Introduction to Reading First
This module describes the main features of
Reading First: (1) the five major reading skills; (2) three kinds of curricula;
(3) four kinds of assessments; (4) systematic and explicit instruction; (5)
scientific validation of all aspects of instruction (the first four items in
this list); and (6) reading as a school-wide endeavor.
A
Concise View of Reading: Five Major Skills, or Big Ideas
Reading First provides educators with
a clear picture of reading. Proficient
reading consists of five major skills.
When these skills are taught in a logically progressive sequence, early
skills help students to learn and use the later-taught skills—leading to
accurate, rapid reading with comprehension and enjoyment. The
five major reading skills are:
1. Phonemic awareness
2. The Alphabetic
principle
a. Letter-sound correspondence
r says rrr
b. Sounding out, or decoding, words
“rim” -> rrriiiimmm -> rim
3. Fluency
4. Vocabulary
5. Comprehension
Below
are brief definitions of each of the five main skills. Statements in italics are from the IDEA
website, at http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/trial_bi_index.php
1. Phonemic
Awareness.
Phonemic awareness is the
ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words. There
are about a dozen ways to hear and manipulate sounds in words. These ways are best taught from easier to
harder. For example,
a. Identify words that sound the same and different. run, sit, fun
b. Rhyme.
can, man, fan, rrr__
c. Count
the number of words in a sentence.
The dog sat by the cat = 6 words
d. Count the number of sounds (phonemes)
in a word.
sat = /s/a/t/ = 3 sounds
e. Blend
(make) words from separate syllables and sounds.
“Listen. ice…cream.
What word?” icecream.
“Listen. mmm…..aaa….nnnn. What word?”
man.
e. Segment
words by identifying the first, last, and middle (medial) sounds. “What
is the first sound in rrrruuuunnn?”
f. Identify
what word it would be if one sound were removed
(phoneme deletion). “Listen… sssaaaat. Take out the ssss. What word now?...”
g. Identify what a word would be if a
sound were replaced
with another. “Listen…. ssssiiiit. Take away the ssss and put in fff. What word now?...”
It’s
best to work on only three or
so kinds of phonemic awareness—not all of them. The best choices are probably rhyming,
segmenting, and blending. It’s also important to connect skill at phonemic
awareness with instruction on the alphabetic principle—letter-sound correspondence
and sounding out (decoding) words.
Specifically, in close succession, when you teach students to hear and
manipulate sounds in words (“Let’s rhyme with it…. ssssit ffffit
mmmmit.”, teach them the letters that go with the sounds (f says fff)
and then to sound out words made of those letters (fit). In other words, don’t work
on phonemic awareness by itself for weeks and then on the alphabetic principle.
Phonemic awareness helps
students learn to read and do other literacy skills. How? A
student who can hear and manipulate the sounds (phonemes) in words, can more
easily:
1. Remember which sound goes with which
letter.
2. Sound out words.
cat.
k/aaaa/t
3. Spell.
“How do you spell cat.?” kaaaat
. /k/ is c. /a/ is a. /t/ is t.
cat.
4. Detect and correct errors in reading
and spelling.
“The hou…no hhoorr..horse ran fast.”
See http://reading.uoregon.edu/pa/index.php for more information on phonemic
awareness.
2. Alphabetic
Principle. The alphabetic principle is the ability
to associate sounds with letters and use
these sounds to form words. Notice that the alphabetic principle
(sometimes called phonics) has two skill-parts.
a. The student knows letter-sound or
sound-symbol relationships:
that m says /m/, i says /i/, and r says
/r/.
b. The student uses letter-sound knowledge
to sound out or decode words-- perhaps letter by letter and then quickly.
“The bike has a bent
rrrriiiimmm….rim.”
When students use letter-sound knowledge to sound out words, they know exactly what the written word says. However, many students are not taught the alphabetic principle in
a systematic way. And many students are
taught NOT to use
knowledge of letter-sound correspondence as the first and most reliable
strategy for identifying words. These
students either HAVE to guess, or they are TAUGHT to guess or “predict” what words say
using “context cues.” For example, they
try to use
1. Pictures on the page. There is a picture of a lion on the
page. The student says, “He was a lion” rather than “He was
lying down.”
