Decoding is the process of converting printed words to spoken words. As readers develop, they apply other decoding skills, such as recognizing word parts e. Students also learn to apply decoding skills to irregular words that are almost decodable. Phonemic awareness and phonics are not the same, but instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics tends to overlap. As students begin to transition to phonics, they learn the relationship between a phoneme sound and grapheme the letter s that represent the sound in written language.
Phonemic awareness instruction improves phonics skills, and phonics skills improve phonemic awareness Lane and Pullen, The National Reading Panel conducted a meta-analysis to review and evaluate research on the effectiveness of various approaches for teaching children to read. Their findings showed that students who received systematic and explicit phonics instruction were better readers at the end of instruction than students who received non-systematic or no phonics instruction Ehri, ; Armbruster, Lehr, and Osborn, The National Reading Panel also stated that "the hallmark of systematic phonics programs is that they delineate a planned, sequential set of phonic elements, and they teach these elements, explicitly and systematically" , p.
Word recognition involves two types of words: regular words the words which students can decode by sounding them out and irregular words the words students cannot completely decode by sounding them out. For example:. In some programs, regular words that can be decoded are called sound-out words. Irregular words that must be learned by memory are called spell-out words. In the beginning stages of phonics instruction, an irregular word can also be a word that the student does not yet have the specific phonics skills to read Carnine et al.
Another important emphasis of phonics and word recognition is learning high-frequency words. High-frequency words can be regular or irregular. First High-Frequency Words. The average number of syllables in the words students read increases steadily in the primary grades.
In fifth grade and beyond, knowing how to decode multisyllabic words is essential, because most of the words students encounter in print are words of 7 or more letters and two or more syllables Nagy and Anderson, Systematic and explicit instruction in decoding multisyllabic words is important. Explicit instruction in how to decode multisyllabic words is most successful for students who can already accurately decode single-syllable words and accurately pronounce all of the typical vowel combinations.
Research shows that students can be taught to flexibly segment multisyllabic words into spelling units chunks that can be decoded Bhattacharya and Ehri, ; Archer et al. Students need two key skills to successfully decode multisyllabic words:. Research tells us that in order to become fluent readers, students need to learn to decode unknown words accurately and automatically. Students who must use all of their mental energy to sound out the words are not able to focus on the meaning of what they are reading LaBerge and Samuels, In fact, research findings show that those students who have not developed automaticity by the beginning of second grade are at risk for reading failure Berninger et al.
Most phonics programs teach students to decode accurately, but learning phonics does not guarantee that students are able to decode words automatically. Students must develop the ability to read words quickly and effortlessly. Children typically progress through a sequence of identified phonics skills as they learn to read and spell—whether they learn slowly or quickly Ehri, ; Moats, ; Templeton and Bear, ; Treiman and Bourassa, Read Naturally offers several programs that are based on the research about phonics and word recognition described above.
Adams, M. Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Archer, A. Gleason, and V. Decoding and fluency: Foundation skills for struggling older readers. Learning Disability Quarterly , 26, pp. Longmont, CO: Sopris West. Armbruster, Lehr, and Osborn. Put reading first: The research building blocks for teaching children to read. Berninger, V. Vermeulen, R. The literacy program emphasizes phonics for beginning readers and comprehension for all students. Teachers provide reading instruction to students grouped by reading ability for 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week.
In addition, certified teachers or paraprofessionals provide daily tutoring to students who have difficulty reading at the same level as their classmates. This review of the program for Beginning Reading focuses on students in grades K—4. Two studies meet WWC group design standards without reservations, and seven studies meet WWC group design standards with reservations.
Together, these studies included 10, beginning readers in grades K—4 in schools in the United States and the United Kingdom. The following are appended: 1 Research details for Borman et al. WWC rating Criteria and a Glossary of terms are also included. The program is designed to improve skills in areas such as concepts of print, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, grammar, and spelling. Since the last WWC intervention report, there have been 34 new studies, one of which meets WWC group design standards without reservations.
Appended are: 1 Research details for Gatti ; 2 Outcome measures for each domain; 3 Findings included in the rating for the comprehension and reading fluency domains; and 4 Description of supplemental findings for the comprehension and fluency domains.
