Introduction
to Reading First
Martin Kozloff
David Gill
July, 2004
This paper 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. 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: 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. 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?...”
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.” ]; and (4) detect and correct errors in reading and spelling. See http://reading.uoregon.edu/pa/index.php
for more information on phonemic awareness.
2. Alphabetic
Principle: 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 students knows letter-sound or
sound-symbol relationships: that m says /m/, i says /i/, and r says /r/.
b. When the student sees an unfamiliar
word (rim) in a story book, the student uses letter-sound knowledge to sound
out or decode the word—-perhaps letter by letter and then quickly.
“The bike has a bent
rrrriiiimmm….rim.”
Using the alphabetic principle (shown above), the student knows exactly what the word says.
In contrast, students who are not taught phonics in a systematic way, or who are not taught
to use phonics knowledge as the
first and most reliable strategy for identifying words, have to guess or “predict” what words say using “context cues,” such as
pictures or what seems to fit the meaning of a sentence, as shown below. Instead of reading “The bike has a bent
rim,” the student guesses
“The bike has a
be…be..bell…belt….ri…ri…rip. The bike
has a belt rip.”
Often, these mis-taught students never learn to read skillfully. 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: The
effortless, automatic ability to read words in connected text. Fluency is
reading with accuracy and speed. 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.
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: The ability to understand (receptive) and use (expressive) words to
acquire and convey meaning. The
three reading skills above—(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.
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.
Following 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: The complex cognitive process involving the
intentional interaction between reader and text to convey meaning. In other
words, sentences don’t tell you what they mean. You have to interact with the text—for example, asking questions,
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
will have one or more of the following weaknesses.
1. The scope
and sequence
(what is taught and in what order) does
not adequately cover all five skills. For example, there is too little instruction on
phonemic awareness, or some of the skills are taught in the wrong order.
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 needs five seconds 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 curriculum. A core reading program should: (1) cover
virtually 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 and exactly 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. As before, it is
important that core and intervention materials are compatible; e.g., both teach
the same comprehension strategies. In
addition, teachers must ensure that what
students learn during intervention instruction is transferred 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 School-wide
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 school-wide
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://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/inventory.doc
Addition
materials on school-wide 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, school-wide effort that
includes clear mission, strong leadership, assignments based on expertise, and
professional development.