2. The shape of a word. The word is “maybe” but the student says
“baby.”
3. A few letters in a word. The student says “kit” instead of “kite.”
4. What seems to fit the meaning of a
sentence. The student says, “The
lamp fell
down,” but the word is “over.”
Students who guess what words say (because they were taught to do this or
because they were not taught the alphabetic principle systematically) may never
become skillful readers. That is why
Reading First stresses systematic and explicit instruction in the alphabetic
principle. Read more at http://reading.uoregon.edu/au/index.php
3. Fluency
with Text. Fluency is the effortless, automatic ability to
read words in connected text. Fluency is reading with accuracy, speed, and prosody (pitch, emphasis).
Fluency is important both for enjoyment
and comprehension. If a person struggles with words
(gu…qu…guil…quil…) , the person will also struggle
to figure out the meaning of sentences. In fact, dysfluent readers spend so much time
and effort trying to figure out what the separate words say, they can barely
pay attention to the meaning of the sentence.
“The ju..jur….jury found her gu..qu…guil…quil…”) In other words, they learn
very little from reading.
To help students read connected text
(e.g., story passages) accurately and quickly, it is important to:
a. Teach students to decode separate words
(regular and irregular) accurately
and quickly—which means (1) using knowledge of letter-sound correspondence (not guessing); and (2) blending the
sounds into words.
b. Teach students to self-correct. “sssiiib… No, sssiiip…sip.”
c. Provide practice reading words enough
times that it is almost automatic; that
is, the words become “sight words.”
Note: sight words are not words
a student memorizes. The student still knows how to decode them
letter by letter. Rather, the student has read the words so
often that decoding takes only an
instant.
d. Provide practice reading text with
which students are already accurate, encouraging
them to read faster and faster without making errors (i.e., more words correct per minute, or wcpm).
Read more about fluency here. http://reading.uoregon.edu/flu/
4. Vocabulary. Vocabulary refers to the ability to understand (receptive) and use (expressive) words to
acquire and convey meaning. The first
three reading skills—(1) phonemic awareness, (2) the alphabetic principle
(letter-sound correspondence and the strategy for sounding out or decoding
words), and (3) fluency—have to do with the mechanics of reading. The last two skills—vocabulary and
comprehension—have to do with making
sense of the written word.
Vocabulary and comprehension cannot be taken
for granted. Many
students will not “pick up” vocabulary and comprehension along the way. Students need to be taught how to get and express the
meaning of words and passages. This is
especially important for students of low socioeconomic status. These students are read to less often, hear
fewer vocabulary words, and therefore understand and use far fewer words than
children born to working class or professional class families.
Here are some of the more important
methods of vocabulary instruction.
1. Read
storybooks to children.
2. Provide direct instruction of new vocabulary words by
selecting important words in a story;
giving explanations, or definitions of the words; and giving students many chances to discuss and use the new words.
3. Teach older students to use morphemic analysis
(analysis of word parts)
to determine meaning. For example, “Bisect. Bi means two. Sect means divide. So, bisect means divide into two parts.”
4. Teach contextual analysis—inferring the meaning of a word
from the context in which it
occurs.
“The
fan’s oscillations cooled everyone in the
room…Sometimes fans move back and
forth. If everyone was cooled, it
probably means the fan blew on
everyone. So, oscillate probably means
to move back and forth.”
You can find more on vocabulary here. http://reading.uoregon.edu/voc/
5. Comprehension. Comprehension is reading and reflecting on a
text to gain meaning. In other
words, sentences don’t tell you what they mean.
You have to interact with the text—for example, asking questions (“When
did Huck realize that Jim was more than a slave?”), checking to see if the text
gives answers, rereading, connecting one sentence with a later sentence to get
the flow of the argument or the flow of events in time. These
comprehension strategies are learned best when they are taught explicitly. This kind of instruction includes the
following.
1. Set comprehension objectives; for example, students will answer
specific literal (who, what, when), inferential (why), and evaluative (can you think of a better way…?)
questions.
