1. hobbies and interests
2. reading

• W
hy is Burst®:Reading
designed the way it is?
• W
hy is it so important
to target instruction?
I knew Jim and Amy had different
needs from Carlos and Sally, but now,
I know exactly what they are.
Burst:Reading Early Literacy Intervention
Table of Contents
Why Burst®:Reading? ....................................................................................................... 1
The Burst:Reading Skills-Based Model ..................................................................... 1
Burst:Reading Instruction ........................................................................................ 5
Fitting Together the Burst:Reading Skills-Based Model and the Instructional Hierarchy ... 7
The Structure of Burst Activities............................................................................... 8
Reading Comprehension ................................................................................................. 10
Phonological Awareness Instruction .............................................................................. 15
Letter-Sound Instruction .................................................................................................. 20
Sounding-Out Instruction ................................................................................................ 26
High-Frequency Irregular Word Instruction.................................................................... 30
Letter Combination Instruction ....................................................................................... 35
Advanced Phonics Instruction ......................................................................................... 39
Reading Fluency Instruction ............................................................................................ 44
Vocabulary Instruction ..................................................................................................... 50
Comprehension Strategies Instruction............................................................................ 54
Recommended Reading ................................................................................................... 59
User Guide: Why
Welcome to the Why book of your Burst®:Reading guide set.
To help struggling readers, teachers like you need a model of reading that helps you identify what skills
and abilities each student currently lacks — and what skills and abilities he or she does have on which
you can build. This guide describes the research-based model used in Burst:Reading and then explains
the component skills.
For each component skill this guide explains:
Why it’s important,
How to identify it in a child, and
What the research says about teaching the skill.
What the skill is,
The guide also uncovers the structure within
Burst sequences (known as strands) — such as
Phonological Awareness or Connected Text — and the
simple structure within an individual Burst activity.
You can read this guide cover to cover; or just dip into
it to read about a particular skill area. Either way, we
recommend you start by reading this introductory article.
The Burst:Reading Skills-Based Model
The ultimate goal of reading instruction — as
Catherine Snow1 of Harvard Graduate School of
Education has said — is for students to “be able to read
books with enjoyment while lying in a hammock under
elm trees.”2 But reading is an enormously sophisticated
skill that must be explicitly learned. No child fails to
learn to speak; yet millions across the world fail to
learn to read. Even with careful, systematic instruction,
learning to read is a real challenge for many.
While it’s hotly debated exactly how many component
skills there are to reading, recent research has shed
light on the subject. A helpful starting point is the
Simple View of Reading:3 Reading with comprehension
User Guide: Why
1
Macro-structure
Midi-structure
Micro-structure
How strands
strands fit
How
fittogether;
together;
the Burst
Burst Skill
Skill Model.
Model.
the
The
The sequence
sequenceof
ofactivities
activities
within
withinaastrand;
strand;
the
the Instructional
Instructional Hierarchy.
Hierarchy.
is seen as the product of (i) decoding, and (ii) listening
comprehension. The Burst Skill Model takes each of
those areas and breaks out the constituent skills as
shown in the diagram on the next page.
hexagons in the Skill Model as shown in the table on
Page 4. Each of these strands is described in more
detail later in this guide. This model shows how
Burst:Reading works:
Each hexagon represents a component skill of reading.
(To keep the model simple, writing skills are not
included.) Skills to the left of the diagram are generally
precursors of skills to the right. Of course, there
are exceptions; some children might become fluent
readers without phonological awareness. And there is
reciprocity between skills; for example, reading
fluency practice will improve phonological awareness.
Identifying the earliest skills that the students in Each strand of instruction in the Burst you are sent
for your student groups corresponds to one of the
2
The
The structure
structurewithin
within
aa single
singleactivity;
activity;
Prepare/Model/Practice/Adjust.
Prepare/Model/Practice/Adjust.
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
your group have not yet acquired;
Teaching those skills;
Building on that foundation with later skills; and
All the while, connecting each component skill to the overall goal of reading with comprehension.
For example, for a group of students who can identify
most letter sounds but are not blending orally or from
print, the Burst system would recommend instruction in
Phonological Awareness and Sounding Out and Blending.
Burst:Reading Skills-Based Model
Phonological
Awareness
Regular
Word
Recognition
Phonological
Awareness
Sounding Out
& Blending
Letter-Sound
Knowledge
Alphabetic
Principle
Letter
Combination
Knowledge
Reading Fluency
Reading
Comprehension
High-Freq.
Irregular Word
Recognition
Advanced
Phonics
User Guide: Why
3
Skill
4
Strand
Abbrev.
Strand
Strand Goal
Phonological
Awareness
PA
Phonological
Awareness Instruction
Students can blend and segment sounds in spoken words.
Letter-Sound
Knowledge
LS
Letter-Sound
Instruction
Students can say the most common sound for single letters.
Sounding Out &
Blending
B
Sounding-Out
Instruction
Students can sound out and read regular words with simple patterns such
as VC and CVC.
Regular Word
Recognition
RW
Connected Text
Instruction
Students can read and understand short sentences that are 100%
decodable.
Irregular Word
Recognition
IW
High-Frequency
Irregular Word
Instruction
Students can read 120 high-frequency irregular words.
Letter
Combination
Knowledge
LC
Letter Combination
Instruction
Students can decode words containing common letter combinations (such
as sh and oa) as well as VCe words.
Advanced
Phonics
AP
Advanced Phonics
Instruction
Students can decode words containing advanced text features such as
common word families, contractions, compound words, etc.
Reading Fluency
Flu
Reading Fluency
Instruction
Students can read connected text with grade-level automaticity.
Vocabulary
Voc
Vocabulary Instruction
Students know the meaning of grade-level words and high-frequency
prefixes and suffixes.
Comprehension
Strategies
CompS
Comprehension
Strategies Instruction
Students know when and how to apply core comprehension strategies such
as summarizing, making inferences, and identifying the author’s purpose.
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
Burst Instruction
The Burst Skill Model tells you what instructional
areas (or strands) to focus on for a given group of
students. There is also a structure to the instruction
within a strand — that is the sequence of activities
that comprise the strand. It has its foundations in a
30-year-old theory of how people learn skills.
According to this theory4 — for which considerable
evidence has accumulated5 — anyone learning a new
skill passes through four stages: acquisition, fluency,
generalization, and adaptation.
This theory — known as the Instructional Hierarchy
(ih) — says that students encountering a new skill,
such as sounding out words, adding fractions, or
driving a car, need first to learn how to execute the
skill with reasonable accuracy (this phase is called
acquisition). Only then is it profitable to focus on
building automaticity (fluency) in the skill, usually
through practice, practice, and more practice.
Once fluent in a skill, cognitive resources are freed to
attend to higher-level concerns such as performing
the skill in different settings (generalization) and
problem-solving in novel situations (adaptation). As
in sports, or playing the piano, or driving a stick-shift,
basic abilities must be mastered first. Similarly, first
graders learning to read need some basic ability in
word recognition — as the experience of countless
Instructional
Hierarchy
Description
Example
Acquisition
Reasonably accurate performance of a skill
Given a written regular word, sound out and then say
the word ( sat g“sssaaat” g “sat” ).
Fluency
Performing a skill rapidly, consistently, and with
proficiency
Given a printed word, say its sound without hesitating
( sat g “sat” ).
Generalization
Performing the skill in multiple settings
Given a written decodable passage, read it aloud.
Adaptation
Adapting the skill to novel demands; problem-solving
Given a written passage, make inferences about the
author’s intent.
User Guide: Why
5
teachers, frustrated that students did not arrive in
their classroom with the necessary prerequisite skills,
attests. To be specific: A student who cannot produce
the most common sound for each letter (acquisition)
will not profit much from instruction in sounding out
regular words (generalization). Instead, the student
should be taught letter-sound correspondences
until she reaches a reasonable level of accuracy
before proceeding. Otherwise, it is as if the student
is attempting to play Rachmaninoff before having
practiced her scales sufficiently.
Making Sense of the Instructional Hierarchy
(From E. J. Daly, III, F. E. Lentz, & J. Boyer (1996). The instructional hierarchy: A conceptual model for
understanding the effective components of reading interventions. School Psychology Quarterly, 11, 369–386.)
The first stage in the skill
development process
The next stage is fluency
— the ability to perform
The next step in the
Adaptation is the final
hierarchy, generalization,
step of the learning
is acquisition, “the
the skill rapidly and
is the process of
hierarchy. The learner
period between the
with proficiency (that is,
displaying a recently
must be able ultimately
first appearance of the
consistently, at a set level,
acquired behavior either
to modify learned
desired behavior and
and with a high degree of
in multiple settings, or in
responses in the face
the reasonably accurate
accuracy).
the appropriate context
of novel environmental
or environment.
demands. Haring et al.
performance of that
behavior” (Haring et al.,
1978, p. 25).
(1978) equate adaptation
to problem-solving
where it is necessary to
provide the learner with
as many novel instances
of applications of the skill
as possible to promote
adaptation.
6
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
Fitting Together the Burst Skill
Model and the Instructional
Hierarchy
Here’s how the model works in practice: Let’s say that a
kindergarten student begins by acquiring some facility
with letter-sound correspondences — when presented
with the grapheme p and asked “What sound?” she
replies /p/. But when shown d she responds /b/ and
when shown b she responds /d/. After some instruction,
let’s say she reaches 90% or better accuracy in lettersounds, correctly identifying the phoneme for 90% or
more of the graphemes. (Research has shown that one
of the most effective ways of getting a student to this
stage is modeling.6 For example, using the “I do; we
do; you do” approach, a teacher models a performance,
then asks students to repeat it, and finally lets students
perform the skill on their own.)
According to the Instructional Hierarchy, having
achieved accuracy in letter-sound correspondences,
a student can move on to building automaticity —
through the key technique of practice. For instance,
the teacher might ask students to quickly produce the
sounds for the letters they know — perhaps by using
a stack of flash cards, or a game where students race
to the board to touch the correct letter, or a computer-
based practice system. Some good research supports
these techniques,7 but other research8 shows that practice alone can lead to poor generalization: For example,
the student who excels at identifying letters on index
cards or on a white board may struggle to identify
the same letters presented as part of a word. So, in
Burst:Reading, we recommend practicing the skill
in its natural context — identifying letters in printed
words and short phrases.
Once a student has reached a certain level of proficiency
in a skill — meaning accuracy, fluency, and some level
of generalization and adaptation — we move on to
the next skill: in this case, sounding out and blending
regular words. Exactly what level of proficiency is
optimal is an open research question and, most likely,
varies from skill to skill and from student to student.
For weaker students, a stronger foundation in the basic
skills is probably helpful before moving on.
But notice something interesting here: we said the
next skill is sounding out and blending. As usual, we
start by building accuracy. Again, the teacher might
use modeling and “I do; we do; you do,” showing the
student simple, regular words and having him or her
sound out each letter and then blend to form the word.
User Guide: Why
7
Clearly, this lesson in sounding out and blending
would also increase a student’s fluency in letter-sound
correspondences. In other words, teaching soundingout accuracy — a later skill — has the side effect of
improving fluency and generalization in letter-sounds
— an earlier skill. We can do both at once!
What this reinforcement loop means is that we can
move more rapidly through the component skills. We
don’t have to wait for a student to fully master lettersounds before moving on to sounding out, since
sounding out itself provides excellent, in-context
practice for letter-sounds. And that’s exactly what
Burst:Reading does: it uses subsequent lessons to
continue to move students up the Instructional Hierarchy for skills taught in earlier lessons. Thanks to this
reinforcement loop, moving through each step of the
ih for each skill can in practice be quite rapid.
The Structure of Burst Activities
Every Burst activity has the same structure: Prepare,
Model, Practice and, if needed, Adjust.
