Teaching Our Children to Read

The Components of an Effective, Comprehensive Reading Program

Bill Honig

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781629140094
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden

Studies of effective teaching practices have continued to validate the need for explicit and systematic instruction in basic reading skills, and Bill Honig uses this research to shed new light on an old problem—how to help all students become fluent readers. Teaching Our Children to Read grows out of the experiences of scores of dedicated teachers and their success in the classroom. This book explores current research from the leading experts in the field, and presents new instructional strategies that bring all students to higher levels of literacy.Highlights from Teaching Our Children to Read include:
• Phonics instruction and fluency
• Connected practice with decodable text
• Multisyllabic word instruction
• Spelling, vocabulary, and concept development
• Strategic reading, book discussions, and text organization
• Literacy benchmarks, assessment, and interventionThis is an essential resource for educators, administrators, policymakers, and parents concerned about how to successfully teach our children to read. Teaching Our Children to Read points the way to implementing the best research-based practices in adopting reading materials, training teachers, and providing the necessary school leadership.

1

The Case for a Balanced Approach

The first and foremost job of elementary school is to teach children to read. The reading program in every school should enable almost every student to be able to read fluently and understand grade-appropriate material by the end of elementary school; to have read a large number of books, magazines, and other informational text; to reach high levels of comprehension ability; and to enjoy and learn from reading. These goals can be achieved only if most students are able to decode and read beginning material by the mid-first grade and have perfected these basic skills to tackle more difficult texts by third grade. Most students who fail to learn to read by this time are destined to fall farther and farther behind in school and are effectively prevented from capitalizing on the power of education to improve and enrich their lives (Juel 1988, 1994; Stanovich 1986, 1993b). Yet large numbers of students do not become readers early enough to develop the skills and experience to read age-appropriate materials throughout their elementary careers and are, in effect, excluded from instruction.

Access to further education, high-skilled jobs, and a chance to participate fully as informed citizens depends in large part on school success, which itself is highly correlated with the ability to read. Given what is known today about the techniques of teaching youngsters to read, no reason exists for this potentially dangerous state of affairs. Reading failure is preventable.

Educators must examine current reading practices critically; identify the most successful programs and approaches; and enlist teachers, parents, and leaders responsible for educating our children in the common goal of remedying this unnecessary situation.

The Great Debate

Five years ago, controversy and confusion in the literacy field centered around how best to teach children to read. Specifically, the question was, Should skills be taught directly in an organized and explicit skills development program as part of beginning-to-read instruction, or will students acquire these skills more indirectly by being read to, immersion in print, and learning them in the context of reading for meaning—an approach known as whole language?

Research by leading experts in the field of literacy has shown that it is not an either-or question. The most effective reading instruction uses a balanced and comprehensive approach that includes the explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics as well as an abundance of rich and varied literature and writing practice (Adams, 1990, 1991; Adams & Bruck, 1995; Beck & Juel, 1995; National Reading Panel, 2000; Pressley, Rankin, & Yokoi, 1996; Share & Stanovich, 1995b; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Stahl, 1992; Wharton-McDonald & Pressley, 1998). It is now conventional wisdom that only through direct skill instruction can all children learn to automatically recognize a growing number of words and possess the necessary tools to decipher new words they encounter. (The 24 major points made in this book about the role of skills in a comprehensive elementary reading program are summarized in Resource A.)

More than 30 years ago, Jeanne Chall exhaustively reviewed the research on beginning-reading programs in her classic 1967 study, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (see also Chall, 1983, 1992, 1995). She concluded that beginning-reading programs that emphasized decoding or phonics, the direct and systematic focus on the system that maps print to speech, and the opportunity to practice learning that system in the context of reading were much more effective than those that solely used meaning-based approaches. This is because thoroughly decoding a word builds the sound/pattern and meaning connections that enable readers to automatically recognize the word on subsequent readings.

Dr. Reid Lyon, head of reading research at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, has said that there is no debate—at a certain stage of reading, phonics is necessary. Then, children need literature to read. Teachers’ classroom routines should include reading good literature to students and discussing it with them, especially by asking questions that stretch children’s minds beyond the literal meaning of the text. Teachers should fill the classroom with a wide variety of high-quality materials and create a literate environment. Students should have a multitude of opportunities to read along with the teacher, work together on reading and writing activities, write daily, and dictate stories about their interests. Teachers should give students choices in their reading, help them to relate what they know to what they are going to read, assist them in keeping reading logs, and offer them the chance to respond personally to what they have read. (For a summary of classroom activities and organizational strategies to incorporate these ideas, see Depree & Iversen, 1994; for a summary of these techniques, see Smith, 1982.)

The whole-language movement has improved classrooms by promoting practices that encourage students to read outstanding literature, including both fiction and, more recently, quality nonfiction; write more; and perceive writing as having a purpose and communicating something important (Pressley & Rankin, 1994, p. 59).

At one time, the crucial issue in reading instruction was whether there also should be an organized and directly taught, explicit skills development component that stresses decoding words and learning the sound/symbol system. Some people have argued against the inclusion of explicit skills development instruction, claiming that explicit instruction is unnecessary and even harmful. These objections are without merit.

