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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
Reading Research and a Reading-Specific Model of Instruction
To orient readers, we begin with a brief explanation of how reading research and instruction have progressed since the middle of the 19th century, followed by a research-based description of how skilled reading develops. Then, we present our reading-specific model of instruction. In chapters 2 through 11, we situate that reading-specific model within the broader context of The New Art and Science of Teaching framework.
Reading Research
Historically, we can conceptualize reading research and instruction in four chronological phases.
1. Before the 20th century
2. From 1900 to the 1970s
3. From the 1970s to the 1990s
4. From the 1990s to the present
Here, we describe salient features and findings associated with each phase.
Before the 20th Century: Oral Reading Reigns
Before 1900, oral reading was the primary focus of reading instruction. Early reading textbooks, such as William Holmes McGuffey’s (1879), were designed to improve a student’s oral reading, and in 1892, philosopher William James stated that one could judge the quality of a teacher by the quality of his or her students’ oral reading. One reason for this instructional emphasis was a lack of widespread literacy among the American populace; most households had only one person who could read (Hyatt, 1943; Smith, 1965). Therefore, reading in the home, whether for entertainment or information, was typically done aloud.
Recitation lessons were the norm in schools; students listened to the teacher read and then tried to reproduce what they heard. Lyman Cobb (as cited in Smith, 1965) explained that students’ goals were:
Distinct articulation of words pronounced in proper tones, suitably varied to the sense, and the emotions of the mind; with due attention to accent, to emphasis, in its several gradations; to rests or pauses of the voice, in proper places.
Such practices prioritized elocution over comprehension (Hoffman, 1987; Hoffman & Segel, 1983), although teachers sometimes asked students to retell what they had read. Nevertheless, in 1891, Horace Mann claimed that 90 percent of students did not understand what they read.
From 1900 to the 1970s: Meaning Resides in the Text
As the 20th century began, the primacy of oral reading waned. According to P. David Pearson and Gina N. Cervetti (2017), rising literacy rates decreased the demand for oral reading in the home. Immigration, child labor prohibitions, and mandatory school attendance swelled public school enrollment, and an increased emphasis on scientific methods in education gave birth to the standardized testing movement. Silent reading rate and comprehension level moved to the education foreground. Pearson and Cervetti (2017) explain:
Unlike oral reading, which had to be tested individually and required that teachers judge the quality of responses, silent reading comprehension (and rate) could be tested in group settings and scored without recourse to professional judgement; only stop watches and multiple-choice questions were needed. In modern parlance, we would say that they moved from a “high-inference” assessment tool (oral reading and retelling) to a “low-inference” tool (multiple-choice tests or timed readings). Thus, it fit the demands for efficiency (spawned by the move toward more universal education for all students) and objectivity (part of the emerging scientism of the period). (p. 15)
Educators reasoned that if students could answer questions about a passage, they were able to read it and comprehend it.
Early 20th century educators typically defined comprehension as accessing the true meaning of a text. That is, they viewed the meaning of a text as an inherent property of the text itself, and the job of the student (with the teacher’s assistance) was to figure it out. Reading “was viewed as a largely bottom-up process in which readers would visually analyze the features of letters, map the sounds onto letters and then onto strings of letters to pronounce words, and listen to the output to achieve understanding” (Pearson & Cervetti, 2017, p. 40). An examination of curriculum materials from this time—William H. Elson and William S. Gray’s (1936) well-known Dick and Jane series, for instance—reveals that the dominant approach to teaching reading involved asking questions about a text after students had read it.
From the 1970s to the 1990s: Readers Construct Meaning
Although a few prescient scholars, such as Edmund B. Huey (1908) and Edward L. Thorndike (1917), articulated sophisticated descriptions of reading comprehension in the early 20th century, widespread interest in readers’ cognitive processes did not occur until the 1970s. In what is often called the cognitive revolution (Anderson, 2010), reading theorists and researchers turned their attention to the reader (rather than the text) as the maker of meaning. They redefined comprehension as what happens when a reader, influenced and guided by his or her prior knowledge, interprets a text. This shift led to four major areas of inquiry, as shown in table 1.1.
Table 1.1: Areas of Inquiry for Reading Research During the Cognitive Revolution
| Area of Inquiry | Question |
| Knowledge Structures | How is prior knowledge stored in the brain? |
| Text Structures | How is information stored in a text? |
| Comprehension Strategies | How do students combine prior knowledge and textual information to make meaning? |
| Teaching Techniques | How can educators improve students’ meaning-making skills? |
Here we briefly explain the major ideas associated with each area of inquiry.
Knowledge Structures: Schema Theory
With the acknowledgment that students bring prior knowledge to a text, scientists became interested in how students store that knowledge in their brains and how they access it when reading a text. One of the most prominent models was schema theory. Schema theory describes knowledge in the human brain as “little containers [called schemata] into which we deposit the particular traces of particular experiences, as well as the ‘ideas’ that derive from those experiences” (Pearson & Cervetti, 2017, p. 25). Schema theory became popular as a model of reading comprehension in part because it readily explained common phenomena, such as the human propensity to disagree about the interpretation of various texts—books, movies, newspaper articles, and the like. According to schema theory, disagreements arise because each individual approaches a text with a different, and unique, body of prior knowledge and experiences. Richard C. Anderson (1984) describes some of the additional phenomena that schema theory explained.
• Learning and memory: For different types of texts, our minds have slots that we expect to fill with certain types of information; information that fits in the slots is that which we easily learn and remember.
• Identifying important ideas: The slots in our schemata guide our search for what is important in a text, allowing us to separate main ideas and details.
• Elaboration and inference: No text is ever completely explicit; our schemata help us to make educated guesses about how we should fill certain slots.
In sum, schema theory posits that individuals store information about their experiences using particular structures; understanding those structures helps students access and apply knowledge when reading a text.
Text Structures: Kintsch and Meyer
A parallel line of research examined how texts store information, and how text structures interact with knowledge structures to create meaning. Researchers conceptualized structures in texts as “slots” that a writer fills with particular types of information. A reader who knows what to expect from the slots of a specific text structure will more effectively align his or her prior knowledge to the text and is more likely to comprehend it. According to Walter Kintsch (1983), whose model of text comprehension was, and still is, widely accepted:
Comprehending a text involves the formation of two parallel, complementary structures, the textbase and the situational model. The textbase is a representation of the content of the text, consisting of the elementary propositions derived from the text which are organized into a coherent whole on the basis of some available knowledge structure, e.g. a schema. The situational model is developed in parallel with the text base proper, but it is a richer structure which contains not only the information derived from the text, but also the reader’s previous knowledge about the subject matter. (p. 2)
In simpler terms, readers organize information from a text into a structure (the textbase) and then combine that with what they already know to create a situational model, which they use to make meaning.
Bonnie J. F. Meyer, Carole J. Young, and Brendan J. Bartlett (1989) articulate six specific text structures and investigate the effect of explicitly teaching those text structures on students’ comprehension. In numerous studies since 1971, Meyer and her colleagues find that teaching text structures using techniques such as “direct instruction, modeling, scaffolding, elaborated feedback, and adaptation of instruction to student performance” (Meyer & Ray, 2011, p. 127) improves students’ comprehension significantly (Meyer, 1971, 1975; Meyer et al., 1989; Meyer et al., 2010; Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980; Meyer & Freedle, 1979, 1984; Meyer & Poon, 2001; Meyer & Rice, 1982).