Prepare: How to get ready to teach the activity.
Model: How to model a skill for the group.
Practice: How to provide students with chances to perform the skill — with you, as a group, or indi-
vidually.
Adjust: How to make the activity easier or harder depending on student proficiency, using the support
and challenge sections.
As you can see, this structure follows the “I do; we do;
you do” approach supported by the research. Every
Burst activity has these same parts every day so that you,
and the students, can get into a fast-paced rhythm.
Now that you are familiar with the structure of Burst instruction, the rest of this guide provides a plainEnglish introduction to each major area in the Burst Skill Model.
8
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
MODEL
PREPARE
EASIER
HARDER
ADJUST
PRACTICE
User Guide: Why
9
Reading Comprehension: The Big Picture
Everyone knows that reading comprehension is
important. But how does it relate to all the other
skills of reading?
Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of
all reading skills. When all skills are working well,
reading comprehension will generally be high.
When some skills aren’t working well, reading
comprehension will generally be lower.
CS
Phonological
Awareness
Alphabetic
Principle
PA
RW
LC
B
LS
IW
AP
Voc
Flu
Comp
This graphic shows the breakdown of reading
comprehension into two main groups of skills.
The Decoding group is on the top, and the
Language Comprehension group is on the bottom.
Together these two groups enable readers to make
sense of what they read.
OK. But what does making sense really mean?
What do readers who make sense of a text
actually do, think, and feel?
Great question! A second grader once asked this of
Ellin Oliver Keene (co-author of Mosaic of Thought)9,
and she recently spent six years working out a
response. Here are some of the key answers she
10
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
highlights in her new (2008) book, To Understand:
New Horizons in Reading Comprehension:10
You remember what you read.
Sometimes you think about it for a long time.
Sometimes you work hard to understand an idea.
Sometimes you talk to other people, read more, and
re-read.
Sometimes you ask people questions.
Sometimes you change your mind and your first
thoughts.
You see how things fit together.
You see patterns and can predict things based on
the patterns.
You get the same emotions in your heart that the
characters feel.
How exactly does poor fluency lower reading
comprehension?
Imagine that the amount of mental energy a child
has for reading a text is like the amount of juice in a
battery. When children have poor fluency, they need
a lot of mental energy to decode a written text. If they
use all or most of their juice for decoding, they won’t
have enough left for the language comprehension part
before the battery dies.
I thought reading was a great way for children
with poor vocabulary to improve their vocabulary.
How exactly does poor vocabulary lower reading
comprehension?
Children can learn new vocabulary from reading, but
if there are too many unknown words in a text, they
won’t be able to make sense of it, whether the text is
written or spoken. Their comprehension will suffer.
You know enough about the characters’ problems to
think of your own ways to solve them.
What’s the special role of comprehension
You decide which ideas matter most and add them
to what you already know.
Children need comprehension strategies for times
when they can’t make sense of what they decode just
by using the oral language skills they’ve developed
for understanding everyday speech. By learning
comprehension strategies and their uses, children
strategies?
User Guide: Why
11
can bolster the language comprehension part of the
equation when ordinary oral language skills aren’t
enough. This allows them to make sense of a wider
range of texts.
How does motivation fit in?
Researchers have described children who have good
decoding and language comprehension skills but fail to
comprehend a text at their level. How does this happen?
The culprit could be poor motivation. If children are
bored with a text and let their mind wander, they can
decode all the words but essentially decide not to send
any energy to their language comprehension skills. To
them, that energy is not worth using, because they
don’t care what the text says. As a result, their reading
comprehension for that piece of text will be low.11
Similarly, researchers have described children who
have difficulty with the fluent decoding of a text but
are passionately interested in what the text says. These
readers can pour extra mental energy into the language
comprehension portion of the equation, and if they know
how to use comprehension strategies, such as re-reading
and clarifying, they can compensate for their low fluency.
They can end up with relatively high comprehension
for a piece of text that is relatively difficult for them to
fluently decode … if they are motivated enough.12
12
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
Could there be other culprits at work if a child
has good decoding and language comprehension
skills but fails to understand a particular text?
Yes – another culprit could be background knowledge.
All texts require readers to make inferences based on
their knowledge about the situation being described.
If children are reading a text about a situation they
are completely unfamiliar with, they may fail to
understand it.
OK, this all sounds pretty simple: Good decoding
skills plus good language comprehension skills plus
good motivation plus good background knowledge are
all necessary for good comprehension. But if it’s really
that simple, then why is it so darn hard to help some
children become good at it?
Don’t confuse Simple with Easy.
Instead, think of Simple as Clear. The way to reading
comprehension is clear. But it’s not easy for any teacher
to help all children get there. Two things make it
especially hard:
Time issues
Differences across students
Here’s what we know from research. Becoming good at
decoding and language comprehension takes enormous
amounts of time. And different kids need to spend time
on different things. Research clearly shows that even
in late elementary school, some children need more
time working on decoding parts of the equation. Others
need more time working on language comprehension
parts. The lowest skilled students often need both.13
Unfortunately, time in school is limited. And children
don’t come to school with labels that identify the
way they need to spend their reading time. Matching
children to the right activities, and giving children
enough time on the right activities, is not a snap.
OK, but teachers already have lots of assessments
that identify skill needs, and there are tons of
curriculum activities. We all know that the federal
government has spent millions of dollars on
programs that are supposed to help teachers
match skills to activities. Yet too many students still
fail to show good reading comprehension at the
The reading comprehension needs of our lowestskilled students are so large, that gaps in reading
comprehension cannot be closed unless we make the
most efficient use of instructional time possible.14
To achieve this goal, we need two main things that
historically have been hard to get:
1. Instructionally intensive activities that give us
maximum effectiveness for the limited
instructional time we have. We need these
activities for all the components of reading
comprehension (in both the decoding and
language comprehension parts of the equation).
2. E
xtremely accurate ways for matching the needs of
different students to the instructional activities that
target those needs.
The effectiveness of reading comprehension instruction
will be determined by how well these two components
are achieved. We can even state this in an equation:
end of third grade. Why is it still so hard to help
Effectiveness = Intensity x Fit.
our lowest-skilled students? What’s still missing?
The effectiveness of reading comprehension instruction
Typical curriculum and assessment packages simply
don’t yet achieve enough learning for the lowestskilled students in the limited time of the school day.
is the product of Intensity-of-Instruction and the
Matching-Fit Between Instruction and Student Need.
User Guide: Why
13
If either of the components on the right side of the
equation is low – for any reason – the effectiveness of
reading comprehension instruction will be low, and
the ultimate reading achievement of our lowest-skilled
students will remain low. For example:
If a program’s individual lessons are effective, but
they require more instructional time than is
possible to bring our lowest-skilled students up to
grade level, then they will lack sufficient intensity,
reduce the total effectiveness of instruction, and fail
some students.
If a program’s activities are not motivating enough
for our lowest-skilled students, then they will lack
sufficient instructional intensity, reduce the total
effectiveness of instruction, and fail some students.
If the matching fit between what students need
and their activities isn’t accurate enough, then
this will reduce the effectiveness of instruction and
fail some students. Students would sometimes be
spending instructional time on what they need and
other times they wouldn’t – and there simply is not
enough time for that to happen and for our lowest
skilled students to still get enough instructional
time on the skills they need.
14
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
However, if both components are high, the
effectiveness of instruction will be high. And our
lowest-skilled students will finally succeed at reading
comprehension throughout their educational careers.
Clearly Simple? Yes.
Easy? No.
Easier with Burst?
Yes.
Phonological Awareness Instruction
What’s the first thing I should know about
phonemic awareness?
The first thing to know is that phonemic awareness refers
to skills with spoken language, not printed language.
Okay. What can children with phonemic
awareness skills do?
CS
Children with phonemic awareness can identify
and manipulate phonemes in spoken language.
Phonological
Awareness
Alphabetic
Principle
PA
RW
LC
B
LS
IW
AP
Voc
Flu
Comp
Hold on: What’s a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest sound in a word that
can affect the word’s meaning. In the word bat,
there are three phonemes: /b/ /a/ /t/. If I change
the first phoneme to /m/, I’ve changed the word’s
meaning: Now it’s mat, not bat.
So do words always have the same number of
phonemes as they do letters?
No. For example, deep has four letters but three
phonemes: /d/ /ē/ /p/.
User Guide: Why
15
Can you give me some examples of what it
What are some examples of phonological aware-
means to identify and manipulate phonemes?
ness skills with sounds larger than phonemes?
Sure. Here are several specific phonemic awareness
(pa) skills:
Take rhyming and syllable skills, for example. When
children can tell you that cat and bat rhyme, they only
have to focus on the -at chunk of the word, a chunk that
is larger than a single phoneme. And when children can
tell you that Pete has one syllable, but people has two,
they’re also focusing on larger units than phonemes.
Recognizing individual sounds in words.
“Tell me the first sound in paste.”
“/p/”
Blending: listening to a sequence of separate sounds and combining them into a word.
“What word is /k/ /l/ /a/ /p/?”
“clap”
Segmenting: breaking a word into its sounds.
“How many sounds are in the word ship?”
“Three: /sh/ /i/ /p/”
What’s the difference between phonemic aware-
I’ve also heard the term phonological awareness.
what’s the link between them?
How is phonological awareness different from
A key difference is that phonemic awareness instruction
targets students’ skills with spoken words, and phonics
instruction targets skills with printed words. But in
both, phonemes play a key role. For example, in a
phonemic awareness lesson, a teacher may say a set of
separate phonemes (for instance, /p/ /a/ /t/) and then
ask students to blend those phonemes into a spoken
word. In a phonics lesson, a teacher may show students
phonemic awareness?
Phonological awareness is a broader term; in other
words, phonemic awareness is just part of phonological awareness. When researchers talk about phonological awareness, they’re talking about phonemic
awareness skills plus skills with sounds that are larger
than phonemes.
16
As children develop phonological awareness, they
generally develop skills with larger units of sound
first. So children usually learn to identify rhymes and
syllables before they can identify phonemes.
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
ness instruction and phonics instruction? And
how to match single letters to phonemes — for example,
asking them to matching the letter p to the sound /p/.
In later phonics lessons, teachers may show students
how to match multi-letter patterns to phonemes — for
example, matching sh to /sh/ and matching igh to /ī/.
Phonemic awareness programs and phonics programs
also share a focus on blending and segmenting: Most
phonics programs explicitly teach students to blend
sounds from printed letters into words while learning
to read, and to segment spoken words while learning to
write them down.
So it stands to reason that if students have trouble
with phonemes, blending or segmenting, they’ll have
trouble in both phonemic awareness lessons and
phonics lessons. When researchers began to realize
that many children had no phonemic awareness skills
upon entering school, they investigated the value of
phonemic awareness instruction as a way to support
children’s success in phonics instruction and in their
overall literacy development.
Research on Phonemic Awareness
How much do researchers really understand
about phonemic awareness?
A lot. Studies on phonemic awareness received major
funding in the ‘80s and ‘90s. When the National
Reading Panel conducted its 2000 analysis of the work
in this area, it looked for studies that used designs
with experimental and control groups. (Studies
employing control groups give educational researchers
the highest confidence that what they are testing is
actually causing learning growth.) Such studies are
often the most expensive and difficult to run. But in
the case of phonemic awareness, the Panel found 52
such studies from 1976 through 1999 — the most for
any area of reading development.
The combined evidence from these studies clearly
established that instruction in phonemic awareness
(pa) can have significant, positive effects on children’s
reading and spelling. The evidence also helped clarify
some of the specific features of effective pa programs
that offer the most benefits for reading growth.
User Guide: Why
17
What were some of the findings that convinced
the National Reading Panel to recommend
phonemic awareness instruction as a key element
in every early reading program?
