin, and history over time come together to tell the story of what words mean, how words are connected, and how they are spelled. (Please refer to foundational research at Bowers & Kirby, 2010.) It is a linguistically sound approach to language instruction that Nueva has integrated into its PreK-12 literary arts, English, and thematic curriculum with the help of Dr. Peter Bowers. Dr. Bowers is the founder of the WordWorks Literacy Centre and has supported this transformation as a consultant over seven years. He was a visiting scholar and SWI coach at Nueva during the 2015-2016 school year.

SWI is about understanding larger patterns across words, i.e., shared roots/bases/families, as much as understanding the evolution and structure of one word. Students learn investigative tools to understand new vocabulary, and so they can apply SWI across every discipline. When students use roots or a word's structure to understand new vocabulary in a content area such as math or history, they are applying their SWI understanding, exposure, and skillset.

Using linguistic tools like word sums and lexical word matrices, students analyze words into elements such as bases, prefixes, and suffixes. By understanding the spelling of other words in that family, students can create meaningful connections across the language to build proficiency in orthographic analysis.

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Orthography

An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language. It includes norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

Word Sum

The word sum is a necessary tool to allow falsification of hypotheses of orthographic morphological structure. Source here.

Lexical Word Matrix

The lexical matrix specifies the association between word meaning and word form. Each column of the lexical matrix corresponds to a particular word meaning (or concept), each row corresponds to a particular word form (or word image).

How Does SWI Work?

In its simplest form, SWI is an inquiry process.

Students begin by asking, "What does the word mean?" They brainstorm ways to define and interpret a given word.

Next, students look at the composition of the word. "How is the word built? What is its structure?" This includes identifying its root, prefix and/or suffix which begins to provide important clues.

Students explore the word's history and etymology. They ask, "What is the word's origin?" to find evidence for the word's structural elements.

They look beyond the word to make connections by considering related words, pronunciation, etc. "What do words that share the same structure or historical root explain about the word in question? How does pronunciation affect the spelling?"

Using word sums to support or refute their structural hypotheses, students visually represent their findingsusing a lexical matrix that displays a family of words sharing the same base element. "What do related words tell me?"

Finally, students pull their data together. "What deeper understanding do I now have of the word or word family, and the context in which I found it?"

Why Does Nueva Teach SWI?

SWI applies the Nueva philosophy to the study of the English language. It teaches deep, comprehensive understanding of our language and how to investigate it. Investigating words based on structure and meaning provokes a deeper questioning and provides a more holistic understanding of other curricular elements, whether a piece of literature, a scientific principle, a historical event, or a mathematical concept.

Once students realize words are spelled the way they are for specific reasons, floodgates of curiosity open. Through their investigations, students discover patterns, structures, and applications as they learn to play with words in a creative environment.

Through SWI, language becomes another medium to be questioned, tested, and, most importantly, enjoyed. The process is naturally scaffolded for a range of individual abilities and exposes students to rich vocabulary. Its effectiveness, particularly with the youngest learners, is grounded in research. In addition, the real-world classroom experience provides further feedback in the study and advancement of SWI. You can see an illustration of the role SWI at Nueva has had in the wider research on literacy instruction in WordWorks Newsletter #95 which highlights the description of a classroom experience by Nueva's prekindergarten teachers.

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Lower School Structured Word Inquiry | The Nueva School

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Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) is a scientific investigation of words: how word parts, structure, origin, and history over time come together to tell the story of what words mean, how words are connected, and how they are spelled.

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What Should Morphology Instruction Look Like?

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What Should Morphology Instruction Look Like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Word Matrix: a map of a word family

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

un + help + ful + ness > unhelpfulness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are reliable conventions for the three suffixing conventions.

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

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

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

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

Here are some videos to illustrate my point.

Grade 2 Morphology

A teacher showing investigations from his class.

Grade 1 Morphology

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

Kindergarten Morphology

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shanahan again

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

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

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

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What Should Morphology Instruction Look Like?

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

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Teacher question

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

Shanahan's response

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

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

Think about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Think questions - not reading preparation lessons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I understand your concern:

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

I had to do that on my own.

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

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How I Teach Students to Use Context in Vocabulary Learning

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I recently read an interview that you did. When you talk about kids needing to recognize when they don't know a word and how to figure it out - did you mean to leave them on their own to do that? When you mention 'passive scaffolding' it makes me think you do.

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"The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction"

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"The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction"

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The Reading Teacher - 2021 - Duke - The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction

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"Is the SOR just the SOR English?" Article

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"Is the SOR just the SOR English?" Article

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"The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications" Article

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"The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications" Article