Table 1.2 lists the six text structures Meyer and her colleagues identify, examples of texts that typically use each structure, and signal words that alert a reader to the presence of each structure.
Table 1.2: Text Structures
Source: Adapted from Meyer et al., 1989; Meyer & Ray, 2011.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this table.
Research on knowledge and text structures highlighted and explored a reader’s response to a text, rather than meaning inherent in a text. Researchers commonly used metaphors such as reader as builder or reader as creator to describe this collaboration between reader and text.
Comprehension Strategies: Reciprocal Teaching and Metacognition
Many researchers during the cognitive revolution investigated the processes that readers use to make meaning (such as predicting, questioning, elaborating, inferring, clarifying, visualizing, retelling, or summarizing). They commonly referred to these processes as comprehension strategies. Initial research indicated that teaching students to use such strategies improved their comprehension of texts. Moreover, researchers attained even better results when they taught students to use combinations of strategies. The best-known and most-researched combination of strategies from this time is reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), in which a reader stops regularly while reading a text to engage in four strategies—(1) prediction, (2) questioning, (3) clarification, and (4) summarization—and selects those most appropriate to the comprehension challenges in the text.
Researchers also delved into the metacognitive strategies that students use to monitor their comprehension while reading. These processes include:
• Awareness—Paying attention to one’s thoughts
• Monitoring—Recognizing when understanding breaks down
• Control—Selecting a strategy to fix the problem
• Evaluation—Judging how well one has resolved a problem and if further attention is necessary
Pearson and Cervetti (2017) describe the genesis of metacognitive research as:
A logical extension of the rapidly developing work on both schema theory and text analysis. These latter two traditions emphasized declarative knowledge, knowing that X or Y or Z is true, but were scant on specifying procedural knowledge, knowing how to engage a strategy for comprehension or memory. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that metacognitive research has emphasized. (p. 26)
The primary metaphor that researchers used to refer to students’ use of metacognitive strategies when their comprehension breaks down was reader as fixer.
Teaching Techniques: Gradual Release of Responsibility
Researchers also sought to describe effective instructional techniques for teachers to use when teaching comprehension and metacognitive strategies. David Pearson and Margaret Gallagher (1983) proposed an explicit model, called gradual release of responsibility, which many educators still use today. In brief, it involves three phases.
1. Teacher responsibility: The teacher explains the purpose of a strategy (or set of strategies), how to use it, and when to use it. Then, he or she models its use by thinking aloud, so that students are aware of what is going on in the teacher’s mind during reading.
2. Shared responsibility: Students engage in guided practice while the teacher provides scaffolding and facilitation.
3. Student responsibility: Students use the strategy or strategies independently.
Many studies find that comprehension strategy instruction, using a gradual release of responsibility model (or similar approach), produces measurable gains in students’ reading comprehension (see Wilkinson & Son, 2011, for a review). Nevertheless, over the same time period, several notable studies indicated that teachers actually engaged in very little comprehension strategy instruction (for example, Durkin, 1978/1979). Why? Strategies instruction is difficult to learn and difficult to implement effectively. For example, Pamela Beard El-Dinary and Ted Schuder (1993) document the difficulties seven teachers experienced as they learned to implement transactional strategies instruction (a multiple-strategies approach similar to reciprocal teaching). By the end of the year, only two of the seven teachers were still committed to using the approach. More recent studies find similar results (Connor, Morrison, & Petrella, 2004; Hilden & Pressley, 2007; Klingner, Vaughn, Arguelles, Hughes, & Leftwich, 2004; Klingner, Vaughn, Hughes, & Arguelles, 1999; Mason, 2004; Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, Mistretta-Hampton, & Echevarria, 1998; Taylor, Pearson, Clark, & Walpole, 2000; Taylor, Pearson, Peterson, & Rodriguez, 2003, 2005). Pearson and Cervetti (2017) label these implementation challenges the Achilles heel of comprehension strategies instruction.
From the 1990s to the Present: Reading Wars and the Common Core
As the 20th century drew to a close, reading research continued to build on the foundation laid in the previous two decades, refining and adding nuance to create a philosophy of reading instruction that researchers often refer to as whole language. Kenneth S. Goodman and Yetta Goodman (1985) describe whole language as a “comprehension-centered pedagogy” in which “literacy—reading and writing—is regarded as a natural extension of human language development” (p. 2). Whole language builds on the previously articulated ideas of reader as builder, creator, and fixer of meaning but goes several steps further. In particular, whole language proponents advocate for consideration of context, incorporation of literature, and the addition of critical literacy. Table 1.3 (page 14) elaborates on these three emphases.
Table 1.3: Whole-Language Emphases
| Emphasis | Description |
| Consideration of Context | Considering context means recognizing that the situation in which a reader encounters a text affects the meaning of the text. Rand J. Spiro, W. P. Vispoel, John G. Schmitz, Ala Samarapungavan, and A. E. Boerger (1987) advocate for looking at texts from multiple perspectives using the metaphor of crisscrossing a landscape from many different directions in order to fully understand and appreciate it. Following the lead of the influential Louise M. Rosenblatt (1978), Peter Smagorinsky (2001) argues that meaning resides neither in the text nor in the reader, but in a “transactional zone” where text, reader, and context come together (p. 133). Just as text had moved to the background and the reader’s response to a text was privileged in the 1970s, the reader moved to the background and context came forward in the 1990s. |
| Incorporation of Literature | In Becoming a Nation of Readers, Richard C. Anderson, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Judith A. Scott, and Ian A. G. Wilkinson (1985) advocate for an increased amount of independent reading in elementary reading programs. Nancie Atwell, with her popular 1987 book In the Middle, inspired many teachers to help students explore literature through reader’s workshops. Many basal readers and reading programs paled in comparison to the richness and complexity of authentic literary texts. |
| Addition of Critical Literacy | Pearson and Cervetti (2017) describe critical literacy as a set of practices that “encourage students to analyze texts with attention to the contexts and features of their construction and the ideologies that underlie them, asking, among other things, whose interests are served by particular texts and particular readings of those texts” (p. 34). Such practices require skillful teaching and facilitation of complex analysis in the classroom. |
For many reading researchers, theorists, and educators, the whole-language approach represented the leading edge of reading research and instruction.
Nevertheless, throughout the 20th century, there were persistent concerns about students who simply couldn’t read. For example, in 1955, Rudolf Franz Flesch wrote the highly controversial Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It, a book that advocated for phonics instruction over more holistic, comprehension-based approaches. In 1965, the U.S. federal government passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and began infusing significant funding into education in general, and into reading instruction and intervention in particular. Over the next fifty years, the federal government would continue to pour money into reading instruction. With so much money at stake, legislators wanted to know how effective different instructional approaches were at improving students’ reading abilities. The following documents and reports attempt to answer those questions and strongly influenced reading policy during this time.
