What kind of text is best for beginning readers?
It’s a question at the center of the “science of reading” movement, and a complex one because of the variety of skills texts should help students build.
Students need opportunities to practice the letter-sound patterns they learn in phonics lessons, experts say. They need to practice reading fluently, without many stops and starts. And they need texts that can teach them new vocabulary words and ideas, books that can deepen their knowledge about the world and foster questions and conversation.
But figuring out what text to use for which purpose, and how to know what’s appropriately demanding for students, can be a challenge for teachers.
Three new studies published in April and May offer insights. The research examines how the words used in texts make them easier or harder for students to read—and what interventions can support children when they’re reading more complex passages.
For decades, many teachers have turned to leveling systems, like the guided reading levels from the popular literacy provider Fountas & Pinnell, to gauge texts’ difficulty. These scales categorize books by perceived readability. Some studies, though, have shown that levels aren’t a reliable predictor of whether students will struggle with a given book. Other research finds that relegating struggling readers to only lower-level books can actually stunt their literacy growth.
Meanwhile, decodable books aimed to improve phonics skills have become popular, in some cases replacing leveled texts in classrooms. Decodables are written to give students targeted practice with specific letter-sound patterns they’ve learned, and for kids to read them successfully on their own. But these books are only meant to be used during a short window, as children are learning to sound out words.
Text designed for reading comprehension instruction, by contrast, is often meant to be challenging—to include new vocabulary and ideas that students need to learn, often with the support of a teacher.
“What I would want you to do as a teacher is to take a look at the text, and ask what your purpose is,” said Elfrieda Hiebert, the founder and CEO of the TextProject, a nonprofit that creates free classroom resources, and an author on all three studies.
For example, she said, teachers should give students certain texts to independently practice reading fluency, and different texts to teach new information about the science behind weather patterns.
Decodability is only ‘one piece of the puzzle’
The vocabulary used in a text is a key predictor of how well students could read it on their own, found one study.
Hiebert, and her colleagues Lori Bruner at the State University of New York at Albany and Laura Tortorelli at Michigan State University gave about 80 1st graders different passages all at the same reading level.
But they varied the vocabulary difficulty on purpose, using a separate index that measured that one feature. Some students got passages with easier words like “park” or “road,” while others received passages with harder words like “fright” or “howled.” Students’ reading accuracy between the conditions differed by about 7-11 percentage points.
“In practical terms, that’s the difference between a child reading a text relatively independently and a child struggling enough that the same text becomes frustrating,” said Bruner, the lead author on the study and an assistant professor of literacy at SUNY Albany’s School of Education, in an email.
The study provides further evidence that texts supposedly at the same reading level can actually make very different reading demands on students. It also offers insight about what words are most likely to trip up students.
Analyzing students’ results, Bruner and her colleagues found that students were more likely to struggle with words that had more sounds, or phonemes, and less predictable spelling patterns—a finding that might seem evident for 1st graders who are still learning to decode. They also had trouble with words they were less likely to use in everyday conversation.
A separate study, from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and the TextProject, found similar patterns.
Their study examined test results of reading accuracy and fluency from 650 2nd graders. Students were most likely to struggle with words that had complicated vowel patterns—like r-controlled vowels, or diphthongs—and words that they didn’t already know the meaning of.
“Decodability is an important piece of the puzzle—but it is not the whole puzzle,” said Bruner. “Children bring both word-reading skills and word knowledge to a text, and both influence how successfully they read it.”
Teachers should consider both factors when they’re selecting texts for students to read independently, she said.
Teaching students to read words ‘in the wild’
Yet a third study suggests that even if a text has words that students might stumble over, teachers can still use it with the right instruction—and see positive growth.
In this study, researchers split 110 3rd grade struggling readers into two groups. One used a traditional reading intervention that limited vocabulary difficulty, while the other used a researcher-designed intervention that used “content-rich texts.”
Both conditions also included instruction in decoding. But in the researcher-designed intervention, the word-level lessons were focused on multisyllabic words in the text that were conceptually important, or that were especially difficult to decode.
After the 60-session interventions, students in both groups took a general reading test that asked them to read passages. Students who were in the researcher-designed intervention read with higher accuracy than those in the general intervention, and at the same level of fluency. In this researcher-designed intervention group, students who started with the lowest accuracy made the most progress.
This targeted, multisyllabic word instruction for older elementary students is a way for teachers to help their students apply their phonics skills in more complex contexts, said Jake Downs, an assistant professor in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at Utah State University.
In grade-level text, he said, “we’re out of captivity and into the wild.” Students need help making the jump from decoding words in controlled settings, like decodable text, to decoding words that might not follow all the same rules.
While the study is focused on 3rd graders, it’s a practice that could be helpful for teachers of younger students, too, Downs said. “We expect kids to read words in the wild all the time, even in 1st grade.”
