Literacy Now

by Nell K. Duke
University of Michigan
April 16, 2014

Periodically, I still hear students told that, “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.” In other words, so the generalization goes, when there are two vowels side-by-side in a word, they represent the long sound of the first of the two vowels, as in the word rain, for example. The problem is, this generalization actually holds true less than half the time—considerably less, depending on whose analysis you read.

I recently had the opportunity revisit a classic analysis by Francine P. Johnston reported in the 2001 article The Utility of Phonic Generalizations: Let's Take Another Look at Clymer's Conclusions. Johnston reviewed a landmark study on how often phonics generalizations apply that was first published by Theodore Clymer in 1963, as well as several replication studies that followed. She also reported on her own analysis, which employed the American Heritage Word Frequency Book (Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971), which was created from a wide variety of reading materials used in grades 3 through 9. Johnston too found that the “when two vowels. . .” generalization often did not apply, nor did any related broad generalization. However, when she looked at generalizations for specific vowel pairs, she found   that regularity was much higher. For example, in her database

• aw made the sound in saw 100% of the time
• oy made the sound in boy 100% of the time
• oi made the sound in join 100% of the time

Ay, oa, ee, ai, ey, and au also represented one particular sound more than three-quarters of the time. Another set of vowel pairs represented either one of two sounds three-quarters or more of the time: ow (snow or how), ew (blew or view), oo (book or boot), and ei (eight or either).

The well-worn “final e” or “silent e” generalization (variously stated to mean something along the lines that in a word ending with a vowel, one or two consonants, and an e, the first vowel represents its long sound and the second e is silent) behaves similarly. In her database, it was true 77.7% of the time for a-e, as in cake, but only 16.6% of the time for e-e, as in these (i-e met the generalization 74.2% of the time, o-e 58.4% of the time, and u-e 76.9% of the time).

What do we make of all this? Johnston concludes, “Broad phonic generalizations are not especially useful in very many cases. However, that should not be interpreted to mean that phonics instruction is not useful or that English orthography is too irregular to be the subject of study. Research in the years since Clymer's study offers ideas about alternatives to the teaching of generalizations” (p. 140). Johnston goes on to suggest strategies that are still recommended (and research-supported) today, such as teaching specific sound-letter relationships (e.g., the sound commonly represented by oi), teaching phonograms or rimes (e.g., -ake), developing orthographic knowledge through word sorting, and teaching students to be flexible in decoding, trying one likely vowel sound and then, if that doesn’t work, trying another. We can’t boil down English orthography into a few simple generalizations, but we have lots of tools to help students deal effectively with its complexity.

Nell Duke is a member of the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel. Reader response is welcomed. E-mail your comments to LRP@/.

by Ana Taboada Barber
George Mason University
February 12, 2014

Vaughn, S., Martinez, L. R., Linan-Thompson, S., Reutebuch, C. K., Carlson, C. D., & Francis, D. J. (2009). Enhancing social studies vocabulary and comprehension for seventh-grade English Language Learners: Findings from two experimental studies. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2(4), 297–324. doi:10.1080/19345740903167018

Most teachers in the U.S. are well acquainted with English Language Learners' (ELLs) struggles with academics, especially with reading comprehension. For instance, on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 69 percent of fourth-graders and 71 percent of eighth-graders identified as ELLs scored below the basic level in reading. In contrast, among English monolingual (EM) students, an average of 25 percent were below the basic level in reading in both grades (U.S. Department of Education, 2011). Although this does not come as a surprise to most teachers, it is not less worrisome; more so in view of the emphasis on literacy across the curriculum required in Common Core State Standards (CCSS, 2010). Although quite a bit is known about word-level skills and early literacy processes in ELLs (e.g., Lesaux & Geva, 2006), there is much less research on how to help these students with their comprehension, especially as they reach the adolescent years and have to contend with complex content-area texts. An exception is intervention work developed by Vaughn and colleagues (Vaughn, Martinez, Linan-Thompson, Reutebuch et al., 2009) in which 7th grade ELLs received comprehension instruction in social studies with instructional practices targeted to meet both their vocabulary and reading comprehension needs. Some useful lessons learned from this study, supported by other research designed to improve comprehension in ELLs, are:

• Teach vocabulary. Research has shown that students' ability to learn textbook vocabulary is improved when explicit vocabulary instruction is integrated with content-area reading. Teaching vocabulary explicitly includes making use of ELL's first language, through the use of:
• cognates (words of similar spelling and meaning)
• providing visual representations of the word
• giving student friendly definitions
• providing repeated exposure to words that are directly taught and embedded in meaningful contexts (Vaughn et al., 2009)
• making use of word roots or morphological awareness (awareness of word parts or morphemes and word formation rules; e.g., Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012).