• A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983)
• Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998)
• Report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000)
• Reading for Understanding: Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002)
• Developing Literacy in Second-Language Learners: Report of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth (August & Shanahan, 2006)
• Developing Early Literacy: Report of the National Early Literacy Panel (National Early Literacy Panel, 2008)
While all of these works were influential, none was more so than that of the National Reading Panel (NRP), published in April 2000. The report focuses primarily on five areas related to reading instruction: (1) phonics, (2) phonemic awareness, (3) fluency, (4) vocabulary, and (5) comprehension. For each area, the panel conducted a review of the extant research and makes recommendations for practice.
Many praised the work of the NRP for its rigorous methodology, but others (particularly those who advocated for a whole-language approach) found fault with the areas the NRP chose to focus on. Advocates of whole-language approaches viewed the NRP’s emphasis on decoding skills (phonics, phonemic awareness) as a step backward. Although the NRP’s report includes comprehension as one of its areas, many researchers and educators believed that there was a subtle repositioning: “Comprehension became the natural consequence of teaching the [alphabetic] code well in the early stages of instruction instead of the primary goal and focus of attention from the very beginning of a child’s instructional life in school” (Pearson & Cervetti, 2017, p. 39). A lively debate, often called the reading wars, ensued; the crux of the conversation centered on whether a phonics-based approach or a whole-language approach was best for students.
In 2010, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Although the standards are surrounded by controversy (much of which stems from the false notion that the federal government created the standards), many reading researchers see them as striking a healthy balance between phonics and comprehension. Advocates of whole language, such as Pearson and Cervetti (2017), describe the publication of the CCSS for English language arts standards as a “comeback” for reading comprehension (p. 12) and state that “the CCSS for reading seem to be well grounded in solid theories of reading comprehension” (p. 45).
In their chapter of the fourth volume of the Handbook of Reading Research, William E. Tunmer and Tom Nicholson (2011) summarize the benefits and drawbacks of both whole-language approaches and phonics approaches:
Whole language provides plenty of opportunity for children to read but is weak on teaching the alphabetic principle…. Phonics gives lots of practice in learning the alphabetic principle but does not provide much opportunity for putting the alphabetic principle into practice through actual reading of text. (p. 425)
They conclude their comparison of whole language and phonics by suggesting that the most effective reading instruction “draw[s] on key elements of both approaches to provide instruction that best suits the needs of individual children” (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011, p. 425). In the next section, we elaborate on how we believe teachers can best provide such reading instruction. Here, it suffices to say that the current state of research in reading acknowledges the importance of both phonics and whole-language approaches.
Development-Based Reading Instruction
As we mention previously, Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) assert that effective reading instruction looks different depending on what students already know and are able to do:
The search for the “best method” of teaching reading is fundamentally misguided, as the most effective approach used with any given child depends crucially on the reading-related knowledge, skills, and experiences the child brings to the task of learning to read. (p. 405)
They use the term literate cultural capital to describe the literacy assets that students may or may not have when they begin school. Table 1.4 (page 16) lists literacy activities that children may experience at home or in the community before they come to school, along with the reading-related knowledge or skills that they may learn from such activities.
Table 1.4: Literate Cultural Capital
| Literacy Activity | Reading-Related Knowledge and Skills |
| Seeing parents and other adults reading for entertainment or informational purposes | Understanding the value and purpose of reading |
| Listening to and participating in conversations | Developing oral language Developing vocabulary knowledge |
| Playing alphabet games (such as I Spy) and reading alphabet books | Building knowledge of letter names and sounds |
| Playing rhyming games (such as using pig Latin or reading nursery rhymes) and reading rhyming books (such as Dr. Seuss books) | Gaining sensitivity to individual sounds and groups of sounds in spoken words (phonemic and phonological awareness) |
| Inventing spellings (such as KLR for color or FRE for fairy) | Developing sensitivity to spelling-sound correspondences (phonics knowledge) |
| Participating in shared reading experiences | Gaining a basic understanding of concepts and conventions of printed language Gaining a familiarity with decontextualized language Becoming sensitive to the grammatical constraints of written sentences Understanding basic genres of written language Acquiring knowledge about the world and particular topics Using basic meaning-making strategies |
Source: Duke & Carlisle, 2011; Purcell-Gates, Duke, & Stouffer, 2016; Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011.
Students who lack literate cultural capital often struggle when learning to read. However, research shows that high-quality teaching can compensate for these deficits. Catherine E. Snow, Michelle V. Porche, Patton O. Tabors, and Stephanie R. Harris (2007, as cited in Duke & Carlisle, 2011) find that students from home environments that were rated low (regarding literacy experiences and support) still made expected gains in reading achievement if they were in classrooms that were rated high (regarding literacy instruction) for two consecutive years. In contrast, only 25 percent of students from low-rated home environments made expected gains if they were in a high-rated classroom for one year, and none made expected gains if they were in low-rated classrooms. These findings indicate that high-quality reading instruction is of paramount importance in ensuring that all students learn to read.
As we mentioned previously, the hallmark of high-quality reading instruction is what Victoria Purcell-Gates, and colleagues (2016) call “a diagnostic approach to teaching reading.” Such an approach “results in greater reading achievement by learners, is documented as a key element of successful classrooms, and is statistically related to reading achievement (p. 1241).
To implement a diagnostic approach to reading instruction, we believe that teachers must understand how reading skill develops. If a teacher has a mental model of the skills reading requires and an understanding of the continua along which those skills develop, he or she can assess a student’s current status for each skill and determine what the student needs to learn next to improve. Such a mental model can also help a teacher understand how various reading skills interact with each other, and the ramifications of low or high skills in particular areas. In figure 1.1, we present a model that teachers might use to conceptualize the development of skilled reading. In the remainder of this introduction, we present research supporting the model.
Figure 1.1: Development of skilled reading.
Notice the headings at the top of each column and at the bottom of figure 1.1: foundational skills, word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Scott Paris and his colleagues (Afflerbach, Pearson, & Paris, 2008; Carpenter & Paris, 2005; Paris, 2005, 2008; Paris, Carpenter, Paris, & Hamilton, 2005; Paris & Luo, 2010) offer a helpful distinction when thinking about these elements: they differentiate between constrained and unconstrained reading skills. Constrained skills, such as fluency and word recognition, are those that develop in a fairly linear way and that students can learn to master in a relatively short period of time. We indicate this in figure 1.1 by the closed columns representing word recognition and fluency (on the left side of the figure). Unconstrained skills, such as comprehension and vocabulary, develop organically and continually over long periods of time; they have the potential for unlimited growth. These appear in the open columns representing vocabulary and comprehension (on the right of the figure). We also consider foundational skills (at the bottom of the figure), such as concepts of print and tier one vocabulary, to be constrained skills. Readers will note that listening comprehension is an exception; it is represented with a closed column. Research by Nell K. Duke and Joanne Carlisle (2011), which we address in a later section, indicates that listening comprehension improves and is useful up to a point, but then becomes less important than reading comprehension as texts become more complex. Therefore, we represent it with a closed column.
Foundational Skills: Concepts of Print and Tier One Vocabulary
Concepts of print are basic ideas about how print (generally) and books (in particular) work (Clay, 2000, 2013). Table 1.5 (page 18) lists selected concepts of print.
