Currents in Literacy

Responding to 21st Century Demands in the Teaching of Reading

By Ellin O. Keene

Teachers are faced with an almost overwhelming array of demands about what they teach and even the manner in which they deliver instruction. Occasionally these demands appear to conflict with one another, leaving teachers in a quandary, especially in relation to what to emphasize in literacy instruction. Textbooks propose a scope and sequence, implying that if teachers use the materials in a specific order and in a comprehensive manner, students will magically learn to read. State standards documents range widely, from very broad statements of general learning goals to extremely specific curriculum and benchmarks, all supposedly designed to provide guidance in what to teach and, in some cases, how to teach so that children will read widely and well.

What is most important? How should teachers prioritize? Which approaches are most effective?

The truth is that there are many approaches that will contribute to students' competence as readers. Each teacher is the one best suited to select a range of methods and approaches to use with students based on his or her knowledge of district and state standards and research-based best practices. The more a teacher understands about the nature of reading itself, the more he or she will be able to develop a palette of instructional strategies to respond to and challenge each student appropriately.

The most successful teachers are those who have a comprehensive knowledge of what reading is, what reading skills and strategies matter most, and select approaches designed to help children respond to reading challenges of various types in authentic reading situations. Given adequate knowledge about the nature and development of the reading process and comprehensive, up-to-date information from the research that describes new insights about reading, teachers make the most thoughtful, effective choices when determining how to teach reading.

What are the building blocks of that knowledge? Where should schools and universities focus attention in relation to helping teachers have the building blocks of knowledge necessary to meet a wide range of students' learning needs in their classrooms?

I would propose that answering three key questions through long term, thoughtful professional learning discussions would go a long way toward creating, for each teacher, the critical theoretical knowledge needed to make appropriate instructional decisions every day. Perhaps if professional conversations in schools, districts and state departments of education around the country could focus on three simple, but essential questions, students would be the ultimate beneficiary.

What is Reading?

Research in the 1980's and 1990's has contributed to a comprehensive understanding of the reading process. Simply: reading is thinking about text. Neurological research as well as research conducted in the fields of education, linguistics, and psychology makes clear what readers must do to recognize and comprehend words and longer pieces of text. In order to read and comprehend, the human mind must process information from many different sources simultaneously.

The term cueing systems refers to the sources through which the human mind receives information during reading. These sources provide the reader with surface structure information (visible and/or audible information about the letters, sounds, words, and grammatical structure) and additional cueing systems responsible for providing the reader with deep structure information (information about the meanings of words and longer pieces of text, the purpose for reading and connecting background knowledge to what is read).

Surface structure systems are used to rapidly and accurately identify and pronounce words and to recognize when the structure of words and sentences is comprehensible.

Deep structure systems are used to understand and remember what is read and to interpret and analyze text at a literal and inferential level.

Surface Structure Systems

Grapho-Phonic System - provides information about letters, features of letters, combinations of letters, and the sounds associated with them.

Lexical System - provides information about words including instantaneous recognition of words, but not necessarily including the meaning associated with the word.

Syntactic System - provides information about the form and structure of the language - the structure of words, sentences and whole texts - including whether words and longer pieces of text "sound right" and are organized cohesively.

Deep Structure Systems

Semantic System - provides information about the meaning(s), concepts and associations of words and longer pieces of text; includes a reader's vocabulary and the degree to which the reader has a full conceptual knowledge of words so that he/she understands subtle definitions and nuances in words.

Schematic System - provides information from a reader's prior knowledge and/or personal associations with text that permit him/her to understand and remember information from text; also governs the grouping and organization of new information in memory stores.

Pragmatic System - provides information about the purposes and needs the reader has while reading; governs what the reader considers important and what the reader needs to understand for a particular purpose; also includes "social construction of meaning" - ways in which groups of readers discuss text to arrive at shared meaning and increasingly abstract interpretations of text.

Many theorists (i.e. Rumelhart, 1984 and Kintch, 1999) believe that these cueing systems operate in the mind simultaneously, providing the reader with an abundance of information from all six sources at every moment he/she reads. The reader relies on different sources of information more or less heavily depending upon the purpose and context for reading. For example, a reader with little legal background knowledge may rely more heavily on the grapho-phonic system to decipher and pronounce technical words in a legal text. That same reader may use the grapho-phonic system rarely while reading a novel by a favorite author.