In one of our own studies (Taboada & Rutherford, 2011) we found that ELLs could benefit from explicit, direct vocabulary instruction of specific science words (e.g., adaptation, camouflage, predator) as well as from embedded vocabulary instruction that was part of instruction of cognitive strategies (e.g., learning specific text words while learning to ask text-based questions). So, maximizing time spent with text that has well built glossaries and text features—such as bold words for key concepts—is important for these students.

• Use video strategically to teach and build discussion of key concepts. Incorporating short video clips into lessons is one way to anchor instruction on key content concepts for students, as well as to provide background knowledge on topics that are unfamiliar to ELLs. In their study, Vaughn and colleagues used short video clips to teach social studies concepts, either before or after students read a passage. Teachers had students focus on one or two key questions prior to video use.
• Use graphic organizers built by students. The use of graphic organizers, such as semantic maps, advanced organizers, Venn diagrams, concept diagrams, and so on was also part of the Vaughn et al. study. Using graphic organizers in relation to texts helps students organize text information and have a solid base for improving reading comprehension in typical on-grade readers (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000). The use of student-constructed organizers also helps ELLs better understand the big ideas, or key concepts, from text and make connections among and between concepts (Deshler & Schumaker, 2006). Further, boiling down key ideas to less text helps ELLs with prioritizing information and learning essential vocabulary. In our own research with Grade 6 and 7 ELLs and English Monolinguals (EMs), we found that graphic organizers teaching students how to identify main ideas from paragraphs were especially helpful and predicted reading comprehension in ELLs (Taboada, Barber, Buehl, Kidd, Sturtevant et al., in press).
• Use structured paired reading to support comprehension and oral language development. Vaughn and colleagues paired ELLs with EMs according to language ability and standardized reading scores. This pairing helped students with similar language background challenge and support each other in the discussion of key ideas while giving corrective feedback. Pairs successfully discussed specific words that had been previously explicitly taught by the teacher and that were related to the big ideas in a particular lesson.  In our own work with Grades 6 and 7 ELLs, we provided written guidelines (after modeling these) regarding how to handle roles in partner reading, with student pairs taking turns reading assigned text sections, one partner asking questions after reading and both rereading silently before attempting to answer their partners' questions. Questions had to follow adequate use of question words, and when possible, correct use of English for forming questions (e.g., verb position). Poster guidelines provided support for these language dimensions so ELLs could focus more on the content of their questions while having extra support for question forms (Taboada Barber & Buehl, 2013).
• Teach other comprehension strategies explicitly. ELLs of intermediate to advanced levels of English proficiency should be exposed to comprehension strategies as part of their regular reading instruction (e.g., Taboada, 2009). Grade 6 and 7 ELLs in the Taboada et al. study benefited from strategy instruction, including activation of background knowledge, identification of main idea, and comprehension monitoring as much as EMs when these were taught following the guided release of responsibility model (i.e., explicit explanation, modeling, guide practice, independent practice) and a variety of texts to use these. In other words, although it is well known that ELLs struggle with vocabulary and this is a key factor affecting their comprehension, general comprehension strategies that help with paragraph and inferential comprehension should not be marginalized.
• Support ELLs' reading engagement. Although not a focus of the Vaughn et al study, it is important to note that similar principles that apply to supporting the reading engagement of EMs apply to ELLs. In particular, teachers should engage in the following:

• matching text to students (Guthrie, 2008) so ELLs can access texts independently while also reading texts that are slightly above their level and require appropriate teacher scaffolds
• supporting their reading self-efficacy such that ELLs learn exactly what they are doing well in reading, and what dimensions of their reading need help and improvement (Taboada Barber & Buehl, 2013)
• offering choices of texts when possible, especially within a topic so they can deepen their knowledge about specific topics (Taboada & Rutherford, 2011)
• providing relevant explanations, so students  know why certain reading activities are important and why specific content bears relevance to their lives (Taboada Barber et al., in press). 