Objection #1: Children Learn to Read “Naturally”

Some natural learning advocates contend that children will either intuit how print maps to sound or recognize the meaning of the word by other methods, such as guessing its meaning from the context or shape, and that teachers can fill in skills gaps when they arise.

Unfortunately, these claims have proven false for a significant number of children. In a comprehensive review, two top educational researchers, David Share and Keith Stanovich (1995b), surveyed the vast scientific and educational literature and concluded that all these assumptions have been conclusively refuted: guessing from context is not an effective way of learning to read, reading is not acquired naturally in the same way as speech,1 and analyzing and learning to abstract parts of words does not hinder learning to read—it is indispensable (Foorman, 1995; Share & Stanovich, 1995b, pp. 3, 30, 32). Foorman (1995) and Share and Stanovich (1995b) cite numerous studies that have shown that (a) the primary and most efficient strategy for unlocking the meaning of a word is to visually process the letters of that word and that weak readers who cannot decode efficiently tend to overrely on context and (b) guessing an unrecognized word from context clues is an ineffective decoding strategy because it is successful only 10% to 25% of the time with content words. Note that the relative effectiveness of using context as the primary method to recognize words, decode new words, and become automatic with words is a different question than whether the use of context accelerates word recognition with accomplished readers. It does (see also Biemiller, 1994).2

In fact, studies by Dale Willows (Morgan & Willows, 1998) in Toronto have shown that even English language learners with limited oral vocabularies benefit from early decoding instruction. These students did just as well as English speakers who received explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics, and they significantly outperformed English speakers who did not receive such instruction. The English language learners who did not receive skill instruction, however, lagged far behind the other three groups. Thus, without systematic instruction in the sound structure system of English and letter/sound correspondences, these students are especially vulnerable to reading failure. When teaching decoding to English language learners, teachers must make sure that students understand the meanings of the words they are decoding because automatic recognition requires readers to retrieve letter pattern, sound, and meaning information.

Moreover, the belief that almost all students can learn to read without an organized, explicit skill strand has taken root in too many schools and districts with disastrous results. Due to the absence of early, organized skill instruction, a large number of students are still not reaching their optimal levels of reading proficiency. A significant number of students in many high-poverty areas are remaining, in effect, nonreaders, and significantly more than 50% of students in these areas are not becoming fluent readers of grade-appropriate materials (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994). When these students attempt to study for their lessons in later grades, they will stumble over many words that will prevent them from attending to meaning. Consequently, they will be unable to participate in grade-level instruction and will fall farther and farther behind during their school careers.

Most of these children will have been barred from becoming fluent readers of grade-level text because they did not receive an organized skills strand early enough to become independent readers of beginning materials in first grade and thus read enough books successfully to stay on track (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1991; Stanovich 1986, 1993b). In Listening to Children Read Aloud: Data From NAEP’s Integrated Reading Performance Record (IRPR) at Grade 4, Pinnell et al. (1995), for example, found that large numbers of fourth graders had very low fluency and reading rates, with reading rates dropping compared to previous years (pp. 21-23, 40-42). If students are not independently reading beginning materials by mid-first grade, they have only a slim chance of reading at grade level by third grade and beyond, unless they receive an extraordinary tutoring program (Juel, 1994, p. 125).

Studies have revealed several factors that put children at special risk for reading failure: poverty, phonological processing and memory difficulties, speech and hearing impairments, language barriers, and parents’ low reading abilities (Lyon, 1998). Respected educator Lisa Delpit (1995) has noted repeatedly that children from lower socioeconomic families, primarily clustered in urban areas, are especially harmed by the absence of a structured phonics and skills program. Similarly, students with some auditory or memory processing problems—found in all schools and estimated to be as many as 20% of all children—are also especially harmed if a skills strand is missing. For these students, learning to read is a powerful equity issue.

The large subpopulation of students with dyslexia, most of whom are unidentified and situated in regular classrooms, has been extensively studied (Adams, 1990; Berninger, 1997; Hall & Moats, 1999; Liberman et al., 1991; Lyon, 1994, 1995; Moats, 1994; Shaywitz, 1996).3 According to the research, most of the students who are designated as learning disabled and become identified as special education students are really reading and spelling disabled. They have difficulty breaking the symbol/sound code of the language. Yet had they received appropriate instruction in kindergarten and first grade, many of these students would not be in special education. In addition, many of the students who have difficulty learning to read but who are never identified as learning disabled suffer from the same phonological processing difficulties.

The main problem for both these groups of students is an inability to recognize, manipulate, and learn the distinct sounds of spoken language (phonemes) and how these sounds correspond to letters and letter patterns in printed text. Lack of phonemic awareness is the most powerful predictor of difficulty in learning to read. Without it, students have an extremely difficult time learning how to use phonics skills to read through a word, generate the sounds the letters represent, and connect the pronunciation with a meaningful word. Unfortunately, many teachers and school policymakers do not understand that a large proportion of their students who are struggling to learn to read are actually suffering from specific phonological processing difficulties or a lack of phonics knowledge that prevent them from learning the sound/symbol system and using phonics and other word attack skills. Consequently, many schools fail to provide these students with timely instructional intervention, and as a result, most of these students will fall significantly and irrevocably behind in reading—a preventable mishap for all but a few. Researchers estimate that all but 3% to 5% of children can l...