Table 1.5: Selected Concepts of Print
| Concept of Print | Description |
| Book Handling | All books have covers and pages that people read in a specific order. |
| Vertical Reading Direction | Reading in English goes from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. |
| Horizontal Reading Direction | Reading in English goes from left to right, line by line. |
| Page Order | People read book pages in a specific order. |
| Print Function | The function of print is to carry meaning. |
| Print-to-Speech Correspondence | One printed word corresponds to one spoken word. |
| Role of Punctuation in Print | People use punctuation to signal types of sentences and the ends of sentences. |
| Letter-Word Discrimination in Print | Words and letters are different; people use letters to make words. |
Source: Adapted from Zucker, Ward, & Justice, 2009.
Regarding vocabulary, Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G. McKeown, and Linda Kucan (2002) categorize vocabulary terms into three tiers. Tier one terms are those that most native speakers already know because they frequently hear them in oral conversations (for example, clock, happy, and baby). Most native English speakers will acquire tier one terms from oral conversation and will not need instruction in them. However, English learners or students from home environments that lack rich oral language experiences will likely need direct instruction in these words. Robert J. Marzano (2010b) compiled a list of 2,845 of these terms, organized into 420 semantically related clusters; visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a list of these terms and their clusters.
Constrained Skills: Fluency and Word Recognition
Fluency is the ability to read accurately and with appropriate expression at an appropriate pace. Most definitions of reading fluency include three components: (1) prosody, (2) accuracy, and (3) automaticity (Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, Meisinger, Levy, & Rasinski, 2010). Prosody is the extent to which oral reading sounds like oral speech; it involves the stress placed on syllables, vocal intonation, and pace of reading. Accuracy is reading words correctly, and automaticity is reading words quickly and without conscious attention to the process (Cunningham, Nathan, & Raher, 2011; Rasinski, Reutzel, Chard, & Linan-Thompson, 2011). Accuracy and automaticity are the twin goals of word recognition development. Figure 1.2 illustrates the relationship between word recognition and the three components of fluency.
Figure 1.2: Relationship between word recognition and the components of fluency.
As shown in figure 1.2, two components of fluency—accuracy and automaticity—are required for students to effectively read the words on a page. Adding prosody allows students to read the words with expression, proper phrasing, and appropriate intonation. Accordingly, we discuss word recognition (accuracy + automaticity) first and finish with a discussion of prosody.
Automatic word recognition (which implies accurate word recognition) is necessary for skilled reading because the brain cannot pay attention to two tasks at once. It must either switch back and forth between tasks, or one of the tasks must become automatic. Reading researchers have been aware of this phenomenon since the late 19th century (for example, see Cattell, 1886; Huey, 1908). In 1974, David LaBerge and S. Jay Samuels articulated their theory of automatic information processing in reading. They posit that, in mature readers, surface-level reading processes (such as identifying letters, decoding them, and connecting words to meanings) operate with little to no conscious effort, allowing these readers to focus cognitive resources on making meaning from text (comprehension). Charles A. Perfetti and Thomas Hogaboam (1975) and Michael I. Posner and C. R. R. Snyder (1975) go a step further, claiming that word recognition has to become automatic because comprehension can’t; understanding a text always requires conscious cognitive control. Later researchers agreed with and extended these theories (see Logan, 1997; Stanovich, 1990), but the fundamental idea remained: “Rapid word recognition frees up mental resources for thinking about the writer’s intent and the meaning of the text rather than what word the print represents” (Roberts, Christo, & Shefelbine, 2011, p. 229). Research also indicates that many struggling readers’ difficulties stem from a lack of automaticity with word recognition (Fletcher, Lyon, Fuchs, & Barnes, 2007; Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon, 2004); these students can’t focus on understanding a text because they have dedicated their cognitive resources to figuring out what the words say.
For skilled readers, some researchers call automatic word recognition “the obligatory nature of word recognition” (Roberts et al., 2011, p. 230). In other words, a skilled reader can’t resist reading a word; to see a word is to know what it says. Reading “happens automatically without the influence of intention or choice” (Ehri, 2005, p. 135). To illustrate this idea, consider figure 1.3. Try to name the animal in the picture while ignoring the printed word.
Figure 1.3: Picture-word interference task.
For skilled readers, the task in figure 1.3 is difficult because they recognize the printed word automatically; the word creates a cognitive cue that the reader must resist in order to accurately name the animal in the picture. Similarly, Stroop tasks (named after the researcher who invented them in 1935) list color words (red, yellow, blue, green, purple) printed in nonmatching ink colors (red appears in purple ink, yellow appears in blue ink, blue appears in red ink, and so on). The reader must name the color of the ink while ignoring the printed word; most find this more difficult than picture-word tasks because colored ink is a weaker stimulus than a picture. Tasks such as these provide proof for the idea that skilled readers no longer sound out words but recognize them automatically.
In 2005, reading researcher Linnea C. Ehri synthesized eight theories about the development of automatic word recognition (Chall, 1983; Ehri, 1998, 1999, 2002; Frith, 1985; Gough & Hillinger, 1980; Marsh, Friedman, Welch, & Desberg, 1981; Mason, 1980; Seymour & Duncan, 2001; Stuart & Coltheart, 1988). She concludes that all students learning to read in English progress through four phases of word recognition development: (1) the prealphabetic phase, (2) the partial alphabetic phase, (3) the full alphabetic phase, and (4) the consolidated alphabetic phase. We describe and summarize each in the following sections.
Prealphabetic Phase
During the prealphabetic phase, students read words using visual or context cues. A visual cue is a distinctive feature of a word’s appearance; for example, a student named William might recognize his name because it has “two lines in the middle” (the Ls). A context cue is something that typically occurs in a word’s immediate environment—for example, the golden arches that often accompany the word McDonald’s.
Philip B. Gough, Connie Juel, and Priscilla L. Griffith (1992) examined the nature of context cues by teaching preschoolers sets of four words in which one of the words appears with a thumbprint (see figure 1.4 for an example).
Figure 1.4: Set of words with a thumbprint word.
Students could quickly learn to “read” the thumbprint word (in figure 1.5, lamp) with the thumbprint next to it, but when the researchers removed the thumbprint, they no longer knew the word. When the thumbprint appeared by itself, with no print accompanying it, students successfully produced the thumbprint word (lamp). When researchers placed the thumbprint next to a different word (for instance, stick), almost all of the children produced the original thumbprint word (lamp) rather than the new word (stick). In essence, these prealphabetic readers were associating the target word’s pronunciation and meaning with the thumbprint image, rather than with the letters of the word.
Patricia E. Masonheimer, Priscilla A. Drum, and Linnea C. Ehri (1984) found that preschoolers who could read common signs and labels such as McDonald’s or Pepsi could still read them if letters were altered; for example, if the researchers changed Pepsi (shown with its logo) to Xepsi, children still read it as Pepsi. Even when prompted to look for mistakes, students failed to detect the change. These findings indicate that, during the prealphabetic phase, learners do not associate words with their spellings, but rather with context or visual cues.