This article is from the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel. Reader response is welcomed. E-mail your comments to LRP@/

by Alfred W. Tatum
University of Illinois at Chicago
January 29, 2014

Question:

Response:

For more than 20 years, I have focused on advancing the literacy development of low-academically performing and high-academically performing boys and youth in the elementary, intermediate, and middle grades. Critical to this work was ongoing reflection and bringing together research findings across multiple domains (e.g., cognitive, sociological, and historical) that would allow me to sharpen my teaching, identify and select texts, and shape classrooms contexts to nurture boys’ confidence that reading and writing are tools of human development. As a result of my analysis of several frames of research, I have settled on the premise that each literacy lesson for boys should have twin aims. The first is teaching a lesson to ensure they are becoming better readers and writers. The second, and equally important, is selecting and discussing texts in ways to ensure young boys become “smarter” about something during each lesson. In short, literacy lessons should concurrently focus on building students’ reading and writing skills and nurturing their intellectual development. One without the other is insufficient. This understanding emerged from a research journey that has led to at minimum four lessons that I share below:

Lesson #1: Relying on current reading and writing research alone will yield insufficient guidance for advancing the literacy development of boys, particularly African American and Latino males,  because much of the research ignores approaches to literacy and intellectual development that have been effective for more than 300 years in the United States (Tatum, 2008, Tatum & Muhammad, 2012). Expanding the research lens is important for honoring the historical precedence that will challenge some current assumptions that it is difficult to engage boys with reading and writing. Outside of my first year of teaching, I have never had difficulty engaging boys with reading and writing texts and subsequently helping them become better readers, writers, and thinkers as result of this expanded lens.

Lesson #2: Honor the multiple identities boys bring into the classroom and avoid “imprisoning reading lessons by smallness” by only focusing on the boys’ racial and linguistic identities. Young boys also have developmental, gender, personal, community, national/international, and economic identities. Selecting and discussing texts through multiple identities are important for shaping meaningful literacy exchanges that will impact boys beyond a given lesson (Tatum, 2009, Tatum, in press a). I have observed too many teachers fall short because reliance on the text default that exists for African American and Latino boys. The text default is defined as selecting certain texts for certain students based on a limited view of their humanity and limited recognition of their need to read and learn from a wide range of texts across disciplines. Soft texts that often focus on emotional and aspiration needs (e.g., beating the odds) are selected over hard texts that can potentially connect boys to disciplines (e.g. discovering the need to read more science). There needs to be greater balance early on and often (Tatum, in press b).

Lesson #3: Move beyond a slow-growth model of literacy development that is anchored by the goal to have students meet minimum standards as the metric for success. While this has been a focus in the U.S. for more than three decades, the minimalist approach is counterproductive for high-performing boys who are often ignored by this approach and for low-performing boys who experience fewer and easier texts that usually focus on minimum standards (Tatum, 2013). Moving boys to reading at advanced levels requires a different orientation. How we conceptualize literacy for boys will affect their literacy experiences in classrooms (Tatum, 2005). This point holds true without regard to students’ ethnicities or their parents’ economic status.

Lesson #4: Becoming paralyzed by a common refrain that suggests a natural divide between African American and Latino boys and reading is problematic. Instead, there is a need to focus on cementing a marriage between boys and reading and writing to tackle the challenges we often encounter as educators when teaching boys who struggle with both.

I share lessons from a research journey to indicate that our questions will continue to change, our demands to do good by the young boys in the U.S. and other nations will continue to grow, and the need to share ongoing lessons emerging from ethically responsible research will be our pathway to ensure boys receive the literacy instruction they deserve.

For more on this topic see
www.studentsatthecenter.org/topics/literacy-practices-african-american-male-adolescents.

This article is from the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel. Read more about the LRP Blog here. Reader response is welcomed. E-mail your comments to LRP@/

by Tanya S. Wright
Michigan State University
January 22, 2014

Question:

What does new research tell us about vocabulary instruction, especially at the K–2 level? Are there ways we should be re-envisioning vocabulary in light of the CCSS?

Response:

The Common Core State Standards ratchet up vocabulary demands for K–2 by calling for children to read and be read to from informational texts from the start of school. While academic vocabulary knowledge is critical for comprehension more broadly (Biemiller, 2006; Nagy & Townsend, 2012), the vocabulary found in informational texts may create different challenges for young readers compared to vocabulary found in fiction (Hiebert & Cervetti, 2012).New vocabulary words in informational texts often represent new concepts for young children. Think about the challenge of explaining the word ecosystem to first graders who are listening to a book about forests compared to explaining a sophisticated word for a known concept such as injured means “hurt.” Further, informational text vocabulary may have specialized meanings in particular subject areas. "Front" has a different meaning in a book about weather compared to everyday situations such as being in front when you are lining up for recess. This can be especially confusing if children try to understand an informational text with the everyday meaning in mind. The same vocabulary word may be repeated more frequently within an informational text compared to challenging words that occur in fiction. So, a confusing word meaning can cause comprehension problems again and again in the same book. While it is clear that supporting children’s vocabulary development is more important than ever, in our recent study in 55 kindergarten classrooms we found very limited attention to vocabulary development (Wright & Neuman, in press). Also, we found minimal time spent on activities that support children’s engagement with the type of vocabulary needed for informational text comprehension: on average less than 2 minutes per day spent reading aloud from informational text, 2 minutes per day of science and only 1 minute per day of social studies.