Wilson, G. Readers, instruction, and the NRP. Phi Delta Kappan , 86 3 , — The authors conducted a study of three different programs to see what kinds of readers are actually emerging from them. Two were commercial programs that used explicit and systematic phonics instruction as a central piece in early reading learning: Direct Instruction DI 4 and Open Court OC. The third was a literature-based program, labeled Guided Reading GR , wherein students were taught to use multiple strategies to focus on the meaning of what they read.
The 84 students in the study live in urban settings and are of low socioeconomic status, but they are not coded for special education or for receiving ESL English as a Second Language services.
To study the reading processes of these students, second-graders were asked to read books to aloud. These retellings were analyzed for inclusion of characters, setting, plot episodes, inferences and connections, and general cohesion smoothness and completeness of the retelling. These observations of language arts instruction allowed us to compare what the students said with what they did while reading and with what was going on during their reading instruction. The instruction provided by DI and OC is similar in many ways.
The DI program is heavily scripted, while the OC program provides teachers with detailed lessons. In contrast, at the third site of this study, phonics instruction was integrated into reading and writing. At the GR school, students learn phonics in the context of reading and writing. The profile that emerged from the GR school reveals that the students use phonics while reading in ways similar to the students at the DI and OC sites no significant difference in measures of phonics use in and out of context , but with a definite concern for meaning.
Vaden-Kiernan, M. Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness. This and other similar programs are increasingly used to prevent reading difficulties and ensure that all children are reading at or above grade level by the end of third grade. Effective early reading instruction is critical for preventing later reading difficulties. With two thirds of 4th grade students failing to achieve proficiency in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in , the need to implement and test effective early reading programs is relevant and pressing.
In this study, an independent research team evaluated the effectiveness of the OCR program in a large national sample of elementary schools at scale, across diverse school populations and conditions, and with no more support than schools would have access to if they had selected OCR as their early reading curriculum apart from participation in a research project. The study participants included approximately 4, elementary school students and 1, teachers across 49 schools in 7 districts each year of the study.
The evaluation of the OCR program involved two key elements: the multi-site cluster randomized trial CRT and the implementation study. Data from teachers and students in two cohorts grades K-3 and grades were gathered over two school years.
Each year of data was collected as cross-sectional and each year is analyzed independently. However, there were positive differential impacts for Kindergarten students as well as Hispanic students. The following keywords and search strings were used to search the reference databases and other sources:. And they came to different conclusions about how people read. It was the early s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan.
He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.
Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words. So, in , Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context. The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context.
Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.
Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory: Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example. Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.
Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems. The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works. It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters.
One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture Eagle Eye , getting their lips ready to try the first sound Lips the Fish , or just skipping the word altogether Skippy Frog.
There are videos online where you can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel, 17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book. The class reads a book together called "In the Garden.
It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word. The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note. In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly.
The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess. This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop. But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns — hallmarks of the three-cueing system.
Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading. But many of the words in those books — butterfly, caterpillar — are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out. When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.
Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone. Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess.
One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut! Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach. Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing.
And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it. It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach.
It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it. Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job. People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read.
The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics. The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument. Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say. Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read.
Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California.
She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. Help me. A woman raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system? Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading. But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.
She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading.
But she got tons of pushback from teachers. In , Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest. By this time, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In , a national panel convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a report.
The evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion.
Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction.
They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy. Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing.
Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system. And it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers. To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see.
Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words. How did you learn to do that? It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping. That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters.
Here's what happens when a reader who has good phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in print. She stops at the word and sounds it out. If it's a word she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the word with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the meaning of the word, she can use context to try to figure it out.
By about second grade, a typically developing reader needs just a few exposures to a word through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory.
She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out. The more words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she's reading; she'll eventually be using less brain power to identify words and will be able to devote more brain power to comprehending what she's reading.
And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process. In this way, he said, three cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader. In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system.
Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate.
They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading. But some children will skip the sounding out if they're taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers — until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures.
Then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't do it if they don't have to.
While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind. These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers.
Not because they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers. Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science evidence against cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it too. Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in the Oakland schools.
They have their work cut out for them. Nearly half the district's third-graders are below grade level in reading.
Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being taught to read. They meet every couple weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot program.
They read and discuss articles about the scientific research on reading. At a meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson. Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like "picture power. The district also bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment system.
The coaches saw right away that "picture power" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words?
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