Additionally, Brian Byrne (1992) finds that prealphabetic readers attend to print-meaning correspondences, but not to print-sound correspondences. In an experiment, he taught prealphabetic readers that triangle-square meant little boy and circle-square meant big boy (see figure 1.5). Then he showed them triangle-cross and asked, “Does this say little fish or big fish?” Most of these prealphabetic readers were able to match the word little with the triangle and answer correctly (it says little fish).
Figure 1.5: Print-meaning correspondence task.
In contrast, when Byrne (1992) taught prealphabetic readers that triangle-square meant fat and circle-square meant bat, the learners were unable to figure out whether triangle-cross meant fun or bun (see figure 1.6). That is, they could not isolate the /f/ sound and match it to the triangle.
Figure 1.6: Print-sound correspondence task.
Bynre’s (1992) findings indicate that prealphabetic readers understand that printed symbols can correspond to spoken words (which have meaning), but they do not understand that printed symbols correspond to spoken sounds (which do not always have meaning by themselves).
Partial Alphabetic Phase
The partial alphabetic phase, according to Ehri (2005), emerges when students begin to form connections between the sounds of letters and the sounds in words. They stop using visual or context cues and start using phonetic (letter-sound) cues to identify words. To make this switch, students must grasp the alphabetic principle—the realization that there is a relationship between printed letters and spoken sounds (Purcell-Gates et al., 2016). Students typically begin to grasp the alphabetic principle as they acquire alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness (Paratore, Cassano, & Schickedanz, 2011).
Alphabet knowledge involves knowing the names of the letters and the sound or sounds associated with each letter. Research indicates that students acquire alphabet knowledge in a specific order (Paratore et al., 2011), typically starting with letters in the student’s name and letters in frequently encountered words. They usually learn uppercase letters before lowercase letters, and generally distinguish letters with few overlapping features (such as O/E or h/s) before letters with many overlapping features (such as E/F, O/Q, K/X, or m/n). Last of all come letters that differ only in orientation (such as b/d or p/q).
Phonological awareness is the ability to manipulate the sound structure of language, such as by segmenting sentences into words and words into sounds. Like alphabet knowledge, learners follow a typical acquisition sequence for phonological awareness (Paratore et al., 2011). Students typically acquire larger units, such as words and syllables, before smaller units, such as phonemes (single sounds). Interestingly, this is likely because phonemes are not actually articulated as separate units in speech. For example, when you say the word green, you blend the phonemes together, making it almost impossible to hear where one ends and the next begins. The National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) explains:
Being able to distinguish the separate phonemes in pronunciations of words so that they can be matched to graphemes is difficult. This is because spoken language is seamless; that is, there are no breaks in speech signaling where one phoneme ends and the next one begins. Rather, phonemes are folded into each other and are coarticulated. Discovering phonemic units requires instruction to learn how the system works. (chapter 2, p. 2)
In other words, because of the coarticulation of phonemes in spoken speech, hearing separate phonemes in speech is a skill that develops as a student learns that words consist of letters, which represent individual sounds. Alphabet knowledge and phonemic discrimination go hand in hand.
To illustrate the difference between the prealphabetic and partial alphabetic phases, Linnea C. Ehri and Lee S. Wilce (1985) conducted a study in which they taught students in both phases to read various invented spellings of words. For example, for the word giraffe, one of the spellings they taught was wBc, which is visually distinctive (it has a memorable shape—tall in the middle). Another spelling they taught was JRF, which is phonetically distinctive (if you say the names or sounds of the letters, it sounds like “giraffe”). Ehri and Wilce (1985) correctly predicted that the prealphabetic readers would remember spellings with strong visual cues (like wBc) and partial alphabetic readers would remember spellings with strong phonetic cues (like JRF); prealphabetic readers remembered wBc as the spelling of giraffe while partial alphabetic readers remembered JRF. Many other studies have replicated these findings (for example, Bowman & Treiman, 2002; de Abreu & Cardoso-Martins, 1998; Roberts, 2003; Scott & Ehri, 1990; Treiman & Rodriguez, 1999).
Although partial alphabetic readers have begun to use phonetic cues to identify words, they cannot yet accurately and reliably decode text. Ehri (2005) explains:
During the partial alphabetic phase children might remember how to read jail by connecting the first and final letters J and L to their letter names heard in the words “jay” and “el.” Because the middle letters are ignored, the connections formed are only partial; hence the name of the phase…. Reading during the partial alphabetic phase is an imperfect process that occurs among beginners who lack full knowledge of the alphabetic system and phonemic segmentation skill. (pp. 143, 145)
In spite of this imperfect decoding, the partial alphabetic phase is critical. Marilyn J. Adams and Maggie Bruck (1993) explain that readers who fail to transition to the partial alphabetic phase (and instead continue to read using context and visual cues) quickly become overwhelmed by the cognitive demands of remembering thousands of words:
Without the mnemonic support of the spelling-to-sound connections, the visual system must eventually become overwhelmed: the situation in which [these children] are left is roughly analogous to learning 50,000 telephone numbers to the point of perfect recall and instant recognition. (p. 130)
Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) articulate two additional problems with staying in the prealphabetic phase: (1) new words become increasingly harder to acquire, and (2) previously unseen words are unreadable.
New words become increasingly harder to acquire because it becomes more and more difficult to find distinctive visual cues for them. If a student recognizes the word stop because it “starts with a squiggle” (the s character), that student will likely confuse stop with other words that also “start with a squiggle” such as stove, son, sand, or sheep. Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) explain that these readers “will make an ever-increasing number of errors and become confused and frustrated unless they discover or are led to discover an alternative strategy for establishing the relationship between the written and spoken forms of the language” (p. 408).
Second, previously unseen words are unreadable for prealphabetic readers because using visual and context cues is not generative; they can’t “figure out” a word. Upon encountering a word for the first time, someone must tell them the word, and they must memorize it in order to be able to recognize it again. Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) point out:
Beginning reading materials typically employ upwards of 1,500 words, each of which must be encountered a first time. Moreover, when a new word does appear in print it does not suddenly begin appearing with great frequency. Approximately 35%–40% of the words used in beginning reading materials appear only once (Jorm & Share, 1983). Thus beginning readers are continually encountering words that they have not seen before and may not set eyes on again for some time. (p. 409)
In sum, even though readers in the partial alphabetic phase do not decode accurately, transitioning from visual or context cues to phonetic cues is critical for later success.
Full Alphabetic Phase
The full alphabetic phase is also called the cipher stage (Gough, 1996) because students decipher the code of printed language and begin to accurately read words. During this phase, alphabet knowledge broadens into phonics knowledge—familiarity with the sounds associated with spelling patterns. Phonological awareness refines into phonemic awareness—the ability to detect and manipulate single sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. These progressions facilitate the development of phonological recoding ability.
Phonological recoding ability is the capacity to figure out unknown words by connecting sounds to print (Juel, 1991). The basic process follows these four steps.
1. A student encounters an unknown word in print.
2. The student generates possible pronunciations for the unknown word (using his or her knowledge of letter-sound and spelling-sound relationships).
3. The student searches his or her oral vocabulary for a word that is a close match to one of the possible pronunciations.