Here are some of the big ones:
The beneficial effects of pa training on reading
lasted well beyond the end of training.
pa instruction produced positive effects on both
word reading and pseudoword reading, indicating
that it helps children remember both how to read
familiar words and decode words they’ve never
seen before.
pa instruction helped all types of children improve
their reading, including normally developing
readers, children at risk for future reading problems,
disabled readers, preschoolers, kindergartners, first
graders, children in second through sixth grades
(most of whom were disabled readers), children
across various ses levels, and children learning to
read in English as well as in other languages.
18
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
Teaching Phonemic Awareness
What advice do researchers have for teachers?
Here are the key nuggets of advice, based on research
about what makes pa instruction most effective:
F
ocus on one or two pa skills, rather than trying
to explicitly teach all of them. Blending and
segmenting, for example, are good choices.
D
on’t wait until after pa instruction to teach
letters. As you teach students the names, shapes,
and sounds of letters, use visual letters to help
students picture the sounds. Let students use
manipulatives like letter cards or magnet letters as
you teach them to manipulate sounds.
S
how students how to apply pa skills in reading
and writing. Show them how blending helps them
decode, and how segmenting helps them spell. If
students see and hear a new word they haven’t read
before, show them how to segment the spoken
word and look at the letters in the printed one, so
they can figure out how the letters and sounds go
together. This can make it easier for them to read
the word the next time they see it.
Children vary in how much pa instruction they
need. In the beginning of kindergarten, when
most children are nonreaders, pa instruction will
usually benefit everyone. Later, it’s important to use
assessments to figure out which students need more
instruction. Teach pa to these students in small groups.
O
verall, plan to spend no more than 20 hours of
your instructional time with any student teaching
phonemic awareness.
Assessing Phonemic Awareness
You can informally check for students’ development
of phonemic awareness by asking them questions
like the ones in the beginning of this article, in the
list of examples for different types of pa skills. Formal
assessments such as dibels Phoneme Segmentation
Fluency can tell you which students need additional,
small-group pa instruction.
sedl, a private, non-profit education corporation has
an unbiased database of reading assessment tools for
students in grades K-2. You can search the database
at www.sedl.org/reading/rad/ for tools that assess
phonemic awareness, and you’ll find at your fingertips
information about each tool’s cost, administration
procedures, and other important features.
User Guide: Why
19
Letter-Sound Instruction
What’s the difference between letter-sound
instruction and phonics instruction?
Letter-sound instruction is part of phonics
instruction, in which students learn how to
match a single letter (like m) to a sound (like
/mmm/).
CS
Phonological
Awareness
Alphabetic
Principle
PA
RW
LC
B
LS
IW
AP
Voc
Flu
Comp
Phonics instruction is broader, including
lessons involving single letters, letter
combinations (like ea and sh), sounding out,
and segmenting spoken words into sounds
in order to write them down.
I’ve also heard researchers talk about the
alphabetic principle. Is that the same thing as
letter-sound instruction?
The alphabetic principle is the idea that letters in
printed words stand for individual sounds (known
as phonemes) in spoken words. Children who
understand the alphabetic principle know the general
operating instructions for written English:
20
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
To write a word, you assign a letter or group of
letters to each of its individual sounds.
To read a word, you assign sounds to each letter or
group of letters in the word and blend those sounds
together.
Letter-sound instruction teaches students both the
alphabetic principle, and letter-sound knowledge. We
use the phrase letter-sound knowledge to refer to
students’ knowledge of which specific sound usually
goes with each letter of the alphabet.
(And we use the term letter combination knowledge
to refer to the more skilled level of knowing how to
decode multiple-letter patterns, like ph and er.)
Basal programs, in contrast, may have a scope and
sequence for teaching some letters and sounds, but
they are less likely to strictly focus the teaching of
a letter to one specific sound. For example, a basal
program may use all of these words to teach the letter
o: orange, of, on, once, open, off, and out.
Whole-language instruction, on the other hand, does
not use a predetermined sequence. Teachers teach a
particular letter-sound combination when it’s needed for
words or sentences that students want to read or write.
What about differences in how students practice
their letter-sound knowledge while reading?
For example, I know teachers who don’t love
decodable books and those who do.
How do phonics programs, basal programs, and
whole-language programs differ in how they
cover letter-sound instruction?
One major difference is that most phonics programs
tend to teach letter-sound knowledge explicitly and
systematically. There’s a specific sequence in the
program for teaching the letters and sounds, and
the lessons are structured to ensure lots of practice
with every letter and its sound. Systematic phonics
programs also typically teach just one sound for each
letter early on.
Students in literature-based basal programs typically
practice reading selections from trade books. These
selections often have many low-frequency words
with complex letter patterns.15 As a result, beginning
readers in such programs encounter many words that
are hard for them to read.
Similarly, students in whole-language classrooms
typically practice their letter-sound knowledge as
they write stories or read material from sources
they will encounter in the “real” world (for example,
User Guide: Why
21
signs, grocery lists, poems, or trade books). As with
literature-based basals, students often practice reading
words for which they have not yet learned all the
English letter-sound correspondences.
Some researchers believe that children can develop
poor reading habits — educational psychologist Kerry
Hempenstall calls them catastrophic strategies16 —
when the material they read is only loosely connected
to their letter-sound lessons. These habits include
ignoring the interior spelling of unfamiliar words, and
over-using guessing strategies; they are linked to the
habits of poor readers in older grades.17
Systematic phonics programs typically avoid these
problems by giving students decodable text that
primarily contains words with the letter-sound
correspondences students have already learned.
The problem with decodable texts, though, is that too
often, the writers fail to make them authentic and
interesting. This raises the serious concern that some
students could develop poor — even catastrophic
— habits of ignoring the meaning of what they read,
becoming word callers.
To avoid this second problem, some phonics programs
have tried to make these texts sound more natural
22
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and use more interesting content. Another option
for phonics programs is to use a co-reading model in
the early stages of instruction. In a co-reading model,
teachers and students read sentences together: The
students read familiar words and new words with
familiar letter-sound patterns, and teachers supply the
rest of the words. In this way, even beginning readers
can practice reading natural sentences in the course
of activities where the primary purpose of reading is
comprehension.
Research on Letter-Sound Instruction
How much do researchers really understand
about letter-sound learning?
A great deal. For instance, for its 2000 report, the National
Reading Panel studied questions including these:
Does systematic phonics instruction help children
learn to read more effectively than other types of
instruction (such as basal, whole-language, and
whole-word instruction)?
Is this instruction beneficial for a wide range of
children, including children who are having difficulty
learning to read, and children who are at-risk for
developing reading problems in the future?
To answer these questions, the National Reading
Panel looked for studies employing experimental and
control groups, because such studies give educational
researchers the highest confidence that what they
are testing is actually causing learning growth. The
combined evidence from 38 such studies clearly
showed that systematic phonics programs were more
effective than other programs in helping children
learn to read. The panel concluded that when children
learn letter-sound correspondences systematically,
their reading growth is greater than in programs that
don’t use systematic phonics lessons.
(You may also want to check out the box on Page 32
in the Letter Combinations article with a description
of the data from cognitive science and neuroscience
about why systematic phonics programs help children
learn to read better than other programs.)
Teaching Letter-Sound Knowledge
What advice do researchers have for teachers?
Here are researchers’ key points:
H
elp students apply their letter-sound knowledge
in daily reading and writing activities.
B
e sure to supplement the phonics portion of your
reading program with other important elements. Be
sure, for example, to spend time reading quality
literature to students to build a sense of story
and to develop vocabulary and comprehension.
Whenever possible, integrate portions of your
phonics lessons into these activities.
I f kindergartners have trouble with letter-sounds,
help them create a mnemonic (memory aid) that
links the letter’s shape to its sound. For example,
draw s as a snake, or h as a house with a chimney.
Students will vary in the amount of letter-sound
knowledge they acquire outside of school. It’s
preferable to assess your students’ needs to select
the suitable amount and type of phonics lessons.
Evaluate your students’ reading competence in
many ways, not only by their phonics skills but
also by their interest in books and their ability to
understand information that is read to them.
User Guide: Why
23
What were some of the specific findings that convinced the National
Reading Panel to recommend phonics instruction (including systematic
letter-sound learning) as a key element in every early reading program?
Phonics instruction helped children at all ses (Socio-Economic Status) levels make
significantly greater gains in reading than did non-phonics instruction.
Phonics instruction improved the reading performance of disabled readers (that is,
children with average IQ but poor reading abilities).
Phonics instruction taught early on in a student’s education proved much more effective
than phonics instruction introduced after first grade. It produced the biggest impact on
growth in reading when it began in kindergarten or first grade, before children had
learned to read independently.
Phonics instruction improved children’s ability to decode regularly-spelled words and
pseudowords. It also produced growth in the ability to read irregularly-spelled words.
Phonics instruction also boosted growth in reading comprehension for younger
students and reading-disabled students. (Whether phonics instruction produces growth
in reading comprehension for students above first grade was less clear.)
24
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
Assessing Letter-Sound Knowledge
You can informally check for students’ development
of letter-sound knowledge by asking them to say the
sounds for each of a series of letters. Many students find
the vowels and the letters b and d especially difficult so
those are good letters to assess.
Formal assessments can tell you which students need
additional, small-group letter-sound instruction. These
assessments often test letter-sound knowledge by asking
students to read short nonsense words, such as wub.
sedl, a private, non-profit education corporation, has
an unbiased database of reading assessment tools for
students in grades K-2. You can search the database at
www.sedl.org/reading/rad for tools that assess lettersound knowledge (listed under what sedl calls cipher
knowledge), and you’ll find at your fingertips information about each tool’s cost, administration procedures,
and other important features.
User Guide: Why
25
Sounding-Out Instruction
What’s the difference between sounding out and
phonics?
Sounding out is part of phonics instruction,
in which students learn how to see a printed
word, say the sounds associated with the
letters, and blend the sounds together to say
the word aloud.
CS
Phonological
Awareness
Alphabetic
Principle
PA
RW
LC
B
LS
IW
AP
Voc
Flu
Comp
Phonics instruction is broader; it includes
lessons involving single letters, letter combinations (like ea and sh), sounding out, and
segmenting spoken words into sounds in
order to write them down.
What’s the difference between blending in
phonemic awareness tasks and sounding out?
Sounding out combines the spoken-word blending
skill that students learn in phonemic awareness tasks,
with the skill of translating the printed letters of a
word into sounds, in order to blend them together.
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Does sounding out have to always be sound-bysound, letter-by-letter?
No, some phonics programs teach students to sound
out using larger chunks. For example, students may
sound out the word cat using the first letter (or onset)
and the rest of the word (or rime), like this: /c/ /at/.
Recently, though, several researchers have concluded
that children’s ability to sound out words with rimes
typically develops after children have learned how to
sound out individual letters and sounds.18
Does sounding out only refer to when students
do so out loud?
No. You can teach students to sound out aloud at
first, and then later encourage them to sound out new
words silently, “in the head.”
However, when the brain automatically recognizes the
word, the process is unconscious and instant, and even
involuntary; we can’t choose not to recognize a word.
But I thought that as children developed, they
shifted from a stage of sounding out to a stage
of automatic word recognition. Are you saying
they will always need to sound out new words?
The shift from sounding out to automatic recognition
happens for every word the child reads, throughout
life. As children develop, they shift from being unable
to recognize any words, to being able to recognize a
small number, and so on. Part of a child’s growth as a
reader lies in building an ever-larger mental dictionary
of words he or she can automatically recognize.
One researcher recently put the point this way:
What’s the difference between what happens in
The question becomes ‘On what words is this child
the brain when students sound out a word, and
fluent?’ rather than ‘Is this child a fluent reader?’19
when they recognize the word?
