Reading Instruction That Works, Fourth Edition: The Case for Balanced Teaching - Softcover

Pressley, Michael; Allington, Richard L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1462516807 ISBN 13: 9781462516803

Verlag: Guilford Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

This book has been replaced by Reading Instruction That Works, Fifth Edition, ISBN 978-1-4625-5184-2.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Pressley, PhD, was University Distinguished Professor, Director of the Doctoral Program in Teacher Education, and Director of the Literacy Achievement Research Center at Michigan State University until his death in 2006. An expert on effective elementary literacy instruction, he was the author or editor of more than 300 journal articles, chapters, and books. Dr. Pressley was the recipient of the 2004 E. L. Thorndike Award (from Division 15 of the American Psychological Association), the highest award given for career research accomplishment in educational psychology.

Richard L. Allington, PhD, is Professor of Literacy Studies in the Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education at the University of Tennessee. He has published over 150 articles, chapters, and books, and has twice received the Albert J. Harris Award from the International Reading Association (IRA) for an outstanding contribution to the understanding of the prevention and assessment of reading disabilities. Dr. Allington has served as president of both the IRA and the Literacy Research Association. He is a member of the Reading Hall of Fame.

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Reading Instruction That Works

The Case For Balanced Teaching

By Michael Pressley, Richard L. Allington

The Guilford Press

Copyright © 2015 The Guilford Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4625-1680-3

Contents

Cover, 
Also from the Authors, 
Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
About the Authors, 
Introduction to the Fourth Edition Richard L. Allington, 
Introduction to the Third Edition Michael Pressley, 
1 Skills Emphasis, Meaning Emphasis, and Balanced Reading Instruction: A Short History, 
2 Skilled Reading, 
3 Children Who Experience Problems in Learning to Read, 
4 Before Reading Words Begins, 
5 Learning to Recognize Words, 
6 Fluency, 
7 Vocabulary, 
8 Expert Literacy Teaching in the Primary Grades with Ruth Wharton-McDonald, 
9 The Need for Increased Comprehension Instruction, 
10 Motivation and Literacy, 
11 Concluding Reflections, 
Appendix: Landmarks in Development of Literary Competence (or, What Happens When), 
Author Index, 
Subject Index, 
About Guilford Press, 
Discover Related Guilford Books, 

CHAPTER 1

Skills Emphasis, Meaning Emphasis, and Balanced Reading Instruction

A Short History

Elementary reading instruction is a topic that has commanded a great deal of attention in recent years. A primary reason for this interest is that citizens today are flooded with information and much of that information is in a print version (newspapers, magazines, blog posts, Internet sites, etc.). A second reason for the attention is that survival today, in society and in the marketplace, depends heavily upon a literate citizenry. A third and final reason is the international evidence that the rank-ordering of American students' academic performance is gradually sliding downward in comparison to that of other industrialized nations. This third reason seems to be more related to other nations more rapidly improving the academic performance of their students as compared to American students. This is especially true in reading achievement, especially for the older (12th-grade) students, where performance has largely been stable since 1982.

However, contrary to the opinion of some that reading skills have declined over the past century, the evidence is simply overwhelming that more students read better today than they did at any point in the past and that reported levels of performance on international assessments underestimate the productivity of American schools and teachers (Carnoy & Rothstein, 2013). At the same time students in some other nations are improving their reading proficiencies at a faster rate than is the case for American students. Thus, we can observe that with the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) guidelines the texts students are expected to read will become more challenging, as will the new assessments. The task facing American educators is to improve the quality of reading lessons offered in our schools such that virtually all students will attain these new and more challenging reading standards.

The central message of this text is that we know more about efficient literacy development and more about effective literacy instruction than we ever knew before. In fact, it looks as though we know enough that virtually all students could be reading on grade level, generally by the end of first grade. When the first edition of this book was written, educators were deeply engaged in what were known as the "reading wars." To a great extent those wars are now behind us unless one primarily pays attention only to the folks heavily invested in one approach or another. There remain a handful of folks who continue to argue for their favorite approach to teaching children to read. Some generate personal revenues from the products they tout. Others have invested their careers in promoting an approach and so continue their long-standing advocacy for that approach.

Such debates about the "best" way to teach children to read began more than a century ago, just as universal education opportunities became the norm. Once the vast majority of school-age children began attending school, questions about the preferred method for teaching children to read began to emerge and take the spotlight. The rapid development of commercial reading programs in the 1920s provided educators with various approaches to developing children into readers. The development of these multiple alternative approaches led to debates about which commercial programs were the better fit for the children.

The classic historical text on the history of reading instruction in America was first published in 1934 and then revised and updated in 1965. That text, American Reading Instruction (Smith, 1965), provides a rather complete examination of the various reading programs developed and used up until its publication. When reading that volume, it is easy to identify the tensions concerning the most effective approach to teaching children to read. Once American schools created a substantial market for commercial reading materials, literally hundreds upon hundreds of reading programs have been produced and sold to schools. These reading programs fall along a continuum with meaning-emphasis programs on one end and skills-emphasis programs on the other (see Figure 1.1).