2. Focus on main ideas in a story or
informational text.
3. Preteach
vocabulary words important for comprehending the material.
4. Read (with students) the material in manageable chunks,
and ask literal, inferential, and
evaluative questions on each chunk.
5. Use a KWL strategy: have students think about and discuss
what I know; what
I want
to know; and what I learned.
You can learn more about comprehension here. http://reading.uoregon.edu/comp
A Comprehensive
Set of Curriculum Materials
No set of curriculum
materials (program) is adequate for teaching all five main reading skills to
all beginning readers. A set of
materials may have one or more of the following weaknesses.
1. The scope
and sequence (what is taught and in what order) may not adequately cover
all five skills. For example, there is too little instruction on phonemic
awareness, some skills are taught in the wrong order; there is too little
review and practice.
2. The materials are designed for the average student,
and do not provide the sort of instruction needed by students (1) who enter
with (for example) a small vocabulary, or little phonemic awareness, or little
knowledge of letter-sound correspondence; or (2) students with specific difficulties
learning to read. For example, a student
knows how to sound out words, but the student takes too long to do it. As a result, the student can’t keep pace as the
teacher points to words on the board and asks the class to read each one
quickly.
Therefore, a comprehensive
reading curriculum will have more than one set of materials. Reading First recommends three kinds of
curriculum materials, or what is sometimes called the “three-tier model”—which
you can read about at the following websites.
Here are the three kinds of
programs.
1. Core. For almost all students.
2. Supplemental. To fill gaps in core materials or to provide
additional instruction to certain students.
3. Intervention. Highly focused, intensive instruction for
certain students
1.
Core curriculum.
A core reading program should: (1) cover all five main reading skills;
(2) be designed so that it will be useful for almost all beginning readers; and
(3) be well-designed, in terms of sequencing of skills, practice, and building
simpler skills into more complex wholes, to name a few features. The University of Oregon’s website states:
A
core reading program is the primary instructional tool that teachers use to
teach children to learn to read and ensure they reach reading levels that meet
or exceed grade-level standards. A core program should address the
instructional needs of the majority of students in a respective school or
district…Adoption of a core does not imply that other materials and strategies
are not used to provide a rich, comprehensive program of instruction. The core
program, however, should serve as the primary reading program for the school
and the expectation is that all teachers within and between the primary grades
will use the core program as the base of reading instruction. Such programs may
or may not be commercial textbook series…Teaching reading is far more complex
than most professionals and laypersons realize. The demands of the phonologic,
alphabetic, semantic, and syntactic systems of written language require a
careful schedule and sequence of prioritized objectives, explicit strategies,
and scaffolds that support students’ initial learning and transfer of knowledge
and skills to other contexts. The requirements of curriculum construction and
instructional design that effectively move children through the “learning to
read” stage to the “reading to learn” stage are simply too important to leave
to the judgment of individuals. The better the core addresses instructional
priorities, the less teachers will need to supplement and modify instruction
for the majority of learners. http://reading.uoregon.edu/curricula/core_program.php
Criteria for evaluating core
reading programs, and reviews of many core programs, can be found here. http://reading.uoregon.edu/curricula/index.php
http://reading.uoregon.edu/appendices/con_guide.php
http://reading.uoregon.edu/curricula/or_rfc_review_2.php
2.
Supplementary Curricula. Supplementary
curricula or programs are used to in two ways.
First, they fill gaps in
a core reading program.
For example, a core program may have too little instruction on rhyming (one
aspect of phonemic awareness), or it may have too few storybooks connected to
its instruction on decoding and vocabulary.
Therefore, a school or district would purchase or create materials to
give the additional instruction.
Second, a core program may not
provide the amount of highly
focused instruction
some students need on certain skills.
For example, some students enter school with a vocabulary so small that
they don’t know what the stories are about.
Therefore, a school or district might use a supplementary program for accelerating these students’
vocabulary development.
Caution.
It is important to select core and supplementary materials that are compatible, or at least to
train teachers to make them compatible.