When students sound out a word, they use a conscious
strategy to figure out what the word is. When they
become skilled at this, they may be able to do it fairly
quickly, but not instantly.
So even fluent readers still sound out new words?
Yes. Just see for yourself what happens when you try to
read an unfamiliar word like:
bathysiderodromophobia (fear of subways).
User Guide: Why
27
Of course, skilled readers are more likely to use larger
units of letters (and sounds) to sound out an unfamiliar word, instead of going letter by letter, sound by
sound, as beginning readers do.
Right?
Right!
unfamiliar word before the brain will automati-
Research on Sounding-Out
Instruction
cally recognize it?
How much do researchers really understand
There isn’t yet a clear answer, but it seems likely that
it takes more times for this to happen for a beginning reader and fewer for a skilled reader. However,
one experiment with Dutch children who had been
through a half-year of first-grade reading instruction showed that it may happen fairly quickly. Even
after only reading a word a few times in a meaningful
sentence, three days later the children could read that
word significantly faster than a misspelled form of it —
a form that would still be pronounced the same. This
happened when children practiced reading a word
four or six times, but not when they only practiced
reading it two times.20
about the effectiveness of sounding-out
How many times do people need to sound out an
All this makes it sound like it’s really important
for children to read a lot, because — for one
thing — doing so should increase the number of
words they can automatically recognize, versus
28
the number of words they have to sound out.
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
instruction?
Enough to recommend that it be part of early reading
instruction. The National Reading Panel concluded
in its report (published in 2000) that when children
learn to sound out new words, their reading growth
is greater than in programs that don’t use systematic
phonics lessons.
(See the box on Page 19 in the Letter-Sounds article
for a description of the National Reading Panel’s findings on the advantages of explicit, systematic phonics
instruction.)
Teaching Sounding-Out Skill
Assessing Sounding-Out Skill
What advice do researchers have for teachers on
You can informally check for students’ development
of sounding-out skill by asking them to read short,
regular words, especially words they have not yet
seen in lessons. What’s more, formal assessments can
tell you which students need additional, small-group
sounding-out instruction. These assessments often test
sounding-out knowledge by asking students to read
short nonsense words, such as wub.
sounding-out instruction?
Here are researchers’ key points:
H
elp students understand the purpose of
sounding out and help them apply their soundingout skill in daily reading and writing activities.
S tudents will vary in the amount of sounding-out
skill they acquire through reading outside of school.
It’s preferable to assess your students’ needs and
select the amount and type of phonics lessons suited
to those needs.
(To find out more about current research on sounding
out, go to www.burstbase.net. You can also help future
research efforts by contributing your own insights
there — we’ll show you how.)
Nonsense words have become undeservedly
controversial in some classrooms. If you are wary of
them, the following points may help: First, nonsense
words are useful only as a testing device for decoding
skill; they shouldn’t necessarily be incorporated into
your instructional program. Second, some teachers
have expressed concern that testing students on
nonsense words isn’t an authentic task; students will
never have to do so outside the class room. That’s true,
but the purpose of the test is to check for students’
ability to decode a totally unfamiliar real word, when
there is no help from an adult, a picture, or a sentence.
(Unfortunately, it’s impossible for test developers to be
absolutely certain, for any real word, that the word is
totally unfamiliar to every child. So, their only choice
is to use nonsense words.)
User Guide: Why
29
High-Frequency Irregular Word Instruction
What are high-frequency irregular (hfi) words?
hfi words have the following features:
They are words that English speakers and writers use frequently. Young readers are highly
likely to encounter these words as they read
beginning-level sentences and texts.
CS
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They are difficult words for beginning readers,
because they do not use simple one-letter/onesound spelling patterns, or they use patterns
where the letter-sound relationship is unusual.
So young readers are likely to have trouble
figuring these words out independently, using
their sounding-out skills alone.
Examples of these words include: the, was, her, is, and they.
Tell me more about how you define difficult.
We start by taking the point of view of young readers
who have learned basic blending and letter-sound skills.
These readers know the most common sounds for each
letter of the alphabet, but haven’t yet learned more
complex patterns, such as letter combinations (like th
30
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
and er). We think of these students as first-threshold
readers, because they’ve reached the first threshold of
knowledge they need for independent reading.
help from the letter-sound connections. Fortunately,
there are very few of these words. Examples include:
eye, one, once, and hour.)
When these readers see a normal English sentence,
they’ll likely encounter several types of difficult words.
One type will be words that use letter combinations,
such as the word her. This word wouldn’t be difficult for
more advanced readers who have learned the er pattern,
but our first-threshold readers could be stumped.
Okay. How exactly do you define “frequent”?
A second type of difficult word is one that uses an
unusual letter-sound correspondence, and one that our
first-threshold readers may have never seen before. An
example is the word is. First-threshold readers may
not know that we sometimes say the sound /z/ for the
letter s, so they could again be stumped. When it comes
to vowel letters, we assume that our first-threshold
readers have only learned the short vowel sounds. So a
word like he could also stump a first-threshold reader.
A third type of difficult word is one that’s difficult
for both of the above reasons. The classic example is
the, which uses both a letter combination (th) and an
unusual sound for the letter e.
(There’s a fourth type of difficult world, too: a word that
is so irregular that students just have to learn it without
We use lists that researchers have compiled based on
analyses of written material in English.21 These lists
order words according to how frequently they appeared
in the samples of text that the researchers analyzed.
(The number-one word, by the way, is the.)
These analyses of highly frequent words map pretty
well onto other common lists of high-frequency words
you may have seen in textbooks, including the Dolch
and Fry lists.22
The diagram below gives examples of words that are
difficult (irregular), frequent, both, and neither.
Irregular
piece
rind
the
was
Regular
cast
tam
and
it
Infrequent
Frequent
User Guide: Why
31
What’s the difference between hfi words and
hfi word is a sight word for that child.
sight words?
It depends what you mean by sight words — different
people use the phrase differently. We use it to
mean any word that students have learned to read
automatically, instead of needing to sound it out. This
could include any of the words in the above diagram.
We take the view — supported by research23 — that
every word a student learns goes through a shift from
being a word the student can’t instantly recognize,
to being one the student does recognize, by sight.
The shift happens when that particular word has
been practiced enough that the brain automatically
recognizes it. In our view, a key part of a child’s growth
as a reader consists of building an ever-larger mental
dictionary of sight words: words that he or she can
automatically recognize.
The difference between the terms hfi words and sight
words is that hfi words are those that first-threshold
readers are likely to be stumped on the first time they
see them. In order for the child to practice an hfi word
enough for it to become a sight word, the child is likely
going to need some help from another reader who can
help him identify and learn the word. Once the child
learns the word and can recognize it automatically, the
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How do you recommend teaching hfi words?
We recommend that you teach hfi words by explicitly
drawing children’s attention to how the letters in the
word relate to the word’s sounds. Here’s an example for
the printed word the:
For this word (the) we say [th] for these
letters (write out th). And we say /uh/ for
this letter (write out e a little apart from
the th). We blend it together and say the
(point to whole word). Wow, that’s a word
we use all the time! For instance, I might
say, “The thing I like best about Joey is his
smile!” or “The picture that Jenny drew is
wonderful!” What a cool word!
Won’t children object if they’ve learned to say /e/
for the letter e, and now in the word the they say
/uh/ for the letter e?
If they do object, you should simply respond that we
usually say /e/ for the letter e, but in this word we say
/uh/. It’s fine to reassure students that /e/ is still a great
sound to try when they see the letter e in a new word.
Here are some key features of the English language
that first-threshold readers need to learn:
S
ome letters are associated with more than one
sound. For example, although we usually say
/e/ when we see the letter e, sometimes we say a
different sound (like /uh/ in the).
S
ome sounds are associated with more than one
letter. For example, although we often use the letter u
to write the /uh/ sound, sometimes we use a different
letter (like the e in the word the.)
Why not just teach students to memorize hfi
they miss an opportunity to focus attention on the
word in the way that helps the brain best remember
it. This belief is supported by evidence from cognitive
science and neuroscience about how the brain learns
to recognize printed words: When good readers see
a new word, they pay close attention to all the letters
in it, and think about how the letters match up to the
sounds. The brain stores this information and makes
connections between information about the word’s
letters (sometimes called the word’s orthography) and
information about the word’s sound and meaning.
We recommend that you not teach hfi words by sight,
because there isn’t any evidence that our brains need
to learn these words differently from other words. In
fact, scientists have been able to use computer models
to simulate children’s word learning — including the
difficulties children face — using models where all
words are learned in a similar way: through thinking
about how the sounds map onto the word’s letters.24
Each time a reader sees and decodes a particular
word, paying close attention to the letters, the neural
connections for that word get strengthened. When
the connections are strong enough, the brain can
automatically recognize the word, and the reader no
longer has to decode it. Research also suggests that
poor readers tend to skip over letters, particularly
those in the middle of words, and this makes it hard
for them to develop the neural connections necessary
for automatically recognizing words.
Further, many researchers strongly believe that when
children ignore the way that letters match to sounds,
(For a description of the research behind this view, see the
box on Page 32 in the section on Letter Combinations.)
words by sight?
User Guide: Why
33
Research on HFI Instruction
Teaching HFI Words
How much do researchers really understand
What advice do researchers have for teachers?
about the effectiveness of hfi instruction?
As described above, researchers suggest that you help
students focus attention on the relationship between
the letters and sounds in hfi words.
When the National Reading Panel analyzed the evidence
on effective reading instruction for its report (published
in 2000), the panel did not specifically look at how
different synthetic phonics programs (that is, those that
teach sound-by-sound decoding) dealt with teaching
irregular words. So it’s probably fair to say that the field’s
understanding of hfi instruction is less well-developed
than its understanding of other aspects of phonics
instruction (including phonemic awareness, letter-sound
learning, and letter combination instruction).
However, the panel’s review of basic research on word
learning did lead it to the following conclusions:
P
rocessing letter-sound relations in words through
decoding or analogizing creates alphabetic
connections that establish the words in memory as
sight words.
A
lthough alphabetic knowledge is not in itself
sufficient for decoding irregularly spelled words, it
does help children remember how to read these words.
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Researchers also suggest that you follow the general
advice from the National Reading Panel report about
what makes phonics instruction most effective —
described on Page 19.
Assessing High-Frequency Irregular
Word Skill
You can informally check for students’ development
of hfi word skills by looking for patterns of errors in
hfi words as students read text aloud. You can also ask
students to read the set of irregular words taught in
Burst:Reading (which is listed at www.burstbase.net).
Formal assessments can also help you determine which
students need additional, small-group hfi instruction.
For example, Wireless Generation’s mCLASS®:DIBELS®
Now What?® Tools can identify for you how well
students read irregular words in text passages.
Letter Combination Instruction
What’s the difference between letter
combination instruction and phonics instruction?
CS
Phonological
Awareness
Alphabetic
Principle
PA
RW
LC
B
LS
IW
AP
Voc
Flu
Comp
Letter combination instruction is part
of phonics instruction. Usually, letter
combination instruction refers to lessons
where students learn how to match multiletter patterns to a sound (like matching ph
to /f/ and ai to /ā/).
Phonics instruction is a broader term,
including lessons with single letters, letter
combinations, blending sounds, and lessons
on segmenting spoken words into sounds in
order to write them down.
Sometimes I hear researchers use the term
grapheme-phoneme knowledge. I know that
phonemes are individual sounds in words, but
what is a grapheme?
Grapheme refers to a particular letter or group of letters
used to represent a particular phoneme. So when
researchers talk about children’s knowledge of how both
single letters and multiple letters match up to phonemes,
they use the term grapheme-phoneme knowledge.
