The Art and Science of Teaching Reading

Anyone who has ever taught reading before knows that you have to be both a master artist and a skilled scientist in order for your students to pick up all of the skills they need.  Some kids learn basic skills quickly but lack the finesse of great readers so we have to help them develop those skills--expression, inference, foreshadowing, discussion.  Other students have difficulty gaining an understanding of the basics--decoding, sight words, punctuation.  We have to take more of a scientific approach with these students.
Every year I have a number of teachers ask me what they can do to help their students become more fluent readers.  This is both tricky and simple at the same time.  We want a program or a step-by-step procedure to follow. And there are some things you can do, like having your students play, "Chase the Pen" where you move the pen ahead of them at the next words so they have to try to catch up to it.  You can do it with a race car or just about anything. Kids like it and it does improve fluency.  But the best way to increase fluency is by giving your students the time to read aloud everyday. The key word being "aloud."  When we have Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) time, most students are reading silently.  That's great but it's not going to help fluency as much as reading aloud. If a student reads a familiar text aloud several times, and has also heard another good reader read the same text several times, this will help improve fluency for students who are good decoders and are just slow  methodical. However, if your student doesn't have good decoding or accuracy skills then fluency is going to have to take a back-burner to building up the child's ability to word call.

Students Reading to Self, courtesy of educators.com

This is often where the science part of reading comes in to play.  I was once at a meeting with about 100 other reading teachers.  The presenter asked us if we knew in what order reading skills are generally acquired.  There were a lot of blank faces.  We weren't sure exactly what she meant.  I raised my hand and said that letter names comes first--which was correct much to my relieve.  We were then able to tell her letter sounds and then there was a lot more silence before people just started randomly guessing.  It turns out there weren't very many of us in the room who knew the logical progression of how reading should be taught and acquired by our students, so let me give that information to you so that if you didn't know before, now you will.  It's important because your curriculum needs to match up and you need to know what your students are ready to learn next in guided groups or one-on-one.  After all, if we wait on the curriculum for all of our students, we are going to put some students way behind where they should be and others will never have the chance to catch up.
Here is the progression:
letter names
letter sounds
vowel-consonant words
consonant-vowel-consonant words
CVCC
CCVC
CVCe
R-controlled vowels
Consonant digraphs (th, ng, sh, wh, ch, igh, ck, kn, wr, nk)
Vowel digraphs and diphthongs (oa, ea, oo, ee, ai, ol, ay, ou, oi, oy, au, aw, oe, ew, ow)
Prefixes and suffixes
Two syllable and multi-syllable words
Basically, that is the order that we introduce words, with the exception of two syllable and multi-syllable words that fall into previous categories.  Here's the catch though--if we have kids that are way ahead in the progression and we are insisting that they cover something two steps behind with us while we go over it for the rest of the class, we're wasting their time.  Likewise, if the class is covering vowel dipthongs and Billy can't decode CVCe, he's not going to be ready for that lesson and isn't going to get anything out of it. So, we're wasting his time as well.  I strongly recommend the majority of the time you spend covering word work and decoding be in your small groups, with the exception of kindergarten classes where the majority of your students are on the same level. That doesn't mean don't throw a mini-lesson out there once a week as a reminder to everyone that "ou" usually says /ou/ like "out" but if the majority of your time is spent teaching these kinds of skills in whole group, you're likely spending a lot of time covering material only a small part of your class needs "just in time."
Another point I would like to make regarding the coverage of these skills is that we need to speed it up.  We can no longer wait until the middle of first grade to teach students r-controlled vowels, digraphs, and diphthongs   Why?  State mandated testing won't let us. We are expecting our students to know how to read well, extract and analyze information, and draw conclusions in third grade.  If they are just getting to be solid readers at the end of first/beginning of second they will drown in third.  We've got to teach these skills as the students are ready for them and push them on from one to the next, regardless of what the pacing guide says.  If you are holding a student back because, "We don't cover that until the second semester," you're holding up their learning and that should never be the case.
This is why teaching these types of lessons in guided reading groups is so powerful.  You are differentiating your instruction for that group.  So, if you have a group that's ready to move on to r-controlled vowels in the middle of kindergarten, you can take them there while other groups are still learning letter sounds.  If you need to go back and review CVCe in the middle of first grade with a group of kiddos, everyone else can keep truckin' without being held up.  Perhaps I'm way off base, but I do not see a lot of value in teaching these skills whole group.  I also don't see a lot of merit in having students complete worksheets to signify they have an understanding of what these letters mean when they are reading. If we need to know if a child can read these types of words, we have to hear them read--not see what they can write down for us.
Good teaching is both an art and a science.  While there are many teachers who innately have the ability to reach the needs of each student, many do not.  We have to rely on a plan of attack--tangible progressions that help us know where to go next.  The Quick Phonics Screener, adapted by Hasbrouck and Parker out of Texas A & M is a great tool to help us know exactly where our students need to go next.  If you would like a link to that document, email me (vanhorna@communityisd.org) and I'll send it to you.  It's fabulous. Read Naturally is also a great resource for building fluency and it's based on the idea that reading the same story aloud several times improves a student's fluency.  If you don't have that program, any text will do, as I describe above. You can find out more about Read Naturally here.
I know many of you have thoughts about these topics of discussion. I'd love to hear what you have to say.  Agree?  Disagree?  Why?
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