Chapter 13: Learning to read words: Linguistic units and instructional strategies

“Learning to read words: Linguistic units and instructional strategies” by Connie Juel and Cecilia Minden-Cupp, discusses the research done by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) as they attempted to answer teachers questions concerning the improvement of primary grade reading instruction. The teachers raised more questions about how to teach children to read words than any other area in early reading. Within this area, the teachers were most concerned with which, and how many, strategies for word recognition they should model for first grade children. At the same time, practitioners were also concerned about the amount of time spent on word recognition in their total language arts programs. They were very concerned about the development of both reading and writing and the development of rich vocabularies and world knowledge with which to comprehend decoded texts.
The CIERA group then examined how reading instruction works in real classrooms by following the activity in four classrooms for one school year. CIERA reasoned that certain instructional procedures might be more effective if their delivery occurs in a particular way and to specific groups of children. Some examples are onset and rime instruction, which might be most effective for children with some decoding skill and some degree of phonological awareness, and sequential letter-by-letter decoding might be more effective for children with less early literacy knowledge. It is also felt that the form of instruction may alter its effectiveness.
In sum, in the current study we examined whether specific forms of instruction might differentially affect students with varying levels of phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and other early literacy foundations. CIERA’s goal was to begin to identify specific instructional practices that appear to best foster learning to read words for particular profiles of children.
Background-
· Volume of words children are expected to read quickly and accurately is overwhelming. By third grade alone, children will encounter about 25,000 distinct words. By the end of eighth grade, children will encounter over 80,000 different words.
· Even the most comprehensive phonics programs rarely provide direct instruction for more than about 90 phonics rules. Yet, over 500 different spelling-sound rules are needed to read (Gough & Juel, 1990; Juel, 1994).
· Rules of phonics in most instructional programs is explicit, while the identification of spelling patterns by skilled readers is implicit and requires considerable orthographic knowledge.
· Primary-grade children are hit with an avalanche of printed words. While some words are seen a lot, the most content words are not.
· Self-teaching hypothesis (Share,1995; Share & Stanovich, 1995; Torgesen & Hecht, 1996), children basically learn to read by developing phonological awareness, learning some basic letter-sound relationships, and phonologically recoding a specific printed word a few times.
· This article mentions linguistic units such as onsets and rimes.
· At about age 4, many children can perceive, segment, and manipulate the rather distinctive syllable units in words. At about ages 4 to 5, onsets and rimes become transparent— which is one reason that, at this age, children seem fond of rhyming games, poems, chants, and even manipulations of linguistic units in the creation of pseudo languages such as Pig Latin.
· Awareness of the individual phonemes within rime units often develops only with reading instruction because of co-articulation.
· Some children may need to analyze words at the phoneme level before they can successfully make analogies involving rimes.
Instructional Strategies
The teacher may provide a menu of strategies ranging from using the contextual cues provided by illustrations to sounding out and blending individual letter-sounds.
The goal of reading is sense making. Orthographic representations of words are what account for the effortless process of word recognition in skilled reading.
To balance sense making and orthographic experience, a reader should ask themselves these questions:
1. Does it make sense?
2. Does that look right?
3. What would you expect to see?
4. Can we say it that way?

Research Questions
Does instruction with an emphasis on different levels of linguistic units (e.g., onsets and rimes, individual phonemes) differentially affect children at various levels of reading development?
When and how are which linguistic units and which instructional strategies best taught to children?

Method- Participants and Setting
Four first grade classrooms (containing 18 students each) in a city in the southeastern US
Approximately 70% percent of the children qualify for subsidized lunch, 60% are African American, 36% are Caucasian, and 4% are from other ethnic groups.
Each of the classroom teachers was a female Caucasian who had more than 10 years of teaching experience. They were each considered a very good teacher by their school principals.
The principals’ judgments were based on two primary factors. The first consideration was that the level of achievement in these classrooms compared favorably with that of other first-grade classrooms at the school. The second consideration was classroom management.
Consideration was based on classroom observations, disciplinary referrals, and accumulated input from parents. Classrooms 1 and 2 were in one school and Classrooms 3 and 4 at the other school.
Language arts instruction generally lasted for 1 ½ hours in each of the classrooms. The ELA period in Classroom 3 tended to run longer, however, while Classroom 2 never ran longer as time was limited by school scheduling.
Each classroom had three reading groups, the 90-minute language arts time period was spent somewhat differently.
Classroom 1- 20 to 30 minutes was spent in a whole class word wall activity before dividing up into reading groups.
Classroom 2- time was spent solely in reading groups.
Classroom 3- the morning message was expanded from the 15 minutes that each class spent on this activity to an additional 15 to 20 minutes. In this classroom, the whole-class morning message formed an integral part of language arts instruction.
Classroom 4- time was conducted solely in reading groups.
Each class had a teaching assistant that supervised students while they were doing seatwork or at their centers.
Each classroom also made weekly visits to the school library, which included listening to a story read by the librarian.
Teachers all had available a basal reading series from 1986. They also had commercial little books the school system had been adding in recent years. The teachers also could use the basal at their discretion.