User Guide: Why
35
What’s the difference between a letter
Is there any research that can help me decide
combination and a blend?
whether to teach phonics rules for letter
In general, letter combinations are two or more letters
representing a single sound (also known as digraphs
and trigraphs) such as sh, ea, oa, ph, or igh. Blends,
in contrast, are multiple consonants representing
multiple sounds blended together, such as tr, bl, or scr.
combinations, like When two vowels go walking,
Letter combination instruction can also include the
l-controlled vowel patterns, such as ol (as in cold). In
this case, the pattern is a multi-sound one that often
confuses young readers, so it’s worth teaching explicitly.
Research on Letter Combination
Instruction
How much do researchers really understand
the first one does the talking?
Researcher Theodore Clymer published a classic study
on phonics rules back in 1966 (The Reading Teacher
reprinted the article in 1996). He showed that most
rules don’t actually work most of the time. The two
vowels walking rule, for example, only works about 45%
of the time. (It does work better for some vowel pairs.
For example, it works 95% of the time for the
oa pair; but it doesn’t work well for oi or au — think
of soil and haul.) Even the silent-e rule only works
about 63% of the time. (Again, it works better for some
patterns: about 77% of the time in a words like cake,
but only about 58% of the time in o words like stove.)25
about letter combination learning?
A lot. The National Reading Panel concluded (for its
2000 report) that when children learn graphemephoneme correspondences systematically and
explicitly, their reading growth is greater.
(See the box on Page 19 in the Letter-Sounds section
for a description of the National Reading Panel’s
findings on the advantages of explicit, systematic
phonics instruction.)
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Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
Teaching Letter Combination
Knowledge
What other advice do researchers have for teachers?
The Letter-Sounds article lists key advice from the
National Reading Panel’s report about what makes
phonics instruction in general most effective. This
important advice also applies to letter combination
instruction.
Do research scientists know why systematic phonics programs help children learn to read better
than other programs?
Many scientists believe that this question can be
This view suggests that of two possible approaches, one
answered by looking at evidence from cognitive
is decidedly better. We might encourage students to
science and neuroscience about how the brain learns to
look only at a few letters in a word and then guess its
recognize printed words.
identification from pictures or context. But students will
Research evidence suggests that when good readers
see a new word, they pay close attention to all its
letters and think about how the letters match up to the
sounds. The brain stores this information and makes
learn to recognize words more easily if we instead focus
their attention on all the letters in a new word, as well
as the match between the letters and the sounds. One
group of researchers recently explained why:
connections between information about the word’s
Phonics instruction may simply point children in
letters (sometimes called the word’s orthography) and
the direction of looking deeply into the printed
information about its sound and meaning.
form of the word as they attach sound to it, rather
Each time a reader sees and decodes a particular
word, paying close attention to the letters, the neural
connections for that word get strengthened. When
the connections are strong enough, the brain can
automatically recognize the word, and the reader no
longer has to decode it.
than looking for clues outside the printed word.
Indeed, each time the child skips over scrutinizing
the internal structure of a printed word in favor of
using contextual cues or illustrations to identify
the word, the child loses an opportunity to imprint
the orthography.26
User Guide: Why
37
In addition, many researchers add these pieces of
advice specifically targeted at letter combination
instruction:
W
hen deciding how many letter combinations to
teach explicitly, keep in mind that the most effective approach will likely depend on the child’s
skill level. Children with the weakest phonics skills
are likely to benefit most from a curriculum that
devotes lots of teacher time to explicitly teaching
a large number of letter combinations. In contrast,
children with higher phonics skills are likely to
benefit most from curriculum that gives them more
time with book-reading practice.
F
rom first grade onward, all readers benefit
from — and need — lots of time to practice their
letter combination knowledge through reading
connected text. So be sure to include this practice
time, even for your lowest students.
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Assessing Letter Combination
Knowledge
You can informally check for students’ development of
letter combination knowledge by asking them to read
words that use these combinations, especially words
they have not yet seen in your reading lessons. You
can also look for patterns of errors on these words as
children read trade book or textbook selections aloud.
If you suspect a problem on a particular type of letter
combination, try creating your own mini-assessment
by asking the student to read five words of that type in
isolation.
Formal assessments — such as dibels® Deep — can
tell you with more precision which students need
additional, small-group letter combination instruction.
Advanced Phonics Instruction
What exactly is advanced phonics instruction?
Advanced phonics activities help students learn about
the following word patterns:
Word families: back, lack, black
Double-letter words: fill, miss, chill
CS
Silent-letter words: lamb, sock, answer
Phonological
Awareness
Compound words: bedbug, sandbox, firefighter
Alphabetic
Principle
PA
RW
LC
B
LS
Flu
Comp
Contractions: it’s, I’m, can’t
-ed words: melted, filled, kicked
IW
AP
Voc
-s words: bats, bugs
The lessons in advanced phonics go beyond soundby-sound decoding. They encourage students to
think about:
1. Larger pattern chunks in words (as in word
families). For example, a child can use his
knowledge of miss and kiss to read the new word
hiss. When students read new words this way we
call it reading by analogy — a skill that typically
User Guide: Why
39
develops after children have developed and
practiced skills in sound-by-sound decoding.
2. The way that certain patterns (like s and ed) are
related to meaning. These types of patterns are
among the morphemes. Researchers cannot yet
clearly delineate how our brains use morphemes
when we read a new or familiar word, but they
do suggest that morphemes may play a role in
children’s automatic word recognition, even as early
as second grade.27
The goal is to continue to encourage students to look
deeply at the spelling — also known as orthography —
of words as they read, and to enjoy discoveries about
how spelling patterns are related.
Do all children need advanced phonics instruction?
When it comes to reading instruction, one size never
fits all. Research suggests that children who enter first
grade with middle or high literacy skills (and engage
in lots of independent book reading) need a lower
amount of phonics instruction.28 Your best bet is to
use assessments for deciding which children need
advanced phonics lessons.
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Research on Advanced Phonics
Instruction
How much do researchers really understand
about advanced phonics instruction?
When the National Reading Panel analyzed the
evidence on effective reading instruction for its 2000
report, it did not specifically look at the difference
between synthetic phonics programs (that is, those
that teach sound-by-sound decoding) that extended
their lessons into advanced phonics, and those that did
not. So it is probably fair to say that there currently is
not as clear an understanding about advanced phonics
instruction as there is about earlier stages of phonics
instruction.
So, are there research-based principles from basic
phonics lessons that might be important for
advanced phonics lessons?
Possibly. The panel’s report on effective reading
instruction clearly states that for the earlier stages of
phonics learning, “Reading programs that are highly
systematic, explicit, and comprehensive in teaching
children how to read words based on their spelling are
more effective than programs that do not share these
features.” Advanced phonics lessons are systematic,
explicit, and comprehensive and so more effective.
(See the box on Page 19 in the Letter-Sounds section
for a description of the National Reading Panel’s findings on the advantages of explicit, systematic phonics
instruction.)
pattern you teach. An explicit and systematic philosophy
is perfectly consistent with encouraging students to
be “pattern detectives” who find and celebrate these
examples.
The National Reading Panel’s conclusions don’t
Teaching Advanced Phonics
Knowledge
seem to fit with what I know about motivating
students. In my teaching experience, most “explicit
and systematic” scripted programs are boring and
What advice do researchers have for teachers?
involve lots of “telling.” My students get more
Here are the key nuggets of advice, based on research
about what makes phonics instruction in general most
effective:
excited when they discover things for themselves.
Your confusion is understandable. The terms explicit
and systematic are sometimes misunderstood by
curriculum developers as the only important features
of a program. They’re also sometimes mistakenly
interpreted to mean boring and mindless by teachers
who think they can’t mesh such an approach with their
views on authentic, motivating classrooms.
Both views are mistaken. Explicit and systematic
instruction can — and should — also be joyful and
authentic. For example, you can use an explicit and
systematic phonics program and still celebrate when
students make their own discoveries about language.
Even with scripted programs, you’ll never include all of
the words in a phonics lesson that relate to a particular
pattern, and there will always be exceptions to any
H
elp students understand the purpose of learning
advanced phonics patterns and help them apply
their advanced phonics knowledge in daily reading
and writing activities.
B
e sure to supplement the phonics portion of your
reading program with other important elements.
Phonics lessons alone are not sufficient, and they
should not take up the lion’s share of the time
you devote to your reading program. Be sure, for
example, to spend time reading quality literature
to students to build a sense of story and to develop
vocabulary and comprehension. Whenever possible,
integrate portions of your phonics lessons into
these activities.
User Guide: Why
41
S tudents will vary in the amount of advanced
phonics knowledge they acquire outside of school.
Typically, at-risk readers will need more explicit
instruction on a greater number of text features
such as those covered in advanced phonics. It’s
preferable to assess your students’ needs and,
based on them, select the suitable amount and type
of phonics lessons.
E
valuate your students’ reading competence in
many ways, not only by their phonics skills but
also by their interest in books and their ability to
understand information that is read to them. By
emphasizing all of the processes that contribute to
growth in reading, you will have the best chance of
making every child a reader.
Assessing Advanced Phonics
Knowledge
Decoding assessments for advanced phonics
knowledge range from highly formal, diagnostic
instruments — such as the dibels® Deep assessment
— to less formal instruments, some of which are
available for free download. (See, for example, www.
balancedreading.com/assessment.html). If you
suspect that a student could benefit from advanced
42
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phonics lessons, try some of these assessments and
look for patterns of errors that map onto advanced
phonics content. You can also take an even more
informal route to assessment and look for patterns of
errors on these words as students read trade book or
textbook selections aloud. If you suspect a problem
on a particular type of word, such as contractions, try
creating your own mini-assessment, asking the student
to read five words of that type in isolation.
Australian education expert Brian Cambourne recently outlined some key considerations when
integrating an explicit and systematic approach into classrooms that also — and crucially —
teach children to love reading.29 He advocates that you:
DO:
DON’T:
Teach explicitly and systematically about the
Teach scripted (explicit and systematic) lessons
often invisible ways we write, spell, and learn.
without being consciously aware of what’s going on.
Otherwise, students may be confused about how
In other words, be careful not to sound robotic and
reading and writing work. They may also miss skills,
keep in touch, as we are sure is your goal, with your
understandings, and know-how that some students
students and how they are responding, feeling and
discover on their own and others don’t.
reacting.
Talk explicitly about your personal likes and dislikes
Forget to help students understand the meaningful
about the texts you read, as well as how you use
and authentic purposes for reading in the world
reading in your personal life.
outside of school.
Tell students explicitly about why you’re asking them
to do the activities in the lessons and how it will fit
together for the main purposes of learning.
Systematically (and rationally) plan what you’re
doing with students. Challenge yourself to justify
your planning decisions.
User Guide: Why
43
Reading Fluency Instruction
What exactly is reading fluency?
Reading fluency is the ability to read a text quickly,
accurately, and with proper expression.
What’s the relationship between reading
CS
fluency skills and word recognition skills?
Phonological
Awareness
Alphabetic
Principle
PA
RW
LC
B
LS
IW
AP
Voc
Flu
Comp
The relationship is an extremely close one,
particularly for beginning readers. Recent research
suggests that for readers in Grades 1-3, their level
of fluency is determined almost exclusively by their
sight-word skills.30 (By sight words, we mean any
words that students can automatically recognize
instead of having to sound them out.) So, the more
words students can recognize automatically, the
better their fluency.
Of course, readers also have to know how to interpret
punctuation in order to read with proper expression.
Many researchers also believe that as children get older,
and as the texts they read get more complex, children’s
fluency skill is more influenced by comprehension-related
skills: skills that use knowledge about how words and
phrases in sentences go together based on their meaning.31
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What’s the relationship between reading fluency
and comprehension ability?
