Teaching Kids to Read Isn't Rocket Science: Leveled Text vs. Decodable Text. Why Can't We Have Both?
Literacy According to Lisa #3
Re-printed with permission from https://www.lisafornebraska.com/media
Author- Lisa Schonhoff, Ed. S., Nebraska State Board of Education: “My views are my own.” (Editors note: Lisa helped us edit this piece so that non-educators can more easily understand it.)
Teaching kids to read isn’t rocket science. That being said, there are a lot of factors that play into student success, most importantly, the teacher in the classroom. With a great deal of dogmatic assertion about what effective literacy instruction looks like, many teachers have become overwhelmed regarding this most important responsibility.
As a matter of fact, there are cohorts of people in education, tasked with training our educators, who have never actually taught kids to read. A current debate that is causing confusion in the education field is whether to use decodable text or leveled text in reading instruction. They are both valuable. Let’s see if we can clear up some of this confusion.
During the past several decades, educators have argued whether teaching phonics is necessary to teach a child to read. You will even hear teachers say that they were told by administrators that they were not allowed to teach phonics. It is impossible to teach a struggling reader without phonics.
The pendulum has swung and now phonics has a constituency again. The constituency comes with a shiny new package called “Science of Reading,” which in fact is not new. It is a decades-old body of research that has been accessible all along.
The Importance of Decodable Text
“Decodable Texts are carefully sequenced to progressively incorporate words that are consistent with the letters and corresponding phonemes that have been taught to the new reader.”
These texts are important for early readers as they require students to use phonics to read them. An example of a decodable text would be a book that focuses on a specific spelling pattern such as ‘at,’ and includes words with those specific phonemes such as ‘mat, cat, sat, bat.’
The Science of Reading advocates encourage schools to use decodable texts, as they are celebrated for bringing back phonics. However, the same advocates discourage leveling, thus removing one of the most important tools that literacy teachers have.
School administrators spent millions of tax dollars on “evidence-based” Science of Reading curriculum materials which must be “taught with fidelity,” according to the curriculum vendors.
“Fidelity” means the purchased materials are to be taught as written, not allowing for teachers to edit or enhance the lessons. This gives classroom teachers very little leeway to meet the needs of individual students.
Luckily, I never had an administrator who enforced “fidelity.”
The Importance of Leveled Text
Leveled Text refers to the age-old practice of providing books with a variety of skill levels, so that each student can find their comfort zone, and expand when they are ready.
“Leveled books are books characterized and categorized by the level of difficulty of the text, based on a number of criteria…such as word knowledge, vocabulary, and sentence structure.”
Currently, teachers are being dissuaded from using leveled texts, or even testing their students for skill levels, as it is not considered an equitable practice, nor does it align with the Science of Reading.
For those of us who have taught hundreds of struggling readers to read, this sounds like an ongoing recipe for disaster. We know that there is a continuum of teaching and learning that happens when kids learn to read.
Teaching one set curriculum, without levels, does not allow for the continuum of learning.
As children grow through the continuum of literacy instruction and learning, they must be exposed to a LOT of books below their reading level to build confidence.
They must be taught with books at their level to grow as readers.
They must be read to from books just above their level to frontload important vocabulary and content that will help them successfully read books at those levels soon.
They must be able to choose content that is interesting to them.
If teachers are not allowed to identify each student’s reading level, they will waste valuable time teaching skills and concepts that are not growing their students as readers.
As an Instructional Coach, it was clear that a teacher needed additional support if they could not easily discuss the level of their students and what that means for them as readers.
There is a time and a place to use both decodable texts and leveled texts. We must not substitute one for the other as the reading curriculum wars rage on. We need to use common sense as educators and avoid the noise that typically comes from those who have never taught kids to read.