What Reading Skills Matter Most?

Ensuring that students can use all six systems flexibly and independently in a variety of text is the work of the reading teacher from pre-school through twelfth grade. Research has shown that proficient readers use a handful of strategies to solve problems and identify words and text structures at the surface level and another handful of strategies to comprehend, remember, interpret, and infer at the deep structure level.

The surface structure systems should be emphasized in primary grades and students should be encouraged to use them strategically thereafter. There is research consensus that the following skills should be taught explicitly to students who do not already use them in order that they can use surface structure systems to pronounce words and read fluently:

• Using context
• Visual word recognition strategies
• Word analysis strategies such as prefixes, suffixes, compound words, and word derivations
• Text management strategies such as rereading/reading ahead, deep reading
• Decoding strategies such as identifying word families, chunking, point and slide, looking for known words
• Cross check across systems (make sense, sound like language, letters match the sounds)
• Asking another reader

Researchers studying deep structure systems and the strategies proficient readers use to comprehend have confirmed that thoughtful, active, proficient readers are metacognitive; they think about their own thinking during reading. Proficient readers know what and when they are comprehending and when they are not comprehending. They can identify their purposes for reading and identify the demands placed on them by a particular text. They can identify when and why the meaning of the text is unclear to them, and can use a variety of strategies (see below) to solve comprehension problems or deepen their understanding of a text. (Duffy et. al. 1987; Paris, Cross, and Lipson, 1984)

The strategies known to be used by proficient readers to independently comprehend text and understand ideas stated and implied in the text are:

• Monitoring for meaning
• Determining importance
• Creating mental images
• Synthesizing
• Relating new to known (schema)
• Questioning
• Inferring

Researchers (Anderson et. al, 1987, Brown and Palinscar, 1985, Dole et.al., 1991, Pearson, 1985, Pearson and Dole, 1987, Roehler and Duffy, 1987) who have studied the reading processes of proficient readers conclude that if teachers taught these strategies instead of much of the traditional skills-based reading curriculum, students would be better equipped to deal with a variety of texts independently. They reason that, because we know which cognitive processes (strategies listed above) are used most routinely by proficient readers, teachers should focus much of their instructional time and energy on helping students gradually learn to use these strategies independently when they read.

The PEBC's research has borne this out. Students in classrooms where PEBC staff developers helped teachers understand and teach the cognitive strategies listed above as their primary instructional focus in reading outperformed their peers on three separate assessments of reading comprehension.

How is Reading Taught?

Since the days of Dick and Jane readers, teachers have believed that if they taught a chronological sequence of skills associated with reading, somehow children would be able to read and comprehend well regardless of whether those isolated skills related to "real" reading. An abundance of research (for a synthesis, see Dole and Pearson, 1987) suggests that if teachers focus their instruction on a few cognitive strategies (listed above) over a long period of time in a variety of different text genres, students will use those strategies independently and flexibly, will identify and pronounce unknown words and comprehend deeply. In other words, focusing on what matters most in authentic contexts is most likely to be successful.

Of course, teaching a few strategies in depth as opposed to hundreds of skills in a fragmented way suggests a different way of teaching. Highly successful teachers teach toward independent mastery of those strategies (closely aligned with state and district content standards) by modeling their own use of the strategies and by gradually releasing responsibility (Gallagher and Pearson, 1983) to students until they can demonstrate use of the strategies independently.

To do this, teachers must be aware of their own thinking strategies while they read and must "think aloud" for students, presenting a model of how proficient readers think. They need a wide variety of high quality, decodable, and challenging text readily accessible in their classrooms. They need to devote large periods of daily time to reading, permitting ample opportunity for large, small, and individual instruction and assessment.

Finally . . .

Knowledgeable teachers who carefully observe students and design instruction accordingly know now and have, perhaps, always known that they need to have a strong knowledge of what reading is, clarity about what reading skills and strategies matter most and a repertoire of instructional strategies they use judiciously. In an era demanding standardization of teaching and learning, it is somehow gratifying to know that great teachers exercising wisdom and concern about the needs of their students are the most precious commodity of all.

Ellin Oliver Keene is Associate Director of the Public Education & Business Coalition in Denver. The PEBC has provided professional development for teachers around the Denver region and throughout the country for over sixteen years.