In general, children’s fluency skill is an extremely good
predictor of their comprehension ability. Why? Because
when children can recognize words automatically,
they have many more mental resources to use in
comprehending what a text means. If children have to
struggle to read words, they spend most of their mental
resources just identifying what the words are, with few
resources left over for comprehension. As a result, their
comprehension ability suffers.
But I’ve seen students who seem fluent when
they read something, and then have no idea
what they just read. I’ve also seen students
struggle through a book that’s way above their
level, yet then be able to tell me lots of things
about it. So I have a hard time accepting that
fluency is all that matters for comprehension.
You couldn’t be more right: Fluency is not all that
matters for comprehension.
For one thing, motivation plays an important role in
the relationship between fluency and comprehension
for any particular text. If children are bored with a
text’s content, they may read it quickly without paying
attention to meaning. Likewise, readers with weak
word-reading skills can still understand a text they are
highly motivated to read, if they use such strategies
as re-reading, looking back, or even reading aloud to
minimize distractions.32
Lack of background knowledge (including vocabulary
knowledge) can also throw off comprehension for
fluent readers. If children are reading about a totally
unfamiliar situation, they may be able to read the
words but be unable to make the kind of inferences
needed for good comprehension. On the other hand,
children with a lot of background knowledge and
vocabulary about a topic (such as outer space) may
be able to use these abilities to figure out words that
are difficult for them to decode. This knowledge may
also help them make inferences and comprehend well,
even though their reading is slow and effortful.
In rare cases, children may have a general cognitive
deficit that impairs their ability to comprehend oral
language. Children apply their spoken-language
comprehension abilities to reading, so these children
could have the ability to read text quickly and
accurately but have poor reading comprehension skills.
User Guide: Why
45
How does fluency develop?
reach late elementary school. These differences
Through practice, practice, practice with reading
texts. That’s one thing researchers agree on. Of course,
students can’t practice fluency with a particular
passage until they have a basic ability to decode most
of the words in the passage.
in reading practice emerge during the earliest
How much practice?
difficult for children, once significantly behind in the
A lot. In fact, Joseph Torgesen of Florida State University
is convinced that this is one reason it’s extremely hard
to help older low-skilled readers catch up to their peers
on fluency, even after you’ve helped them catch up on
phonics skills. It’s just very difficult to give these older
readers enough reading practice time to catch up on the
amount of reading practice they’ve missed and keep up
with the amount of reading practice their fluent peers
are continuing to get. He writes:
growth of their sight word vocabulary, to close the
We have proposed elsewhere several possible
explanations for the difficulty we have experienced
in helping older children to close the gap in reading
fluency after they have struggled in learning to
read for several years. The most important factor
pronounced as the children advance across the
grades in elementary school…[if] typical readers
are continually expanding their sight vocabularies
through their own reading behavior, it should be very
gap in reading fluency.33
What kind of reading practice helps children most?
How can I support this practice in my classroom?
Those are the million-dollar questions researchers
have been studying closely in recent years. The next
sections describe their findings, particularly those
relevant to elementary teachers.
Research on Instruction for
Developing Reading Fluency
How much do researchers really understand
about the effective instruction for developing
appears to involve difficulties in making up for
reading fluency?
the huge deficits in reading practice the older
Enough to conclude that repeated oral reading
practices can definitely help increase children’s fluency.
children have accumulated by the time they
46
stages of reading instruction and they become more
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
For its report published in 2000, the National Reading
Panel found 16 studies, conducted from 1970 to
1996, that used experimental-control group designs
for testing the effectiveness of repeated oral reading
practices. (Control-group studies give educational
researchers the highest confidence that what they
are testing is actually causing learning growth.) The
students in these studies ranged from Grades 2
through 9. The resulting evidence convinced the panel
that repeated oral reading practices helped improve
students’ reading ability, from Grade 2 through at least
Grade 5, and helped improve the reading of students
with learning problems much later than Grade 5 as well.
In addition, some programs (called guided repeated
oral reading) give teachers carefully designed feedback
routines to use in guiding the reader’s performance.
Did the panel find that some programs were more
effective than others?
No, the panel did not believe there was enough
evidence to recommend one program over another.
Instead, it concluded that all of the procedures seemed
to have a reasonably high likelihood of success.
Teaching Reading Fluency
What advice do researchers have for teachers?
What are repeated oral reading practices?
These are programs that generally have the following
key features:
1. Students read and re-read a text.
2.Students get increased amounts of practice reading
aloud — compared to the amount they get in
traditional whole-group, “round-robin” instruction
— through either one-on-one instruction, tutors,
audiotapes, peer guidance, computer-based voice
recognition software, or some other means.
Here are the key nuggets of advice, based on research
about what makes fluency instruction most effective:
D
o not rely solely on word-list reading practice.
Children need to develop fluency through practice
reading connected, meaningful text.
F
ind ways to incorporate repeated oral reading
practices as part of your reading program. Have
students read passages orally multiple times while
receiving guidance or feedback from peers, parents,
or yourself.
User Guide: Why
47
D
on’t emphasize fluency without comprehension.
Continue to emphasize to students that the goal of
reading is comprehension.
A
s a general rule, aim for material that students
can read with a 92-95% accuracy level. Traditional
notions of the right “instructional level” held that
children should be able to read materials with greater,
95-98% accuracy. However, recent research with
second graders suggests that the increased support
provided by repeated reading practices can help
children gain instructionally from more difficult
texts, even those children reading at below the 95%
accuracy level. (Indeed, researchers found benefits
when children worked with text that they initially
read at only an average 85% accuracy level.34)
C
onsider using texts such as poems or plays that
students can perform in front of an audience.
The goal of delivering a real performance can give
students a natural motivation to re-read and practice
texts, and to work on their expression.35
D
o not rely on currently popular programs that
encourage students to increase the amount of
reading they do on their own. Research has not yet
proventhat children actually do read more as a result
48
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
of these programs, or that they do so enough to affect
their reading achievement. It’s not that encouraging
children to read more is bad or wrong, it’s just that
we don’t yet know enough about how to do this
effectively. The National Reading Panel’s review of
research on current popular programs, including
those that use points or prizes to motivate reading,
has not found that these programs can be effective.
Assessing Reading Fluency
You can informally check students’ fluency
development by asking them to read aloud texts that
you think are at their level.
Formal assessments can help you determine which
students need the most help with fluency, and
whether their fluency is improving. Curriculum-based
measurement (cbm), such as dibels® Oral Reading
Fluency, is a widely-studied form of classroom
assessment that includes a passage-reading fluency
measure. cbm is used over time, and includes enough
equivalent tests to cover most or all of the school year,
even if students are tested weekly. Each passage fluency
test contains text written at an end-of-grade difficulty
level. So for example, first graders use cbm tests written
with an end-of-first-grade level. Each time students are
tested, they individually read aloud a different passage
for one minute, and the teacher marks each student’s
number of words read correctly. Since every passage
is of the same difficulty, the teacher can tell if students
are improving from test to test. There are over 200
research studies showing the validity, reliability, and
instructional usefulness of cbm.36
User Guide: Why
49
Everything You Wanted to Know About
Vocabulary But Were Afraid to Ask
The Basics: In Plain English
I teach young, at-risk students. What are the top
three things I should know about vocabulary?
1. The size of your students’ vocabularies when they
come to school may be dramatically smaller than
that of children from more advantaged homes. By
first grade, children from homes with high-income
levels know anywhere from two to five times as
many words as children from low-income homes.37
Researchers have labeled this problem word poverty.38
2. Closing the gap in vocabulary knowledge must start
early if we are to help children from disadvantaged
homes succeed in reading comprehension. Too
many children progress in early reading only to fall
behind in the fourth-grade slump. Many researchers
are convinced that this problem is due in large part to
the failure to adequately build children’s vocabularies
in earlier grades.39 By fourth grade, many children are
encountering so many unknown words in text that
they cannot understand what they read.
50
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Unfortunately, the word poverty that some children
bring to school is so large that it will take years
to address. Your school’s attempts to remedy the
vocabulary gap must start as soon as possible, rather
than waiting until after children have learned to read.
3. Knowing a word is not all-or-none. Children usually
only pick up bits of information about a word each
time they encounter it. They need to encounter a word
in many different contexts in order to fully know it.
Children who fully know a word can use it precisely,
understand it quickly, and use it for different purposes.40
What are the best words for vocabulary instruction?
As usual, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. You need to
consider the age of the children, their level of need, and
the type of instruction.
For older children, particularly those near middle
school level, it’s important to include academic words.
Words like infer, deny, prove, and factor are highly
critical for understanding texts and thinking processes
in different disciplines.41
For younger children, many researchers suggest that
for general whole-class instruction, teachers pull words
from grade-appropriate read-aloud books. You can think
of words from these books as falling into three tiers:
Tier one words are words that children already know.
They occur very frequently in everyday talk.
Tier two words are not as common in everyday talk but
are relatively frequent in children’s books. Examples
from kindergarten read-alouds are words like disappear
and foolish. First grade tier-two words include clutching
and announce. Researchers recommend that you use
tier two words like these for your vocabulary lessons.
Tier three words are rare words, such as peninsula, that
are less common across read-alouds. They are better
suited for learning in content areas.42
For the most at-risk younger children, you should
consider small-group intensive instruction with a
focus on words that may derail learning in decoding
lessons and independent reading. Researchers report
that children in vocabulary crisis, particularly those
from other language backgrounds, often do not fully
know common words in early reading instruction,
such as hog and thorn.43
So does knowing a word’s meaning really affect
how children decode and recognize it?
Yes. Children who know a printed word in their oral
vocabulary can more easily and quickly sound it out
and read it in their texts.44
Research on Vocabulary Instruction
What do researchers know about effective
instructional methods for teaching vocabulary?
The National Reading Panel45 concluded that teachers
should use a variety of methods for most effectively
teaching vocabulary. These methods should include:
Direct instruction that gives definitions or other
attributes of words
Repeated and multiple exposures to a word in many
contexts
Rich and authentic contexts that can help link word
use to content areas
Active engagement
Multimedia methods, including pictures and
computer technology
Incidental exposure outside of vocabulary lessons
User Guide: Why
51
Teaching Vocabulary
I already include lots of vocabulary discussions
and activities in my day, especially when I read
to children. But often the words just don’t stick.
What else can I do?
Researchers are continuing to study what makes words
sticky; that is, what makes vocabulary instruction
most meaningful and memorable. Their work suggests
that instruction is stickier if the teacher includes
analytic talk. For example, if you are reading a book
in which frogs quarrel, don’t just talk about the word
in the context of the story or ask children about times
when they quarreled. You should also help children
analyze word meanings, and you should recycle word
knowledge by doing this across multiple days. Ask
questions like:
What would quarreling sound like?
What do people quarrel about?
I f you were quarrelling with a friend over a game, would you think the same as your friend or different?
Is quarrelling peaceful and friendly?
If someone quarreled in our classroom, what would
it look like?
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Use the word quarrel in a sentence by saying,
“People quarrel over ___.”
Give a thumbs-up if this sentence is true, and a
thumbs-down if it’s false: A party is more fun when
everyone is quarrelling.46
You could also consider ways that computer
technology can help add richness to your lesson
contexts. For example, one study showed impressive
gains in students’ vocabulary learning when they used
digital cameras as part of a program to help them
notice and recycle words.47
What do researchers suggest that I do outside of
my vocabulary lessons to help students’ vocabulary learning?
Researchers strongly encourage you to insert
uncommon words into your speech as much as you
possibly can:
For example, rather than reminding a student that he
didn’t quite close the door, the teacher might tell the
child to close the door because it is ajar. Rather than
asking a student to water a drooping plant, the teacher
might say that the plant is becoming dehydrated.
