Chapter 15: The Texts of Beginning Reading Instruction

Sarah Ruth Sullivan
August 27, 2007
Chapter Summary
From Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, Fifth Edition.
Edited by Robert B. Ruddell and Norman J. Unrau

Chapter 15 “The Texts of Beginning Reading Instruction”
By Elfrieda H. Hiebert and Leigh Ann Martin
Note from Sarah…as I read this chapter, I had several points where I could not make sense of the text. I decided to post my thought process in these instances; you will see when I write in italics and bold that’s “me” talking!

Hiebert and Martin’s chapter, found in Section Two, “Processes of Reading and Literacy,” under Part 2: “Foundations for Literacy Development” builds on research related to children’s word learning and examines the research on the effects of different types of texts on emergent readers. In this chapter, Hiebert and Martin explore several dimensions of text evaluation, including the number of unique words in a text, how engaging the text is, the nature of the language used in the text, the presence of illustrations and the kinds of contributions these dimension make to a child’s reading acquisition. The authors seek to answer the question as to what factors affect text difficulty and therefore influence the reading acquisition process for children, particularly for those students for whom literacy development occurs primary in school. Specifically, the authors center their investigation on three questions:
1. How is reading facilitated or hindered by different texts?
2. How are different types of words acquired?
3. Considering that texts have changed over the past two decades, how well do current texts match the patterns established by text and word-learning studies?
Effects of Particular Text Types on Children’s Reading Development
The authors warn at the outset that there is a surprisingly small amount of studies on the effects of texts on beginning reading development. They contend that most of the existing studies are limited in scope and often flawed in their design, principally because text effects have been confused with instructional method. Many of these studies, therefore, have not measured what they set out to in terms of the effects of various texts on reading acquisition.
With the above-noted caveat in mind, the authors begin by describing the reality that basal readers, which come prepackaged from publishers, have been the basis of reading instruction in the United States. In 1992, over 85% of schools reported using basal reading programs (Shannon, 1997), and this figure appears to have remained stable since then (Baumann, Hoffman, Duffy-Hester, & Ro, 2000).
Hiebert (1999) identified three types of texts for beginning readers:
1. High-frequency texts (words such as here, can and he are overrepresented)
2. Phonics texts (support word recognitions through a preponderance of decodable vocabulary)
3. Literature-based texts (emphasize the meaningfulness of the entire text)
a. One form of literature-based text is called “predictable” texts due to the repetition of certain phrases or sentences.
Of the three types of texts for beginning readers, the authors focus their review on predictable texts because of their dominance in textbook programs over the past 15 years, despite the fact that there has been little empirical evidence supporting their efficacy.
I do not know why the term basal text is not mentioned here in the list of three types of text. I have no idea what the authors even mean by the term “basal reader” because they don’t define it. They start the chapter by saying that basal readers are used in over 85% of instruction, but then when Hiebert describes the kinds of texts (above) she does not mention basal readers. I thought maybe “basal readers” means any kind of prepackaged published texts for beginning readers (so all three types of texts described by Hiebert could be basal), but this is not true as later in the article the authors compare basal readers with predictable texts, so these are obviously not the same thing. It is really confusing and I wish the authors started with clear definitions before losing me in the details.
And if basal readers comprise 85% of instructional texts (listed above as Shannon 1997), then why do they list “predictable texts” as dominating textbooks in the last 15 years? Which has dominated instruction, basal texts or predictable texts? This is confusing writing in my opinion.
The authors contend when basal readers have been compared with predictable texts, beginning readers display more fluency with predictable texts than texts from basal reading programs or phonics texts. However, the authors point out that this fluency is actually an artifact of the predictable pattern of the text. For example, study by Leu, DeGroff, and Simons (1986), found that the contextual supports of the predictable texts helped poor readers improve their reading rates and comprehension to the level of good readers ONCE the children had mastered the pattern (but not before). The authors also note that predictable texts appear to encourage an overreliance on the pattern.
The authors point out that children’s miscues fail to indicate how well children remember words they have read in predictable texts. The studies attempting to compare predictable texts with other texts in terms of word learning did not isolate the text from other instructional components that may have affected the children’s abilities to remember words. A significant result was found in a study by Hoffman et al. (1999) in which the decidability and predictability of texts did affect beginning readers fluency, accuracy and rate. Reviews of literature do typically conclude that phonics-based instruction produces reading achievement superior to approaches that emphasize high-frequency words or meaningful stories (Adams, 1990; Chall, 1995; Foorman et al., 1998), however, the relative contribution of particular types of texts to lessons or writing activities is unclear .
Research on Children’s Word Learning
The authors contend that there is more extensive research on children’s word learning with word lists and phrases than there is within whole texts. This is due to the fact that the experiments on single words can be more controlled than whole text investigations; however, this limits the generalizabilty of findings in research to the realities of homes and classrooms in the real world. Three types of word learning, corresponding to Hiebert (1999) characterization of texts, are reviewed:
1. Highly meaningful words (corresponds to high-frequency texts)
2. Highly regular words (corresponds to phonics texts)
3. High frequency words (corresponds to predictable texts)
Type 1-highly meaningful words (corresponds to high-frequency texts) – Young children are first interested in words that represent concepts of personal meaning to them, usually proper nouns indicating meaningful persons in their lives.
The authors note that similar to Ashton-Warner’s (1963) self chosen vocabulary, the themes of beginning reading textbooks from the 1930s-1980’s were chosen to be meaningful and relevant to young children; these meaningful themes were conveyed through high-frequency words.
Again, these writers switch their terms mid-paragraph. They begin this paragraph on highly meaningful words and end up switching to talking about the use of high frequency words use to convey meaningful themes.
The meaningful themes of these textbooks were conveyed with generic high-frequency words (for example in the Dick and Jane readers). This approach changed in the 1980s with “authentic texts” where the emphasis has been on the engagingness of the text as a whole with less attention given to the repetition of meaningful words.
The theory behind meaningful word learning is that the first words to which children attend because of their meaningfulness in their lives lay the foundation for the next stage in which they attend to alphabetic relationships. The authors contend that while research is still inconclusive on this type of word learning, it does seem to indicate the efficacy of teaching at least a core set of meaningful, high-imagery words in beginning texts.
Type 2 - highly regular words (corresponds to phonics texts)- As illustrated by Adams’ research in 1990, efficient word recognition in an alphabetic language depends on the beginning reader gaining insight into the alphabetic nature of the written language; that word spellings map onto word pronunciations (Adams, 1990). These mappings can occur at several levels: word, syllable, sub syllable, morpheme and phoneme. While researchers agree that beginning readers need guidance in the alphabetic patterns of written English, there is not agreement on the appropriate content of the unit of the alphabetic relationship. Some researchers believe the first unit of study should be the individual phoneme, others contend that since phonemes can be “unstable” due to their phonemic environment, and that rimes should be the initial unit of study.
Type 3-high frequency words (corresponds to predictable texts) – The authors contend that much of written text consists of a small group of words-prepositions, connectives, pronouns and articles. These high frequency words often have irregular letter-sound relationships. This has caused a controversy in phonics text publishing, with some believing in restricting the occurrence of high-frequency words, while others argue that restricting the use of high-frequency words prevents beginning readers from developing a flexible stance towards reading that can handle both regular spelling pronunciations and high-frequency exceptions.
Research on Features of Existing Texts
The authors consider three characteristics of current texts: the number of total and unique words in texts; the proportion of unique words that are phonetically regular, multisyllabic and highly frequent; and the engagingness of the text. The authors note that while researchers have yet to link these three factors with the ease or difficulty for reading acquisition, a “compelling case” can be made theoretically for each of these dimensions.
1. The number of total and unique words in texts – Historically the total number of words and the number of unique words among those total words has been used as an indicator of the demands of reading programs on beginning readers (Chall, 1995, and others). The authors point out, however, that the number of words is a general indicator at best of the task posed by the text for beginning readers.