For example, a core program might tell teachers properly how to correct
errors when students misread words in connected text. For example, the word is “made” but a student
reads “mad.” “He m….mmm…mad the....”
Teacher. “That word is made. What
word?”
Student. “made.”
Teacher. “Spell made.”
Student. “m a d e”
Teacher. “What word?”
Student. “made.”
Teacher. “Yes, made. Please start the sentence again, Joey.”
However, the supplementary materials might
not tell teachers how to correct reading errors, or may suggest a different
method (format). This will confuse students. So, the school either has to use core and
supplemental materials that correct errors the same way, or the school has to
decide that teachers will apply to all supplementary materials the error
correction format used in the core program.
3.
Intervention
Curricula. Intervention
programs are designed to meet the needs of students with so little background
knowledge or so much difficulty learning to read that they need specially
designed instruction and special, additional time for instruction. For example, diagnostic assessment may show
that some kindergartners are falling behind, perhaps because their phonemic
awareness skills are still so weak. Or,
some third graders struggle to comprehend text because they are still weak on
basic comprehension skills. In both
cases, students would get extra time for interventions, using materials that
focus on their skill weaknesses.
Caution.
Again, core and intervention materials should be compatible; e.g., both
teach the same comprehension strategies.
In addition, teachers must ensure that what students learn during intervention instruction is
transferred back to general (core) reading instruction. For example, teachers must ensure that
students are taught to use
their new phonemic awareness and comprehension skills when they are with the
rest of the class reading storybooks in the core materials. Otherwise, intervention instruction will have
no benefits.
You
can read more about supplementary and intervention programs at the following
websites.
Four
Kinds of Assessments
One of the basic
ideas in Reading First is that instruction
should be a rational process.
Teachers need solid information on the skills students bring and do not
bring to reading instruction, on the progress they are making during
instruction, and how much progress they made during the year. Without this information, teachers can’t
successfully: (1) assign students to proper reading groups and to properly
trained teachers; (2) decide if the core program is adequate or if students
need supplemental or intervention instruction (and on exactly which skills); or
(3) decide at the end of the year if students are ready to move to the next
year/level of a core program. Therefore,
Reading First advocates four kinds of assessments. Each has a different function.
Screening Assessment. Screening
assessment is done when students enter a beginning reading program or at the
start of the year. The function is to
determine whether a student has the entry skills (e.g., knowledge of the
alphabet, phonemic awareness, and vocabulary) that are likely to make
instruction in the core program alone adequate, or whether the student has
specific skill deficits and learning difficulties that require supplemental
and/or intervention instruction.
Progress Monitoring. Progress is monitored on skills worked
on. These assessments might be done, for
example, every month to see if or how students’ skill at decoding (sounding
out) words is improving or if or how much fluency (measured as words correct
per minute, wcpm) is increasing. Again,
this information would be used to make instructional decisions. Perhaps a student should be moved to a
reading group that is progressing more quickly.
Or a student might get extra practice at decoding so the student reads
connected text more accurately and quickly.
Or, a student’s progress may be so slow that intervention instruction is
called for. However, before that is
done, more information is needed—supplied by diagnostic assessment, discussed
later.
Progress monitoring also says
something about the quality of
a curriculum and/or the quality of instruction delivered by teachers. For example,
2. Students in Ms. Black’s class make excellent
progress in the core program, but students in Ms. Winter’s class do not. This suggests that Ms. Winter may not be
using the core properly. For example,
Ms. Winter may not correct errors, or she may go to the next lesson before
students master skills in the present one.
In this case, Ms. Winter’s teaching must be assessed. The inventory, here, shows how to assess
teachers’ reading instruction. http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/inventory.doc
Diagnostic
Assessment. Screening assessment may show that a student has
little knowledge of phonemic awareness.
Does this mean the student is not read to and talked with enough at
home, or does it mean the student can’t easily hear the differences between one
word and another? Likewise, progress
monitoring may show that a student is not picking up skill at sounding out
words. Does this mean the student’s
knowledge of letter-sound relationships (s says /s/) is weak (and therefore the
student can’t say and blend the separate sounds in many words), or could it be the
student knows letter-sound relationships but has a hard time retrieving and then using
this knowledge quickly enough to keep up with the pace of instruction? Clearly, making the right instructional
decision requires answers to these questions, which are supplied by diagnostic
assessment.