What can teachers do to support vocabulary learning in K–2 classrooms? Most importantly, teachers should engage in activities that promote vocabulary development such as reading aloud from informational text as well as fiction, building word and world knowledge through content area learning, and facilitating discussions using challenging vocabulary (Neuman & Wright, 2013). In addition, here are some of the important steps in teaching vocabulary explicitly:

1. Select vocabulary to teach each week from read alouds and also from content you are teaching. Examine your science, social studies, and mathematics curricula for vocabulary to support informational text comprehension.
2. Explain word meanings to children during reading using child-friendly definitions.
3. Help children to make connections by discussing the ways that new vocabulary relate to one another and to children’s existing knowledge (e.g., in an informational book about plants, discuss that embryo and cotyledon are both parts of a seed or that evergreen and deciduous are two categories of plants). (Neuman, Newman, & Dwyer, 2011; Silverman, Proctor, Harring, Dowle, Mitchell, & Meyer, 2014).
4. Create opportunities for children to practice using new vocabulary in meaningful contexts (e.g., during a science exploration or during discussion of a read aloud).
5. Review, review, review. Children learn word meanings over time, strengthening their knowledge each time a word is encountered (Biemiller & Boote, 2006). Read the same book multiple times or read a set of books on the same topic to provide repeated opportunities for children to encounter new vocabulary.
6. Monitor children’s progress. Watch and listen to see if children are able to use new words that have been taught.

For more on this topic, see:

Wright, T. S. (in press). From potential to reality: Content-rich vocabulary and informational text. The Reading Teacher.

References

Biemiller, A. (2006). Vocabulary development and instruction: A prerequisite for school learning. In D. K. Dickinson & S. B. Neuman (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (Vol. 2) (pp. 41-51). New York: Guilford Press.

Biemiller, A., & Boote, C. (2006). An effective method for building meaning vocabulary in primary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 44-62.

Hiebert, E.H., & Cervetti, G.N. (2012). What differences in narrative and informational texts mean for learning and instruction of vocabulary. In E. J. Kame’enui & J. F. Baumann (eds). Vocabulary instruction: Research to practice (2nd Ed) (p. 322-344). New York: Guilford.

Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as tools: Learning academic vocabulary as language acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 47, 91-108.

Neuman, S. B., Newman, E. H., & Dwyer, J. (2011). Educational effects of a vocabulary intervention on preschoolers' word knowledge and conceptual development: A cluster‐randomized trial. Reading Research Quarterly, 46, 249-272.

Neuman, S. B. & Wright, T. S. (2013). All about words: Increasing vocabulary in the Common Core classroom, PreK-2. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Silverman, R. D., Proctor, C. P., Harring, J. R., Doyle, B., Mitchell, M. A., & Meyer, A. G. (2014). Teachers' instruction and students' vocabulary and comprehension: An exploratory study with English monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual students in Grades 3–5. Reading Research Quarterly, 49, 31-60.

Wright, T. S., & Neuman, S. B. (in press). Paucity and disparity in kindergarten oral vocabulary instruction. Journal of Literacy Research.

This article is from the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel. Read more about the LRP Blog here. Reader response is welcomed. E-mail your comments to LRP@/

by Timothy Shanahan
University of Illinois at Chicago
January 15, 2014

I recently received this question from a fourth grade special education teacher in New York City: “I was wondering what your opinion/research shows as far as the relationship between grammar instruction and reading comprehension. Do you have any preference as far as grammar programs/teaching methodologies go?”

In response to this excellent question, I’d say that there is a lot of evidence showing the importance of grammar in reading comprehension. Studies over the years have shown a clear relationship between syntactic or grammatical sophistication and reading comprehension; that is, as students learn to employ more complex sentences in their oral and written language, their ability to make sense of what they read increases, too.

Also, readability measures are able to predict how well students will comprehend particular texts on the basis of only two variables: vocabulary sophistication and grammatical complexity. At least for the Lexile formula, grammar is much more heavily weighted than vocabulary. This means that the text factor that is most predictive of comprehensibility is how complicated the sentences are grammatically.

There are also experimental studies that show that there are ways that grammar can be taught formally that improve reading comprehension.

To read my full response, see “Grammar and Comprehension: Scaffolding Student Interpretation of Complex Sentences” on the Shanahan on Literacy blog. 

Timothy Shanahan is a member of the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel, the group who coordinates this blog. Read more about the LRP Blog here. Reader response is welcomed. E-mail your comments to LRP@/