2. The decodability of words – Chall’s 1995 observation that basal readers did not provide sufficient phonics experiences caused researchers to probe into the relationship between the phonics instruction of teachers’ editions and the phonics patters in the words that appear in children’s texts. While texts can be judged as decodable because of elements presented in lessons in the teachers’ edition, there is a substantial amount of phonics data that beginning readers must be able to navigate to be successful with texts of beginning readers.

3. The engagingness of texts – Alvermann and Guthrie (1993) proposed engagement as a defining construct in literacy. Engagingness describes the potential of a text for creating engagement. Hoffman, Christian, et al. (1994) identified three ways in which the potential of a text for engagingness can be measured: design, content and language. For beginning readers, design engagingness is centered on illustrations. After design engagingness, other factors likely influence their sustaining interest in the text, for example, if the content is unfamiliar, complex or trivial, a text may not continue to be engaging. Further, if the language is bland, children’s engagement with the text may drop off. The authors point out that while text engagement may depend in part on race, class, ethnicity and personal interest, it is important to consider whether texts hold promise for engaging at least some of the children within a group for whom the text is being developed.
Next Steps
The authors point out that their review of the literature reveals that there is not a substantial amount of research on the features of effective beginning texts. One reason may be the gulf between the publishing industry and educational systems. The authors contend that publishers and researchers need to collaborate in addressing critical questions on appropriate texts for beginning readers. They describe the most urgent of these questions to be centered around:
· texts for the initial period of independent word recognition
· Issues related to decidability (what should the unit of information be? How many exemplars are needed of a unit? At what speed can beginning readers assimilate new information, especially those for whom good instruction and materials are critical to their literacy?
The authors end with a warning that unless systematic research on text features is conducted, the vacillation evident in texts published in the last 20 years will continue (Hiebert, 2000). It is critical to probe in this field in order to ensure that children are brought into literacy with the best possible texts and the best possible experiences with those texts.