What we have labeled as skills emphasis has other labels as well. Some use the term bottom-up approaches to describe the same approaches that we label as skills emphasis. Others use the term code emphasis, but that term too narrowly limits the focus to approaches for developing decoding skills. Left out of discussion of code-emphasis approaches is any focus on comprehension or even vocabulary development. Because there exists a research base for developing proficiencies related to decoding words and because a similar research base exists for developing both reading comprehension and vocabulary development, we use skills emphasis if only because the same folks who prefer explicit instruction in decoding also prefer explicit instruction in comprehension and vocabulary. From a skills-emphasis framework teachers must explicitly teach the various skills needed to become a reader. Skills-emphasis folks have a long list of specific skills that will need to be taught if they are to be acquired. Extensive instruction and practice, even in isolation, of these various skills are needed to foster reading development. In skills-emphasis approaches it is the skills framework that drives the lessons.

We label the other end of the continuum as the meaning-emphasis approach, while others label it the top-down approach or whole-language approach. No matter whether the proficiency to be developed is decoding, or comprehension, or vocabulary, folks on this end of the continuum want instruction to be initiated with the whole, not with some parts of the whole. In the case of reading, this usually means beginning with the story as told in the text or told by the student and transcribed by the teacher. After the whole is introduced, say the meaning-emphasis folks, then we will focus on the skills, if we ever focus on the skills. Skills, when they need to be taught, are best taught in the context of the story, not taught in isolation and not practiced on worksheets. Through extensive reading practice coupled with mostly minimal guidance, children become readers, and in the process they acquire the skills proficiencies they need. In the meaning-emphasis framework it is the text that is to be understood that drives the lesson.

At the center of the continuum is where we place balanced literacy approaches. We place it at the center because our balanced approach takes the research evidence on the potential of early and explicit decoding instruction and the evidence on explicit comprehension strategies instruction and blends it with the research evidence on the potential of meaning-emphasis instruction for developing vocabulary, comprehension, and motivation to read. This was also the recommendation of the National Research Council's committee in their report (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children.

Perhaps balanced literacy instruction best explains the substantial successes of exemplary first-grade teachers in teaching all children to read (Pressley, Allington, Wharton-McDonald, Collins-Block, & Morrow, 2001). You will read more about the classrooms exemplary teachers create and the lessons that they offer later, in Chapter 8. But before we discuss the balanced approach to literacy lessons, let's review skills- and meaning-emphasis approaches. Both approaches have had their advocates for over a century and both have been used in American classrooms over that same period. Surprisingly, perhaps, regardless of which approach has been used, most American children have learned to read (e.g., Bond & Dykstra, 1967; Mathes et al., 2005). The debate seems more about whether one approach or the other can improve the lot of children who struggle while learning to read.

SKILLS-EMPHASIS APPROACHES

The first item we need to be aware of is the variety of skills-emphasis reading programs available commercially. Basically, all of the programs are designed so that at the earliest stages of literacy acquisition the letter–sound relationships are taught. Actually, in recent years it has become obvious that students must understand that the smallest unit of language is not a word but a phoneme. Much evidence indicates that children who make good progress in acquiring early reading proficiencies are able to segment spoken sentences into individual words and spoken words into constituent sounds (Liberman & Shankweiler, 1985; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1991). In other words, in the sentence A cat ran home, they can identify each of the four words in that sentence. When the word cat is spoken to them, they can break cat into the three phonemes, cuh, aah, and tuh. Demonstrating this sort of understanding is important for decoding lessons to make any sense. It is also critical should the child attempt an invented spelling of a word. Until recently, little attention was paid to having teachers explicitly work on developing such phoneme awareness, but most children still acquired this proficiency, usually in first grade. However, there was a subset of children who did not develop this capacity, too many of whom have failed to learn to read along with their peers. Thus, the necessity of explicit instruction is indicated for at least some children.

Once phonemic segmentation is established, teachers begin to teach the sounds of individual letters. In many skills-emphasis programs decoding lessons are accompanied by a decodable text that provides material for the child to practice reading. Decodable texts present almost only words that can be sounded out as well as words that represent the letter–sound relationships that have already been taught. We provide an early example from McGuffey's Readers, a widely used reading series from the 1800s.

Is it an ox?

It is an ox.

It is my ox.

Am I in?

Am I in it?

I am in it.

Decodable texts are developed such that children are only exposed to what they have already been taught. Some states require publishers to provide decodable texts, but these states differ on what proportion of words need to be decodable as well as how one calculates that proportion. Nonetheless, at least two studies (Jenkins, Peyton, Sanders, & Vadasy, 2004; Juel & RoperSchneider, 1985) found no significant difference on end-of-year standardized reading assessments when comparing students using decodable texts versus students using regular or predictable texts for initial reading lessons. Recently, Adams (2009) noted that while she felt that the available research supported the use of decodable texts, such use was only supported for a modest period of time. Her analysis led her to conclude that "if there exist data, theory, or cogent argument for extending decodables beyond the very beginning levels of reading, then I am unable to find it" (p. 4). She argues for using decodable texts in kindergarten and during the beginning first few weeks of first grade. As with aspirin, too heavy a dose of decodable texts may produce unwanted deterrents to becoming an effective and efficient reader.