Procedure
Through weekly classroom observations of language arts instruction (frequently 90 minutes) throughout the school year, the researchers observed each low group each week and the other two groups in each class at least once every 2 weeks. They developed a coding system that would focus their observations on the following primary areas: (a) activities, (b) materials, (c) strategies, and (d) linguistic units.
The researchers observed whole-class as well as small group sessions. The classes were divided into their reading groups. Each class had a low, medium, and high group.
When the class was divided into reading groups, we concentrated our coding on what went on in individual reading groups when the teacher was instructing them.
We initially intended to record the actual time children spent simply reading. This proved impossible for two reasons, first, children often shared a book and second, even when each child had a copy of the text it was apparent that many children were not looking at the text.
Assessment was done by administering the Book Buddies Early Literacy Screening. The BBELS assessment includes two parts. Part 1 assesses both early literacy understandings involved in word recognition and word recognition itself. Part 2 assesses ability to read and comprehend passages. A subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test was also administered to every child to assess word reading. These assessments were done in September, December, and May.
In December and May, each child read five decodable words and five sight words that were specific to their reading groups.

Results
Reading and writing of texts was the activity all reading groups engaged in most extensively, except those in Classroom 4. Throughout the school year, about 40% or more of the language arts activities in all reading groups, except those in Classroom 4, involved reading and writing text.
Phonics and phonemic awareness activities were much more common in Classrooms 2 and 4 than in Classrooms 1 and 3
From September through December, 3% of the activities in the low-reading group in Classroom 1 involved phonics and, similarly, 6% of the activities in Classroom 3 involved phonics. In sharp contrast, during this same time, 50% of the activities in the low-reading group in Classroom 4 involved phonics, as did 37% of the activities in Classroom 2.
Some differences between Classrooms 2 and 4 in the phonics instruction. They were (a) both teachers made use of onsets and rimes, but Teacher 4 more frequently broke the rime unit into individual letter sounds, whereas Teacher 2 treated a key rime in a word as a source for analogies to other words; (b) the phonics curriculum was more preset in Classroom 4 than in Classroom 2; and (c) phonics instruction stayed at about the same level in Classroom 2 throughout the year, whereas systematic phonics instruction ceased in Classroom 4 by the end of February.
Teachers in Classrooms 1 and 3 relied on a class word wall and spelling activities to foster word recognition more than they did direct phonics instruction. Word wall and spelling activities in these two classrooms emphasized the visual letter strings of words.
End of the year BBELS testing showed the means on the passage reading of first grade, children in Classroom 4 were reading on a late-second-grade level; children in Classroom 3 were reading on a mid-second-grade level; children in Classroom 2 were reading at an end-of-first-grade level; and children in Classroom 1 were reading at a primer level.
Children could not comprehend passages in which they failed to identify many words. At the first-grade level, reading comprehension is ruled by word recognition ability.
Think aloud strategies were applied to read unfamiliar words. This includes sounding out and blending words together as well as using onsets and rimes. There are two primary findings from this strategy analysis. First, the strategies children tried to apply did reflect the strategies (or lack of such) that they were taught and second, children in the low groups had difficulty seeing the chunks in words.

Findings
It is important to know that this study contains limitations since it is not an experimental study and only contains four classrooms.
One important finding is that Differential Instruction may be helpful in first grade.
Phonics is critical for some children but may not be helpful for others.
Children who entered first grade with minimal reading skill seemed to have greatest success with the following classroom practices:
1. Teachers modeling word recognition strategies by (a) chunking words into
component units and encouraging the sound and blending them; and (b)
considering known letter-sounds in a word and what makes sense.
2. Children were encouraged to finger-point to words as text was read.
3. Children used hands-on materials (e.g., pocket charts for active sorting
of picture cards by sound and word cards by orthographic pattern).
4. Writing for sounds was part of phonics instruction.
5. Instructional groups were small with word recognition lesson plans
designed to meet the specific needs of children within that group.