Outcome Assessment. Outcome
assessment determines how much students have learned at the end of a semester
or year. This information is used to
evaluate: (1) the quality of the core, supplemental, and intervention
materials; (2) the quality of instruction; (3) student motivation, attention,
and participation; and (4) students’ specific reading difficulties—leading to
decisions about curricula (keep, change, modify), instruction (ways to improve
and how to assist teachers), and classroom management.
Assessment instruments should:
(1) provide valid
information (information on the skills that need to be measured); (2) be appropriate for students’ age
and grade level; (3) be reliable
(different users would get about the same data with the same students); (4) be relatively easy
to use; and (5) provide objective
information (e.g., 100 correct words per minute) rather than impressions
(“Sally reads pretty accurately and quickly”).
Therefore, it’s wise to select instruments with a solid track
record. Sources below describe and
evaluate many assessment instruments.
http://www.fcrr.org/assessment/
Systematic and Explicit
Instruction
The
most respected scientific research in education and psychology shows clearly
that instruction yields higher and faster achievement in more students (with
and without learning difficulties) when instruction is systematic and
explicit. Here are some resources you
might examine.
http://epaa.asu.edu/barak/barak.html
http://epaa.asu.edu/barak/barak1.html
http://idea.uoregon.edu/~ncite/documents/techrep/tech05.pdf
http://idea.uoregon.edu/~ncite/documents/techrep/tech06.html
But
what does systematic and explicit mean?
Systematic means that:
1. Instruction is given in a planned,
logically progressive sequence of things to be taught. For example, certain letter-sounds (a, s, i, m,
r) are taught before other letter-sounds (b, n, y, sh) because they are easier to learn and are used more often.
2. Instruction is guided and assessed with clearly defined objectives for everything taught. Objectives are stated in terms of what
students will do.
Good
objective. Students are given two
minutes to read the assigned passage
from “The bear and the hare.” They read the passage at a rate of at least 100 words correct per minute.”
Poor
objective. Students read story books
quickly and get most words right.
3. Instruction is focused
precisely on the thing (knowledge unit) to be learned, as specified by the
objective. For example, if students are
to read a passage at 100 wcpm, then that is exactly what the teacher focuses on
during the ten minute fluency exercise
during lessons. She does not work on
fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension at the same time.
4. Instruction provides planned
practice to strengthen all of the skills worked on.
5. Instruction provides planned
work on new examples (e.g., words, text) to foster application or
generalization of previously taught knowledge.
6. Instruction includes assessments
designed and used in a timely fashion to monitor the different phases of
instruction, or mastery: acquisition, fluency, generalization, retention, and
independence.
Explicit
means that:
1. The teacher reveals in an obvious and clear
way to students the knowledge she is trying to communicate. She does this through demonstrations (modeling) and running
commentary to students. For example,
“I’ll
show you how to sound out this word. [man
is written on the board.] Listen. I do
NOT stop between the sounds. [Teacher
touches under each letter as she says the sound.] mmmmaaaannn.
Now, I’ll say it fast. [Teacher
slides her finger under the word.] man.”
2. The teacher ensures student attention to
important features of an example or demonstration. “Look [points to the word ate] here is a
vowel, then a consonant, and then an e at the end [name]. So, we do NOT say the e at the end.”
Here
is an example of instruction that is not
explicit. It is implicit—or buried in the
teacher’s talk.
The teacher holds up a big book that
has a paragraph from a story. She reads
the words slowly. Occasionally she points to the letter r and says rrr. She expects that this will be enough for
students to get the connection between the letter and the sound. Of course, many students do not get it.
In
contrast, explicit instruction would
have the teacher hold up the big book and say,
“New sound. This sound (points to the letter
r in ran) is rrr. Say it with me… And
this sound (points to r in car) is rrr.