4. If the student finds a match, he or she checks to see if that word makes sense in context.
Although there are other ways to decode words (such as from memory, from context, or by creating analogies between unknown and known words), phonological recoding ability is uniquely important for two reasons. First, most obviously, it allows students to figure out words they have never seen before. Second, less obviously, but more importantly, it enables students to self-teach. The self-teaching hypothesis (Jorm, 1979; Jorm & Share, 1983; Share, 1995, 1999, 2004, 2008) suggests that once students can successfully sound out words, the best way for them to improve their reading is through independent reading. This is because, ultimately, skilled reading requires extensive and implicit knowledge of English orthography, which is impossible to teach directly.
Orthography refers to the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols. According to Roberts and colleagues (2011), “English has one of the most opaque or deep orthographies of all the world’s languages and is characterized by complex and variable relationships between spoken and written language” (p. 230). Orthographic knowledge includes familiarity with various spellings for various sounds, the ability to properly pronounce speech sounds, and an understanding of the proper formation of plurals and affixed words, permissible spelling patterns, and exceptions to rules. English orthography also includes:
Knowledge of correspondences between single letters or digraphs (e.g., sh, oa) and single phonemes, correspondences between groups of letters (e.g., tion) and groups of phonemes (e.g., /shun/), and polyphonic spelling patterns (e.g., ear as in bear and hear, own as in clown or flown) …[,] knowledge of more complex conditional rules whose application depends on position-specific constraints or the presence of “marker” letters … [,and] morphophonemic rules that speakers of English know implicitly, such as that regular noun plural inflection is realized as /s/ when it follows a voiceless stop consonant, as in cats, and as /z/ when it follows a voiced phoneme, as in dogs. (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011, p. 414)
Exercises 1 through 5 in appendix B (page 169) provide further insight into the complexities of English orthography.
In sum, English orthography entails a vast amount of detailed and highly variable information, most of which skilled readers access and apply quickly and without conscious attention. It is impossible for educators to directly teach such a volume of information to such a depth in the time available for reading instruction; “there are simply too many letter-sound relationships for children to acquire by direct instruction, probably several hundred” (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011, p. 414). Therefore, students must learn the bulk of English orthography implicitly during independent reading (Adams, 1990; Adams & Bruck, 1993; Bowey & Muller, 2005; Cunningham, 2006; Cunningham, Perry, Stanovich, & Share, 2002; de Jong & Share, 2007; Ehri, 1992, 1997, 2005; Gough & Walsh, 1991; Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Hulme, Snowling, & Quinlan, 1991; Kyte & Johnson, 2006; Perfetti, 1992; Share, 1995, 1999, 2004; Sprenger-Charolles, Siegel, & Bonnet, 1998; Tunmer & Chapman, 1998, 2006; Wessling & Reitsma, 2000). Cunningham and colleagues (2011) explain:
The detailed orthographic representations necessary for fast, efficient word recognition are primarily self-taught during independent reading. Phonological recoding (i.e., decoding via translation of a printed letter string into its spoken form) is the mechanism or self-teacher that enables a reader to independently acquire an autonomous orthographic lexicon…. A successful decoding encounter with an unfamiliar word provides the reader with an opportunity to acquire word-specific orthographic information, such as order and identity of letters. This exhaustive grapheme-by-grapheme decoding (en route to a correct pronunciation) will result in the formation of well-specified orthographic representations…. The ability to independently decode novel strings through phonological recoding, such that rich orthographic representations can be formed, stored, and used, is perhaps the most valuable skill for learning orthographic representations of words. (pp. 265, 277)
To sum up, phonological recoding (sounding words out) is a critical skill because it enables independent reading. In turn, implicit learning during independent reading is the only way for students to acquire the comprehensive and implicit understanding of English orthography that they need to be skilled readers.
While it is not feasible to teach all of the phonics patterns in English directly, research shows that teaching a systematic progression of them helps jump-start phonological recoding (Gough, 1996; NICHD, 2000; Thompson, Fletcher-Flinn, & Cottrell, 1999; Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011). Catherine E. Snow and Connie Juel (2005) explain that “phonics may be useful to children not because of the specific letter-sound relations taught, but because a phonics approach gives children the chance to discover the alphabetic principle, and provides practice looking closely at word spelling” (p. 516). In chapter 4, we provide research-based guidelines regarding which phonics patterns to teach and what order to teach them in.
Consolidated Alphabetic Phase
By the time students enter the consolidated alphabetic phase, word recognition has moved from “a highly demanding, intentional process requiring constant, laborious symbol-sound translation to a less demanding, direct process which incorporates the automatic recognition of letters and immediate identification of specific words” (Cunningham et al., 2011, p. 260). Readers in the consolidated alphabetic phase are reading large amounts of text independently, and they now process words in larger chunks. Ehri (2005) explains, “As a result of practice reading many words, the reader processes increasingly larger units as these units recur, from features to letters to spelling patterns to whole words, referred to as unitization” (p. 151). For example, consolidated alphabetic phase readers recognize the unit –ing and read it as a whole, rather than as individual sounds. Ehri (2005) additionally points out:
Knowing larger blends contributes to the learning of sight words by reducing the memory load. For example, connections to learn the word interesting are much easier to form if the four syllabic spellings, IN, TER, EST, ING, are known as units than if the word is analyzed as 10 graphophonemic units. (p. 150)
Also, Ehri and Wilce (1983) find that readers in the consolidated phase could read words as rapidly as they could name numbers, indicating that words were stored in memory and accessed as whole units, rather than sequences of letters or syllables.
As students engage in unitization, they also begin to learn that different word parts carry meaning. They can use these morphemes to determine the meanings of unfamiliar words, which students can now read but may not possess in their oral vocabularies. For example, a student might encounter the word reworked for the first time in text. By studying the morphemes in the word—re meaning “to do again,” work meaning “an effortful activity,” and ed meaning “in the past”—the student can reason that it means that someone worked on something again in the past. According to Purcell-Gates and colleagues (2016), students who know more about morphemes and are more aware of them in text exhibit stronger reading comprehension than students without such knowledge and awareness.
Prosody
As we mentioned previously, fluency comprises word recognition (accuracy + automaticity) and prosody; prosody centers on the rhythmic and tonal features of speech and involves three major elements (Kuhn & Schwanenflugel, 2017; Rasinski et al., 2011).
1. Stress: The prominence the speaker places on particular words and syllables
2. Intonation: The rise and fall of vocal pitch
3. Duration: The length of time the speaker employs in pronouncing a word or part of a word and patterns of pausing between words, phrases, and sentences
Research indicates that there is a relationship between prosody and comprehension. Melanie R. Kuhn and Paula J. Schwanenflugel (2017) find that “as children develop good reading prosody, they also develop better reading comprehension skills” (p. 320). Rebekah G. Benjamin and Paula J. Schwanenflugel (2010) find that good readers actually make greater prosodic distinctions as texts become more complex and difficult. James V. Hoffman (2017) cites extensive research indicating that prosody assists the reader in constructing meaning from a text (Allington, 1983; Rasinski, Blachowicz, & Lems, 2006; Rasinski & Hoffman, 2005; Schrieber, 1980, 1987).