Rather than telling students to line up faster, the
teacher might ask them to stop dawdling.48
How can I teach my children to be independent
word learners?
Here are several strategies that have shown positive
effects in research studies:49
Model for your students how to look up a difficult
word in a dictionary. Think aloud as you choose the
best definition for the context where you and your
students encountered the word.
Model how to use context alone. Some contexts can
be vague or misleading, so be sure to use examples
where the context is specifically helpful and contains
strong clues. Point out the clues you are using.
In Grades 3 – 5, teach children common pre-fixes
and suffixes in activities where students read texts
with these words in them. Create activities that
foster students’ curiosity about and awareness of
prefixes, suffixes, and root words, rather than asking
students simply to recite meanings.
Assessing Vocabulary
Vocabulary assessments can vary on whether they
tap breadth of word knowledge (how many words
are known)50 or depth of word knowledge (how
well words are known). Assessments also vary on
whether they measure children’s receptive vocabulary
knowledge (the ability to understand a spoken or
written word) or their expressive vocabularies (the
ability to use words).
Some vocabulary assessments focus on breadth by
asking children to match a word to a picture of its
most common meaning. An example of a researchbased assessment of this type is the Peabody Picture
Vocabulary Test (PPVT). The PPVT measures
receptive vocabulary.
Usually children’s ability to understand a word
is greater than their ability to produce and use a
word. The Expressive-Vocabulary Test (EVT), asks
children to produce words in response to pictures
and questions. The EVT is normed with the PPVT so
that you can make comparisons between children’s
receptive and expressive vocabularies.
You can also informally check for children’s knowledge
of depth of word meaning by asking them questions
that go beyond the word’s simplest or most common
meaning and contexts. Many words, such as duck have
multiple meanings–as in quack or watch out!
User Guide: Why
53
Everything You Wanted to Know About
Comprehension Strategies But Were Afraid to Ask
The Basics: In Plain English
What are comprehension strategies?
Comprehension strategies are mental procedures
that children can use on their own as they read to
improve their understanding.
What are some examples of comprehension
strategies for young readers?
Here are just a few examples, from studies with
students as young as kindergarten:51
Making predictions
Inferring
Drawing conclusions
Finding main ideas
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What’s the difference between comprehension
strategies and comprehension skills?
These terms are commonly confused, and researchers
have only recently suggested a way to make the
distinction clear.52 We can think of comprehension
strategies as mental actions that readers take
deliberately, in an attempt to control and improve
understanding. Once readers have used a particular
strategy over and over, so that its use becomes natural
and automatic, then we can say the strategy has
evolved into a skill.
For example, some young readers may need to
deliberately remind themselves to visualize information
after reading each sentence, particularly if the text is
hard or confusing. After much practice, visualization
may become something they do automatically when
reading interesting material. At that point, visualization
has evolved from a strategy into a skill.
Research on Comprehension
Strategy Instruction
How much do researchers really understand
about the effectiveness of comprehension strategies instruction?
For Grades 3 – 6, they understand a lot; for Grades
K – 2 somewhat less. Research on comprehension
strategies began in the 1970’s and became a hot topic
in the field soon after. For its report published in 2000,
the National Reading Panel reviewed 203 studies. The
vast majority were conducted with students in Grades
3 – 8. They found that seven types of comprehension
instruction appeared to be effective for classroom
instruction with these older students:
Comprehension monitoring instruction
Cooperative learning instruction
U
se of graphic and semantic organizers (including
story maps)
Question-answering instruction
Question-generation instruction
Summarization instruction
Instruction that combined strategies (multiple-strategy
instruction) also appeared effective.
So do researchers recommend waiting until Grade
3 before beginning comprehension strategy
instruction?
No! Researchers agree that more studies are needed,
but they recommend that teachers not wait on research
to integrate some level of comprehension strategy
instruction into their K – 2 classrooms. Here’s a quote
from leading researchers David Pearson and Nell Duke:
It may be that some strategies – perhaps
relating text to prior experiences or making
predictions about text content – are so
foundational that they should be emphasized
a great deal very early in schooling. It may be
that other strategies, such as summarizing,
are so difficult for young learners that they
should be either backgrounded or given
more intensive instruction in primary-grade
education. Unfortunately, presently available
research does little to suggest priorities for
different comprehension strategies or for the
particular challenges young learners may
face in learning them … These significant
shortcomings notwithstanding, we know
enough about what to teach and how to teach
comprehension to our very youngest readers
User Guide: Why
55
to make a good start at doing so. To delay this
sort of powerful instruction until children have
reached the intermediate grades is to deny them
the very experiences that help them develop
the most important of reading dispositions
– the expectation that they should and can
understand each and every text they read.53
Teaching Comprehension Strategies
What advice do researchers have for teachers?
Here are some key pieces of advice for teaching
comprehension strategies in K – 2 classrooms:
H
elp young students visualize and remember to use
strategies by combining them with hand motions.
Research shows that hand motions can be extremely
effective in helping young students understand and
trigger their use of comprehension strategies.54
M
ake sure that children understand the purpose for
comprehension strategies. Explain that strategies are
things that good readers do to better understand and
enjoy what they read. The more explicit a teacher is in
teaching and stipulating the purpose of comprehension
strategies, the better the students will achieve.55
Model, model, model. Most researchers advocate
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that with beginning readers, you can use
comprehension strategy instruction with readaloud text. As you read (or during a discussion of
the text), “think out loud” to model the strategy
you’re teaching. Then give children a chance to
practice using the same strategy as they listen to
more of the text and additional read-alouds.
D
on’t overdo the use of any particular strategy.
For example, don’t ask children to make predictions
on every page. Research shows that even good
readers don’t make predictions constantly – they’re
doing other things too.
U
se comprehension strategies instruction with
both story and informational read-alouds.
Research suggests that children don’t get enough
practice in comprehending informational text in
the early grades, and that they enjoy these texts as
much as or even more than stories. By fourth grade,
children with lots of practice in comprehending
informational text will have a definite advantage
over those who don’t.56 Some genre-specific
strategies for story and informational texts include:
• Stories: Understanding story elements,
sequencing events, retelling, finding the
underlying message
• Informational texts: Understanding visual
and textual elements, text structure, and
summarization of non-fiction
H
elp children organize information and concepts
from text with graphic organizers. Recommended
structures include Venn diagrams, hierarchical maps,
flow charts, lists, and KWL charts.57
W
hen children are ready to read and write
independently, encourage them to put an occasional
sticky note on pages where they’ve used a strategy.
After some practice with marking the page, teach
children to jot down a note about the strategy, so they
can share it later with a reading partner or with you.
S
caffold instruction to include a gradual release of
responsibility to students when having them apply
a strategy. Research suggests that teachers should
explain, model, and scaffold instruction before
releasing the responsibility onto students to practice
and apply a strategy.58
E
stablish a set of organizational and management
routines in the classroom and create an
atmosphere of support and encouragement. When
students know what to expect during instruction and
are not afraid of taking risks, they will perform better.
Assessing Comprehension Strategies
Comprehension assessments that ask children to
answer questions quickly and fluently can help you
assess strategies that have developed into skills.
For assessing children as they are developing
comprehension strategies, you can also use informal
observation:
If a child cannot retell a story, ask the child to
identify the order of key events or use a graphic
organizer to query if the child understands
narrative elements and their relations. If
children cannot answer multiple-choice
questions quickly, ask them to think aloud as
they read the stem and response options and
ask them to show you how they search for
confirming or disconfirming evidence in the
text…The main reason for assessing strategies
is to find clues about what the student is not
doing or what is being done incorrectly so that
teachers can reteach better strategies.59
Kathy Collins, a researcher and first grade teacher, offers
several additional ideas for assessing early readers:
During a reading conference I might choose to assess
a child’s comprehension or engagement with the text
User Guide: Why
57
by asking, “What have you been thinking about as you
read this?” The child’s response can provide a lot of
information. I also ask children to share some of the
places where they have put sticky notes so that I can get
an idea of the kinds of thoughts they have as they read.
If I notice that a child always seems to predict or make
personal connections, I may remind her of another
kind of thought that readers may have as they read.60
58
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
Recommended Reading
Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and
Complete Science-Based Program for
Reading Problems at Any Level by Sally
Shaywitz (Vintage, 2005).
Direct Instruction Reading by Douglas
Carnine, Jerry Silbert, and Edward
Kame’enui (Prentice Hall, 2003).
Report of the National Reading Panel.
Teaching children to read: an evidencebased assessment of the scientific
research literature on reading and its
implications for reading instruction:
Report of the sub-groups. National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development
(2000) (nih Publication No. 00-4754). Washington
DC. http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/
smallbook.cfm. Information in this guide is partially
excerpted from the Panel’s report.
Beginning to Read: Thinking and
Learning about Print by Marilyn Jager
Adams (The mit Press, 1994).
A Focus on Vocabulary (Research-Based
Practices in Early Reading Series) by Dr.
Elfrieda Hiebert, Fran Lehr, Jean Osborn.
(Pacific Resources for Education and
Learning, 2004).
Bringing Words to Life: Robust
Vocabulary Instruction by Isabel Beck,
Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan
(The Guilford Press, 2002).
Comprehension Instruction: ResearchBased Best Practices edited by Cathy
Collins Block and Sheri R. Parris (The
Guilford Press, 2008).
User Guide: Why
59
Recommended Reading (continued)
Comprehension Process Instruction: Creating
Reading Success in Grades K – 3 by Cathy Collins
Block, Lori L. Rodgers, and Rebecca B. Johnson
(The Guilford Press, 2004).
Growing Readers: Units of Study in the Primary
Classroom by Kathy Collins (Stenhouse
Publishers, 2004).
Reading and Writing Informational Text in the
Primary Grades: Research-based Practices by
Nell K. Duke and V. Susan Bennett-Armistead
(Scholastic Teaching Resources, 2003).
To Understand: New Horizons in Reading
Comprehension by Ellin Oliver Keene
(Heinemann, 2008).
60
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
Notes
1. Professor Snow is also a member of the FreeReading advisory
board. FreeReading (www.freereading.net) contains the open source
instructional materials on which the Bursts program is based.
2. Snow, C. (2007). Word Generation. Transcript from a presentation at
the CREATE conference, October. Oak Brook, IL.
3. Hoover, W. A. & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading.
Reading and Writing, 2, 127-160.
4. Haring, N.G., Lovitt, T.C., Eaton, M.D., & Hansen, C.L. (1978). The
Fourth R: Research in the Classroom. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill
Publishing Co.
5. See Daly, E. J., III, Lentz, F. E., & Boyer, J. (1996). The instructional
hierarchy: A conceptual model for understanding the effective
components of reading interventions. School Psychology Quarterly, 11,
369–386. A very similar concept, called “stages of learning” is described
in Bos, C.S. & Vaughn, S. (2002). Strategies for Teaching Students with
Learning and Behavior Problems. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
6. Espin and Deno (1989) found that modeling (i.e., the teacher models
accurate reading of the entire word) outperformed prompting (i.e., the
teacher says only the initial part of a word) in building accuracy of sight
word reading. Espin, C. A., & Deno, S. L. (1989). The effects of modeling
and prompting feedback strategies on sight word reading of students
labeled learning disabled. Education and Treatment of Children, 12, 219231. See also: Grossen, B., & Carnine, D. (1991). Strategies for maximizing
reading success in the regular classroom. In G. Stoner, M. R. Shinn, & H.
M. Walker (Eds.), Interventions for Achievement and Behavior Problems
(pp. 333 — 356). Silver Spring, MD: The National Association of School
Psychologists.
