Finding Common Ground and Common Sense: More Thoughts About the Current Dialogue Around the Teaching of Reading
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To become readers children need to read books at school and teachers need to read aloud to their students every time class meets. These words might sound like obvious common sense to educators since we are a storying people, and we think in terms of stories, share our thoughts through stories, and stories enable us to learn and remember information, concepts, and ideas (Newkirk, 2014, Wells, 1986). A sad truth is that many developing readers—students reading two or more years below grade level—rarely hear stories read aloud or read books they choose. Reading books and listening to read alouds are usually not the core intervention for moving developing readers forward and improving their reading skill and identities.
Instead, interventions for many developing readers consist of skills such as phonics practice, developing and improving phonemic awareness, pseudo or nonsense word reading, fluency practice using repeated readings of short passages, etc. Such interventions are easily measureable and become the data by which many intervention programs measure success. Though children in these programs can show progress with individual skills, they frequently continue to struggle with reading, recall, and comprehension. In addition to skill practice and a steady diet of decodable texts, offering developing readers outstanding books that are relevant to their lives can change the landscape of intervention. Moreover, when these students increase their reading volume and listen to daily teacher read alouds, they can understand how:
● skills fit into the reading of meaningful books;
● a knowledge of word families supports decoding using analogous thinking;
● phonemic awareness supports decoding;
● hearing fluent, expressive reading during teacher read alouds can improve their fluent reading and why
● practicing fluent, expressive reading with self-selected books can increase their recall and comprehension.
An intervention program exclusively focused on the data collection of measureable skills not only excludes volume in reading of books, but also often fails to consider the whole child—the person behind the numbers. Numbers can be deceptive and can advance the illusion that children are improving because skill assessments show progress. However, there’s a disconnect that often occurs and raises this question: If children’s skills are solid and show progress, why can’t they read and comprehend texts at their independent or instructional reading level? The answer is that practicing skills in isolation without students experiencing how these skills link to reading books can inhibit progress in reading with enjoyment and deep comprehension. The solution is simple: put volume in reading at the center of intervention plans and offer students opportunities to apply skills they’re practicing to outstanding books they select.
It doesn’t matter if your school has adopted a Response to Intervention (RTI) program or if you intervene using the original intent of RTI: that teachers use information they collect through observations and one-to-one interactions with students to tailor and target interventions to each student’s needs. What does matter is that the core intervention for students always is volume in reading and daily teacher read alouds.
The research of Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988) tells the story about volume in reading. Their study found a correlation between the time students devote to daily reading and their reading proficiency and comprehension of texts.
In sum, the principal conclusion of this study is that the amount of
However, The National Reading Panel rejected the findings of the 1988 study on the grounds that it did not meet their scientific research standards. The good news is that in 2004 Dr. S. Jay Samuels and Dr. Yi-chen Wu completed a scientific study in response to the National Reading Panel and concluded that the more time students read, the higher their achievement compared to a control
Nancie Atwell also links daily reading to developing proficiency in reading books every day (2010). Volume in reading is an effective intervention for developing readers (Allington 1977, 2012; Allington & Gabriel, 2012; Allington and McGill-Franzen, 2021) and a predictor of learning success because students who read, read, read develop a strong personal reading life as well as meet words in different contexts and enlarge their vocabulary, meet and understand diverse literary genres, discuss books with peers, develop positive reading identities, and find pleasure in reading and learning.
Even though the research on volume in reading is compelling, a survey done by Scholastic in 2017 and based on nearly 3,700 PreK-12 principals and teachers show that 94% of principals and teachers agree or strongly agree that students should choose books at school and read independently every day. Here’s the big disconnect: only 36% made time for daily independent reading. A startling statistic that most likely affects developing readers participating in RTI. In addition to more time for students to read at school, it’s would be helpful to study how schools schedule intervention support for elementary and middle school students.
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