There are at least three possible reasons for the relationship between prosody and comprehension. First, Andreas Lind, Lars Hall, Björn Breidegard, Christian Balkenius, and Petter Johansson (2014) suggest that the auditory feedback from their own voices helps readers clarify and specify the information they read. Second, Lyn Frazier, Katy Carlson, and Charles Clifton Jr. (2006) suggest that prosody helps to preserve information in working memory, giving the brain more time to make connections between this information and prior knowledge. Finally, Kuhn and Schwanenflugel (2017) hypothesize, “Good readers might link ideas in working memory using a prosodic packaging that is more optimal for comprehension” (p. 320). Although research has not yet completely explained the relationship between prosody and comprehension, it does indicate that prosody plays a mediating role between automatic word recognition and comprehension.
Unconstrained Skills: Comprehension and Vocabulary
Comprehension and vocabulary, as unconstrained skills, develop continually over long periods of time and have the potential for unlimited growth. Regarding comprehension, Duke and Carlisle (2011) write:
Comprehension is a quintessential growth construct. As adults, we might still be developing our ability to comprehend some kinds of text (e.g., the IRS manual) and some content (e.g., studies in neuropsychology), and we might be refining the practices we use to comprehend text (e.g., searching text ever more effectively). (p. 200)
Unlike constrained skills, which develop along a fairly predictable progression, unconstrained skills develop more organically. Again, Duke and Carlisle (2011) explain:
While it is clear that comprehension develops, it is also clear that there is not a single path to comprehension development. This is largely because there are myriad reader factors, text factors, and context factors that all impact reading comprehension…. Comprehension is affected by individual differences in students’ capabilities and experiences as they interact with the quality of the opportunities they have at home and school to develop language and literacy…. There is no single set of stages or linear trajectory on which readers can be placed. (p. 215)
Vocabulary functions similarly. For example, it would be impossible to articulate a progression of words that all students learn in a fixed order (or even phases of word learning that students advance through). Therefore, in this section, rather than presenting developmental progressions, we first define vocabulary and comprehension and then present research and instructional considerations for both areas.
Vocabulary
As we explained previously, vocabulary knowledge is a critical element of reading. A student’s ability to use phonological recoding to read an unfamiliar word hinges on whether the unfamiliar word is in his or her oral vocabulary. As the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) states:
Benefits in understanding text by applying letter-sound correspondences to printed material come about only if the target word is in the learner’s oral vocabulary. When the word is not in the learner’s oral vocabulary, it will not be understood when it occurs in print. (chapter 4, p. 3)
Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) add:
Children with poorly developed vocabulary knowledge will have trouble identifying and assigning appropriate meanings to unknown printed words, especially partially decoded or irregularly spelled words, if the corresponding spoken words are not in their listening vocabulary (Ricketts, Nation, & Bishop, 2007). This in turn will limit the development of their phonological recoding skills, as additional spelling-sound relationships can be induced from words that have been correctly identified. (p. 421)
As we discussed, instruction in tier one vocabulary terms is foundational and critical for students (usually English learners) who do not know such terms; tier one vocabulary instruction should occur immediately and intensively as soon as possible for these learners. However, all students (including those receiving instruction for tier one terms) need direct instruction in terms from tiers two and three. Terms in both tiers occur infrequently in print; thus, students are unlikely to learn their meanings through repeated exposure. Tier two terms are general and appear in all disciplines and content areas (analyze, inquire, rescind); tier three terms are specific to one discipline or content area (quadrilateral, federalism, valence, allegory).
Once students have achieved automatic word recognition, their vocabularies appear to be the limiting factor in their comprehension. Andrew Biemiller (2005, 2012; Biemiller & Slonim, 2001) finds that after third grade, most students could decode 25 to 30 percent more words than they could understand: “From third grade on, the main limiting factor for the majority of children is vocabulary, not reading mechanics (i.e., decoding print into words)” (Biemiller, 2012, p. 34). Robert J. Marzano, Katie Rogers, and Julia A. Simms (2015) synthesize research to articulate the following five characteristics of effective vocabulary instruction.
1. Presenting individual terms and their descriptions in rich contexts (Graves, 2000; NICHD, 2000; Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986): Teachers select terms to teach and provide context-rich descriptions of them (rather than dictionary definitions). These descriptions can include using the term in sentences, providing pictures associated with the term, and explaining synonyms and antonyms of the term.
2. Asking students to generate information about terms (Anderson & Reder, 1979; Graves, 2000; Nagy, 2005; NICHD, 2000; Scott, Jamieson-Noel, & Asselin, 2003; Stahl & Clark, 1987; Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986; Vogel, 2003): Teachers prompt students to generate their own descriptions of terms. Such descriptions should involve both words and pictures.
3. Using multimedia methods (words, pictures, animations, and so on) to introduce and practice terms (Mayer, 2001; Mayer & Moreno, 2002; NICHD, 2000; Neuman, Newman, & Dwyer, 2011; Sadoski & Paivio, 2001): Teachers strive to incorporate multisensory activities and experiences into vocabulary instruction. Engaging as many senses as possible when learning a term solidifies it more rigorously in memory.
4. Asking students to relate new terms to words they already know (Anderson & Reder, 1979; Booth, 2009; Chi & Koeske, 1983; Entwisle, 1966; Glaser, 1984; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999; Scott et al., 2003; Stahl & Murray, 1994; Stahl & Nagy, 2006; Tinkham, 1997): Teachers help students create mental networks of concepts by pointing out how new words connect to previously learned words. As with multisensory activities, explicit connections between terms solidify them in memory.
5. Providing multiple exposures to new terms and opportunities to use those terms in the classroom (Beck et al., 2002; Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; Bowman, Donovan, & Burns, 2001; Brophy & Good, 1986; Daniels, 1994, 1996; Dole, Sloan, & Trathen, 1995; Hoffman, 1991; Leung, 1992; McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Pople, 1985; McKeown, Beck, & Sandora, 2012; NICHD, 2000; Pressley, Allington, Wharton-McDonald, Block, & Morrow, 2001; Rosenshine, 1986; Scott et al., 2003; Sénéchal, 1997; Snow et al., 1998; Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986; Wharton-McDonald, Pressley, & Hampston, 1998): Teachers review previously taught terms on a regular basis, asking students to discuss them, extend their understanding of them, and play games with them. Each subsequent exposure to a term solidifies it more firmly in memory.
Marzano and colleagues (Marzano, 2004, 2010b; Marzano et al., 2015; Marzano & Pickering, 2005; Marzano & Simms, 2013) have designed a six-step process that incorporates each of these elements of effective vocabulary instruction.
1. Provide a description, explanation, or example of the new term: State the new term, ask students what they already know about it, and provide information that communicates and clarifies its meaning.
2. Ask students to restate the description, explanation, or example in their own words: Prompt students to think about how they might describe the new term to a friend or use the new term in their personal lives. Students should record their responses in a vocabulary notebook or academic journal.
3. Ask students to construct a picture, symbol, or graphic representing the term or phrase: Students should create a visual representation for the term. This might be a sketch of the object a term refers to, a symbol for the term, an example of the term, a cartoon with a character using the term, or a graphic for the term.
4. Engage students periodically in activities that help them add to their knowledge of previously taught terms: At various times over the next few days or weeks, students should identify similarities and differences between terms and examine the morphology of terms.