Say it with me… And this sound (points to r in barn) is rrr. Let’s see if you remember our new sound. What sound is this? (points to r in ran)… What sound is this? (points
to r in barn)… What sound is this?
(points to r in car)…. Now I’ll read the story. (Teacher points to each r as she reads and
has students say rrr and then read the whole word.)
As
you can imagine, this explicit instruction of letter-sound correspondence is
more likely to teach most students quickly.
Scientific Validation
This is one of the most important
contributions of Reading First. Every
curriculum or program, every teaching method (e.g., how to correct errors), and
every assessment instrument must be:
1. Valid (does what it is
supposed to do) and reliable (works
much the same way in the hands of different people).
2. Based
on scientific research. For example,
the sequence for teaching phonemic awareness (beginning with identifying words
that sound alike vs. different, and ending with replacing a phoneme and saying
the new word) in a core program must be based on solid scientific research that
says this is an effective sequence.
3. Field
tested to ensure that it is valid and reliable and effective before it is used.
Teachers
will be more confident, and certainly will be more effective, if all of their
teaching methods and materials are known to work. The following websites have more information
on scientific validation.
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/RigorousEvidence.pdf
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/whatresearchsays.htm
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/Research%20and%20Reason.pdf
http://www.ecs.org/html/educationIssues/Research/primer/understandingtutorial.asp
Reading is a Schoolwide
Endeavor
If teachers in different grade levels
and classes use different curricula, different assessments, different rules for
interpreting assessment data and for making instructional decisions, and
different teaching methods, their students are not likely to benefit as much
from reading instruction as they would if reading were a coordinated schoolwide
activity. Therefore, schools need to:
1. Develop a school mission that stresses the importance of reading, sets high but
realistic achievement goals for each year, and assumes primary responsibility
for students’ achievement.
2. Examine
different curricula and assessment instruments (using materials at the
websites listed above), and select the ones that have been shown to be most
effective.
3. Select
the right teachers for the right jobs.
It is essential that the best teachers teach students in the early
stages of reading and teach students who are behind or who need interventions.
4. Select
specialists to coordinate testing, collect assessment information, order
curricula, obtain outside consultation and training, and provide technical
assistance to teachers.
5. Have
principals and other administrators who know the five reading skills; know
what explicit and systematic instruction looks like; know what effective
reading instruction looks like; know what to ask job applicants to ensure that
they get skilled teachers; know the criteria that define adequate curricula;
and have the strength to require teachers to use curricula faithfully and to
improve their teaching as needed.
6. Provide professional
development on all aspects of Reading First, as well as timely ongoing
assistance.
Here
is the website for an instrument that lays out the skills teachers need. It can also be used as a guide for
assessment, professional development, and ongoing assistance.
http://educationation.org/inventory.doc
Addition
materials on schoolwide implementation include the following.
http://oregonreadingfirst.uoregon.edu/downloads/Program_Fidelity_Checklist.doc
http://www.texasreading.org/utcrla/
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/al_jan_02.pdf
http://readingserver.edb.utexas.edu/downloads/primary/guides/2000_word_analysis_SE.PDF
http://reading.uoregon.edu/logistics/trial_log_index.php
Let’s Summarize
The six features of Reading First
discussed above amount to an integrated approach
to reading.
1. There are five main reading skills:
phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle (letter-sound
correspondence and using this knowledge to decode words), fluency (accuracy and
speed), vocabulary, and comprehension.
2. Three kinds of curricula ensure that virtually all children learn
to read: core programs, supplementary programs, and intervention programs—with
placement determined by assessment information.
3. There
are four kinds of assessments: screening, diagnostic, progress monitoring, and
outcome. These provide information used
to make decisions about students’ curriculum and instructional needs, the
quality of curricula used, and the quality of instruction.
4. The wisest course is to teach all skills systematically (in a
planned, logical sequence) and explicitly (the teacher clearly demonstrates
knowledge).
5. All of the above are based on the rules and procedures of
scientific research to ensure validity, reliability, and effectiveness.
6. All of the above are part of a coordinated, schoolwide effort that
includes clear mission, strong leadership, assignments based on expertise, and
professional development.