7. For instance, Word Drill (i.e., having the student repeat a misread
word following examiner modeling of accurate reading) was found to
be more effective at increasing accuracy and fluency in word recognition
compared to no error correction procedures, modeling followed by a
single repetition, or prompting. Rosenberg, M. S. (1986). Error-correction
during oral reading: A comparison of three techniques. Learning
Disability Quarterly, 9, 182-192.
8. Shapiro and McCurdy found that found that teaching words in
isolation did not lead to generalization in passage reading. Shapiro, E. S.,
& McCurdy, B. L. (1989). Direct and generalized effects of a taped-words
treatment on reading proficiency. Exceptional Children, 55, 321 — 325.
62
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
9. Keene, E. O., & Zimmerman, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought: Teaching
comprehension in a reader’s workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
10. Keene, E. O. (2008). To understand: New horizons in reading
comprehension. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
11. Walczyk, J.J., & Griffith-Ross, D.A. (2007, March). How Important
Is Reading Skill Fluency for Comprehension? The Reading Teacher, 60,
560–569.
12. See note 11.
13. Valencia, S. W., & & Buly, M. R. (2005). Behind test scores: What
struggling readers really need. In S. Barrentine & S. Stokes (Ed.), Reading
assessment: Principles and practices for elementary teachers, 2nd edition.
International Reading Association.
14. Allington, R. (2001). What really matters for struggling readers:
Designing research-based programs. New York: Longman
15. Hiebert, E.H. & Fisher, C.W. (April, 2002). Text matters in developing
fluent reading. Paper presented at the Preconvention Institute, “Tools
for Global Understanding: Fluency, Comprehension, and Content
Knowledge” at the annual meeting of the International Reading
Association, San Francisco, CA.
16. Hempenstall, K. (2004). Abracadabra phonics: Balanced magic.
Education News.org. Retrieved 8/18/08 at www.ednews.org/articles/43/1/
Abracadrabra-phonics-Balanced-magic/Page1.html
17. Foorman, B., R., Breier, J. I., & Fletcher, J. M. (2003). Interventions
aimed at improving reading success: An evidence-based approach.
Developmental Neuropsychology, 24, 613-639.
18. Hempenstall, K. (2003). Phonemic awareness: What does it mean? A
2003 Update. EducationNews.org: Retrieved 8/11/08 from www.ednews.
org/articles/523/1/Phonemic-awareness-What-does-it-mean/Page1.html.
19. Foorman, B., R., Breier, J. I., & Fletcher, J. M. (2003). Interventions
aimed at Improving reading success: An evidence-based approach.
Developmental Neuropsychology, 24, 613-639.
20. Reitsma, P. (1983). Printed word learning in beginning readers.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 75, 321-339.
21. See:
(i) Carroll, J.B., Davies, P., & Richman, B. (1971). The American Heritage
Word Frequency Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
(ii) Fry, E. B., Kress, J. E., & Fountoustudentis, D. L. (2000). The Reading
Teacher’s Book of Lists. NJ: Prentice Hall.
(iii) Kucera, H. & Francis, W. H. (1967). Computational analysis of presentday American English. Providence, RI: Brown University.
(iv) Zeno, S. M., Ivens, S. H., Millard, R. T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The
educator’s word frequency guide. New York: Touchstone Applied Science
Associates.
22. See also www.wordlistgenerator.net for the Dolch list (originally
published in Problems in Reading, The Garrard Press, 1948) and Fry list
(cited above).
23. Perfetti, C. A. (1992). The representation problem in reading
acquisition. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, & R. Treiman (Eds.) Reading
Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
24. Harm, M. W., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1999). Phonology, reading
acquisition, and dyslexia: insights from connectionist models.
Psychological Review, 106, 491-528.
25. Clymer, T. (1963). The utility of phonic generalizations in the primary
grades. The Reading Teacher, 16, 252-258. Referenced in: Johnson, F.
(2001). The utility of phonics generalizations: Let’s take another look at
Clymer’s conclusions. The Reading Teacher, 55, 132-143.
26. Snow, C. and Juel, C. (2005). Teaching children to read: What do we
know about how to do it? (pp. 501-520). In M. Snowling & C. Hulme,
(Eds.) The Science of Reading: A Handbook. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
See also:
Rayner, K., Foorman, B. R., Perfetti, C. A., Pesetsky, D., & Seidenberg, M.
S. (2001). How psychological science informs the teaching of reading.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2, 31 – 74.
Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain. New York: HarperCollins.
27. Carlisle, J. F., & Stone, C. A. (2005). Exploring the role of morphemes
in word reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 40, 428-449.
28. Juel, C., & Minden-Cupp, C. (2000). Learning to read words: Linguistic
units and instructional strategies. Reading Research Quarterly, 35, 458-492.
29. Cambourne, B. (2002). Explicit and systematic teaching of reading – a
new slogan? In R. Allington (Ed.) Big Brother and the National Reading
Curriculum: How Ideology trumped evidence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
30. Schwanenflugel, P. J., Meisinger, E. B., Wisenbaker, J. M., Kuhn, M. R.,
Strauss, G. P., & Morris, R. D. (2006). Becoming a fluent and automatic
reader in the early elementary school years. Reading Research Quarterly,
41, 496-522.
31. National Reading Panel (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel:
Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific
research literature in reading and its implications for reading instruction:
Reports of the sub-groups. (NIH Publication No. 00-4754). Washington
DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
32. Walczyk, J.J., & Griffith-Ross, D.A. (2007). How Important Is Reading
Skill Fluency for Comprehension? The Reading Teacher, 60, 560–569.
33. Torgesen, J. K. (2004). Lessons learned from research on interventions
for students who have difficulty in learning to read. In P. McCardle and V.
Chhabra (Eds.) The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research. (pp. 355-382).
Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Company.
34. Stahl, S. A., & Heubach, K. M. (2005). Fluency-oriented reading
instruction. Journal of Literacy Research, 37, 25 – 60.
35. Rasinski, T. (2008). Teaching fluency artfully. In R. Fink., & S. J. Samuels,
(Eds.) , Inspiring reading success: Interest and motivation in an age of
high-stakes testing (pp. 117-140). Newark, DE: International Reading
Association, Inc.
36. Fuchs, L. S., Fuchs, D., & Compton, D. L. (2004). Monitoring early
reading development in first grade: Word identification fluency versus
nonsense word fluency. Exceptional Children, 71, 7-21.
37. Graves, M. F., Brunetti, G. J., & Slater, W. H. (1982). The reading
vocabularies of primary-grade children of varying geographic and social
backgrounds. In J. A. Harris, & L. A. Harris (Eds.), New inquiries in reading
research and instruction (pp. 99-104). Rochester, NY: National Reading
Conference.
Hart, B., & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday
experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes.
Moats, L. (2001, Summer). Overcoming the language gap. American
Educator, 5 – 9.
38. Moats, L. (2001, Summer). Overcoming the language gap. American
Educator, 5 – 9.
39. Chall, J. S., & Jacobs, V. A. (2003). Poor children’s fourth-grade slump.
American Educator: Research Round-Up. Retrieved from http://www.aft.
org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring2003/chall.html.
Chall, J. S., Jacobs, V. A., & Baldwin, L. E. (1990). The reading crisis: Why
poor children fall behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
User Guide: Why
63
40. Lehr, F., Osborn, J., Hiebert, E. (2004). A Focus on Vocabulary.
Research-Based Practices in Early Reading Series. Pacific Resources for
Education and Learning. Available at: http://www.prel.org/products/re_/
ES0419.htm.
41. See http://www.wordgeneration.org/snow.html.
42. Beck, I., McKeown, M. G., & Kucan, L. (2002). Bringing words to life:
Robust vocabulary instruction. New York: Guilford.
43. Juel, C., & Deffes, R. (2004). Making words sticky. Educational
Leadership, 61 (6), 30 – 34.
44. See note 40.
45. See note 31.
46. Juel, C., & Deffes, R. (2004). Making words sticky. Educational
Leadership, 61 (6), 30 – 34.
Labbo, L.D., Love, M.S., & Ryan, T. (2007, March). A vocabulary flood:
making words “sticky” with computer-response activities. The Reading
Teacher, 60(6), 582–588.
47. Labbo, L.D., Love, M.S., & Ryan, T. (2007, March). A vocabulary flood:
making words “sticky” with computer-response activities. The Reading
Teacher, 60(6), 582–588.
48. See note 40.
49. See note 40.
50. Adams, M., & Spoehr, K. T. (2006). Framework Paper for the
Vocabulary Addition to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).
See http://cog.brown.edu/~spoehr/Vocabulary_Project/VocabMain.html
51. Block, C. C., Parris, S. R., & Whiteley, C. S. (2008). CPMs: A Kinesthetic
Comprehension Strategy. The Reading Teacher, 61(6), pp. 460 – 470.
64
Burst:Reading Literacy Intervention
52. Afflerbach, P., Pearson, D. P., & Paris, S. G. (2008). Clarifying
differences between reading skills and reading strategies. The Reading
Teacher, 61(5), 363-373
53. Pearson, P. D. & Duke, N. K. (2002). Comprehension instruction in
the primary grades. In C.C. Block & M. Pressley (Eds.) Comprehension
instruction: Research-based Best Practices. Guilford.
54. Block, C. C., Parris, S. R., & Whiteley, C. S. (2008). CPMs: A Kinesthetic
Comprehension Strategy. The Reading Teacher, 61(6), pp. 460 – 470.
55. RAND Reading Study Group. (2002). Reading for Understanding:
Toward an R&D Program in Reading Comprehension.
56. Duke, N. K. & Bennett-Armistead, V. S. (2003). Reading and writing
informational text in the primary grades: Research-based practices. New
York: Scholastic.
57. Duke, N. K. & Bennett-Armistead, V. S. (2003). Reading and writing
informational text in the primary grades: Research-based practices. New
York: Scholastic.
58. Carlisle, J. & Rice, M. (2002). Improving Reading Comprehension:
Research-based Principles and Practices. USA: York Press.
Lehr, F., & Osborn, J. (2005). A Focus on Comprehension. Pacific Resources
for Education and Learning.
59. Afflerbach, P., Pearson, D. P., & Paris, S. G. (2008). Clarifying
differences between reading skills and reading strategies. The Reading
Teacher, 61(5), 363-373
60. Collins, K. (2004). Growing readers: Units of study in the primary
classroom. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.
User Guide: Why
III
WHAT
HOW
• Welcome to Burst®:Reading!
• How should I prepare for Burst sessions?
• Introducing Burst:Reading
• How do I make my Burst:Reading sessions effective for
• What’s in a Burst?
• Smarter Instructional Materials
• Where does the instructional content come from?
• What is the need for Burst:Reading?
WHY
all students in the group?
• W
hat should the rest of my class be doing while I
work with the Burst group?
• H
ow do I change a Burst if I feel it doesn’t match my
students’ needs?
• H
ow can I keep students on task and motivated
during a Burst?
• Why Burst:Reading?
• How far can I depart from the steps specified in the Burst?
• Reading Comprehension
• What are the important roles teachers and others on
• Phonological Awareness Instruction
the instructional team may play in delivering Bursts?
• Letter-Sound Instruction
• Can I add students to my Burst group?
• Sounding-Out Instruction
• H
ow should I respond when some of the students in
• High-Frequency Irregular Word Instruction
• Letter Combination Instruction
• Advanced Phonics Instruction
• Reading Fluency Instruction
• Vocabulary Instruction
• Comprehension Strategies Instruction
• Recommended Reading
my group make great progress but, for others in the
same group, progress is slower?
• H
ow do I handle a Burst session that takes more than
(or less than) 30 minutes?
• How do I use Burst:Reading with my ell students?
• H
ow do I use Burst:Reading as part of Response to
Intervention (rti)?
• H
ow do I use Burst:Reading with my Special Ed
students?
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