5. Periodically ask students to discuss previously taught terms with one another: At various times over the next few days or weeks, students should talk to each other about terms they’ve learned and try to refine or revise their descriptions of terms (recorded during step 2) as a result of their discussion.
6. Involve students periodically in games that allow them to play with previously taught terms: At various times over the next few days or weeks, students should play word games with terms they’ve learned.
Comprehension
The RAND Reading Study Group (2002) defines comprehension as “the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language” (p. 11). Duke and Carlisle (2011) elaborate:
Meaning does not reside in the oral or written text, which Spiro (1980) calls but “a skeleton, a blueprint for the creation of meaning” (p. 245)…. The reader accesses the meaning of words in text, processes the syntax of clauses and sentences, relates clauses and sentences to one another to build local coherence (e.g., by inferring what pronouns refer to), and relates larger pieces of text to build global coherence (e.g., by inferring how one portion of the text is relevant to another), in the end building a situation model of the text (Kintsch, 1998; Perfetti, 2007). This typically no longer includes memory of the specific clauses or sentences within the text, but rather is the overall meaning made of the text through the interaction of reader, text, and context factors. (p. 200)
Additionally, Cynthia Shanahan (2017) points out:
Competent readers do not use a universal approach to reading. Depending on the level of prior knowledge, the kind of text, and the purpose for reading, individuals alter their attention to different structural, rhetorical, and linguistic characteristics and think in varied ways about the elements they encounter. (p. 479)
Research indicates that skilled readers perform the comprehension-related actions listed in table 1.6 before, during, and after reading.
Comprehension strategies are “goal-oriented processes that readers and writers use to construct meaning” (Conley, 2017, p. 407). Research has shown that educators can teach comprehension strategies and that such instruction has positive effects on reading comprehension (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Gambrell & Bales, 1986; Haller, Child, & Walberg, 1988; Mahdavi & Tensfeldt, 2013; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Pressley, 2002, 2006; Pressley et al., 1992; Trabasso & Bouchard, 2002). Ian A. G. Wilkinson and Eun Hye Son (2011) elaborate:
There is now no doubt that instruction in small repertoires of comprehension strategies, when implemented well, produces robust effects on measures of comprehension, including standardized tests (e.g., Anderson, 1992; Brown et al., 1996; Collins, 1991)…. There are at least two alternative explanations for the effect of teaching strategies. One alternative explanation is that teaching strategies promote students’ active engagement with text. Kintsch and Kintsch (2005) noted that a feature of all strategies is that they promote the active construction of meaning during reading, and the linking of the text with reader’s prior knowledge and experience (see also Willingham, 2007). Another alternative explanation is that strategies are vehicles that enable students to engage in dialogue about text. (pp. 364–365)
Table 1.6: Comprehension-Related Actions
| Before Reading | • Know why they are reading and set goals for reading. • Know how they will use the knowledge gained from reading. • Know many word meanings (vocabulary). • Know a lot about the world (prior knowledge). • Preview a text to determine its genre and structure. • Skim a text to determine which parts to process before reading closely. |
| During Reading | • Recognize words on the page automatically. • Read text fluently. • Look for important information (in words or pictures) and pay more attention to it. • Try to relate important points to one another. • Use what they already know (prior knowledge) to make predictions. • Relate new content to prior knowledge. • Use strategies such as predicting, imaging, questioning, summarizing, clarifying, inferring, and connecting to prior knowledge to construct meaning and interpret the text. • Remember information from a text using strategies such as reviewing, summarizing, paraphrasing, and questioning. • Monitor their understanding and the alignment of their understanding to their reading goal or goals. • Revise their prior knowledge and interpretation of a text as they read. • Rate the quality of a text and its usefulness for accomplishing the purpose for reading. • Interact with the text on both personal and intellectual levels as they read. • Engage in an internal dialogue or responsive conversation with the author of the text. • Evaluate the author’s purposes, intentions, and goals based on assumptions, worldviews, and beliefs that are overt or covert in a text. |
| When Comprehension Breaks Down | • Become even more active. • Adjust reading speed and level of concentration depending on the purpose and importance of reading. • Change comprehension strategies. • Puzzle out unfamiliar words, phrases, or concepts, especially when they seem important to interpreting the text. • Reread or use other strategies to try to regain a hold on the text (such as reviewing, questioning, summarizing, evaluating, or considering alternative interpretations). |
| After Reading | • Continue to build and reflect on their understanding of the text. • Assess how a text has affected or will affect their knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. |
| General | • Have a repertoire of comprehension strategies and know when and how to use them and combine them. • Have a repertoire of metacognitive strategies to monitor their reading processes. • Employ different processes in different ways, and to different degrees, depending on why they are reading and what they are reading, both with respect to disciplinary context and genre. |
Sources: Cho & Afflerbach, 2017; Purcell-Gates et al., 2016; Wharton-McDonald & Erickson, 2017.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this table.
The most effective comprehension instruction is explicit and utilizes a gradual release of responsibility model (see Purcell-Gates et al., 2016, for supporting research).
Comprehension instruction should begin before students have developed automatic word recognition. That is, it should start as soon as they begin school, even before they can read text independently. Duke and Carlisle (2011) state that “we should be concerned about the development of reading comprehension from very early on, long before children can read text themselves” (p. 217). Paratore and colleagues (2011) advise that “curricula intended to guide both parents and teachers in their interactions with young children must be as relentlessly focused on developing vocabulary and language knowledge as they are on developing code knowledge” (p. 123). As we show in figure 1.1 (page 17), comprehension instruction before students have reached the full alphabetic phase will largely focus on developing students’ listening comprehension. Duke and Carlisle (2011) explain that developing comprehension skills through listening and then asking students to transfer those skills to their reading make sense because both listening and reading comprehension focus on making meaning from language:
Comprehension refers to the listener or reader’s understanding of the message expressed by the speaker or writer…. In this respect, listening comprehension and reading comprehension are not different—both are focused on accessing the meaning of a message communicated by someone else. (p. 199)
Once students can use phonological recoding to read texts themselves, they can apply their existing listening comprehension strategies and skills to text they read themselves.
As students mature in their comprehension abilities and read more difficult texts, research shows that listening comprehension actually becomes less important because it is less effective as texts increase in complexity. Again, Duke and Carlisle (2011) explain:
In the years when students are first learning to read, they typically can comprehend more challenging passages when listening than when reading, because of limitations in their word recognition. By the middle school years, the pattern is often reversed: students’ performance on challenging passages is better by reading than by listening. This is because readers can pace themselves, reread sentences, and carry out other strategic activities to construct their understanding of the text. Such activities are not possible when listening to passages of the kind that are typically used in written texts. (p. 202)
Also, as students mature in their reading comprehension skills, they are increasingly expected to read texts in order to learn from them, especially in the content areas of social studies, science, and mathematics. Teachers can facilitate such disciplinary reading by making certain that students understand the norms of the discipline in which they are reading and the specific strategies that experts in those disciplines typically use. For an analysis of disciplinary reading and recommendations regarding strategies to use with social studies, science, and mathematics texts, please see appendix C (page 177).
Summary