While some proponents of skills-emphasis approaches have made extravagant claims about the advantages of using skills-emphasis programs (e.g., Blumenfeld, 1982; Flesch, 1955; Groff, 1998; Moats, 2000; Moats & Foorman, 1997; Sweet, 1997), the several summaries of the research comparing skills-emphasis beginning reading programs with meaning-emphasis programs offer a more nuanced point of view. We next review the major research summaries on this topic that have been published since 1965.

Are Skills-Emphasis Approaches Supported by the Research?

The answer to this question depends on what sort of evidence you want. It also depends on whether you examine reading word lists (or pseudoword lists) as compared to examining reading comprehension after reading whole texts. Finally, the question also hinges on whether early advantages continue onward, resulting in improved performances in later grades. The point is that you will often get different answers if you judge the efficacy of skills-emphasis programs solely on rate and accuracy of performances while reading decodable pseudowords in isolation or judge the efficacy based on comprehension of texts read either early in the schooling process or later on. In the same way, whether you compare comprehension performance after explicit comprehension strategy instruction on tasks similar to those used in the explicit lessons or with students' understanding of the stories and books they read without prompting to use the strategies establishes the contrast when asking whether explicit comprehension instruction is effective. These issues notwithstanding, we have available a number of research summaries comparing skills-emphasis and meaning-emphasis reading programs. Below we summarize the largest and most influential summaries.

The U.S. Office of Education First-Grade Cooperative Research Studies

The most accessible report of this federally funded large-scale research study is found in Bond and Dykstra (1967). Basically, 27 different research teams comparatively evaluated at least two different reading programs. Some research teams examined more than two programs but all 27 teams compared at least two approaches. The research teams used common assessments so that the supervising research team could consider all of the studies as one large and grand experiment. Outcomes at the end of first, second, and third grade were available (although not all teams continued their study through the end of third grade).

In general, this study disappointed almost everyone. Disappointed because, as Bond (1966) wrote, "We have found no one approach so distinctly better in all situations and respects than the others that it should be considered the one best method nor to be used exclusively" (p. 8). What they found was that every program worked well in some classrooms but did not work well in every classroom. Bond and Dykstra (1967) concluded that rather than continue comparative curriculum studies of different reading programs, it seemed that "future research might well center on teacher and learning situation characteristics rather than methods and materials" (p. 123).

Perhaps because of this recommendation fewer comparative studies were published in the next 35 years. Instead, researchers began examining teachers, teaching practices, time allocations, social context, and so on in attempting to discover a solution for improving reading outcomes in American schools (McGill-Franzen, Zmach, Solic, & Zeig, 2006).

Jeanne Chall and the "Great Debate"

Perhaps the next most widely discussed analysis of the effects of skills-emphasis programs was done by Jeanne Chall (1983) of Harvard University (note that Chall used the term "code emphasis" while we use the term "skills emphasis" because the skills-emphasis approach has a broader meaning than does code emphasis). Chall reviewed the research available at that time and using a vote count process established that skills-emphasis beginning reading programs when compared to meaning-emphasis approaches were more effective at developing reading proficiency. However, she also cautioned educators.

A beginning code-emphasis program will not cure all reading ills. It cannot guarantee all children will learn to read easily. Nor have the results of meaning-emphasis programs been so disastrous that all academic and emotional failures can be blamed on them, as some proponents and publishers of new code-emphasis programs claim. (p. 309)

Chall also examined a number of different phonics approaches including synthetic, analytic, intrinsic (embedded), phonogram families (linguistic), and modified alphabets (artificial orthographies). She concluded that there was no evidence of the superiority of any of these skills-emphasis approaches when comparing outcomes from programs of different types. "I cannot emphasize too strongly that the evidence does not endorse any one code-emphasis method over another" (p. 307). Finally, she also noted the analyses of commercial reading programs indicated that much more attention was being paid to skills-emphasis instruction than existed in earlier editions of reading programs.

Marilyn Adams and Beginning to Read

Adams's book (1990) was actually a work mandated by Congress to the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. Adams was selected to author this review of research on beginning reading. Her book laid out what the research tells us about the role played by phonemic segmentation, letter–sound relationships, and orthographic learning in acquiring decoding proficiency. She comes down on the side of skills-emphasis instruction, but like Chall (1983), with some reservations. For instance, she points to a central role for motivation in acquiring decoding proficiency:

The goal of teaching phonics is to develop students' ability to read connected text independently. For students, however, the strongest functional connection between these two skills may run in the reverse direction. It is only the nature of reading that can make the content of phonic lessons seem sensible; it is only the prospect of reading that can make them seem worthwhile. And, certainly, we hope that such instruction will seem both sensible and worthwhile to students. (p. 272)

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Reading Instruction That Works by Michael Pressley, Richard L. Allington. Copyright © 2015 The Guilford Press. Excerpted by permission of The Guilford Press.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Guilford Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1462516807
• ISBN 13: 9781462516803
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Auflage: 4
• Anzahl der Seiten: 487
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• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar