Components of Effective Reading Instruction
Scarborough's Reading Rope
In 2001, Dr. Hollis Scarborough created the Reading Rope to capture the complexities of learning to read and to convey how the different “strands” of reading are all interconnected, yet independent of one another. Scarborough's Reading Rope is made up of lower and upper strands. When all these component parts intertwine, it results in skilled and accurate, fluent reading with strong comprehension.
The lower strands include:
- Phonological awareness
- Decoding
- Alphabetic principle
- Letter-sound correspondences
- Sight recognition
The upper strands include:
- Background knowledge
- Vocabulary
- Language structures
- Verbal reasoning
- Literacy knowledge
The Lower Strands
- Phonological Awareness: It's a skill set that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language – parts such as words, syllables, onsets, and rimes.
- Decoding: the ability to apply knowledge of sound-letter relationships (phonics) to correctly pronounce written words.
- Sight Recognition: Sight word memory is also referred to as our orthographic lexicon, which includes all the words we can read accurately and effortlessly. Sight word recognition is foundational to fluent reading.
The Upper Strands
- Background Knowledge: Readers rely on background knowledge to attend to and make sense of what they are reading. This is especially important for readers who are still relying heavily on word decoding rather than rapid word recognition. Having knowledge about a variety of subjects, topics, and ideas makes it more likely that they will be able to make sense of what they are reading.
- Vocabulary: An extensive and rich vocabulary enables readers to make sense of what they are reading. A reader with rich auditory and oral vocabularies will find it easier to read through texts that contain words they have not seen in print before. If the student can use their growing decoding skills and match their result with a word they already know the meaning of, they will be more confident in their abilities and will spend less overall effort on reading a text.
Language Structures
- Syntax - The arrangement of words in a phrase or sentence. The English language has patterns and rules for the way we order our words. It also has some flexibility and variety in acceptable patterns, and even then, speakers and writers are allowed some leeway with these patterns.
- Semantics - In linguistics, semantics is the study of the meanings of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Knowledge of the meaning of a text is essential to reading.
Verbal Reasoning
- Inference - a conclusion one can draw from known facts or evidence
- Metaphor - a word or phrase used to say that something is another thing in order to suggest that they are similar
Literary Knowledge
- Print Concepts - letters vs. words, 1:1 correspondence, reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom, spaces between written words, letter order matters, etc.
- Genres of Literature – different types of books or stories defined by special characteristics
Reading is Thinking: Systems of Strategic Actions
This indispensable instructional tool from Fountas & Pinnell reveals the many simultaneous, coordinated thinking activities that go on in a reader’s head. There are three ways of thinking about a text while reading:
Thinking within the text involves efficiently and effectively understanding what’s on the page, the author’s literal message.
Thinking beyond the text requires making inferences and putting text ideas together in different ways to construct the text’s meaning.
Thinking about the text, readers analyze and critique the author’s craft. Reading is thinking and a student’s talk about what they’ve read is evidence of that thinking.
Components of Effective Reading Instruction:
Read-alouds
Listening to high-quality literature is an essential part of every balanced literacy classroom. Reading aloud is crucial even in instances where the teacher does nothing more than read
spectacular literature aloud in such a way that children listen with rapt attention, clamoring for
more. The learner expands his listening vocabulary and hears how language sounds so that he is able to identify when something doesn’t “sound right”. The learner also listens to a fluent reading of the text from his teacher or other mature readers. He develops a model of what fluent reading sounds like.
As he reads he demonstrates listening comprehension, is taught to make inferences about characters and plot, and learns to love literature. Through read-alouds the learner is exposed to many literary genres. The pay off for reading aloud becomes even greater when teachers read aloud from a wide range of genres, which generally happens when teachers integrate reading aloud into all parts of the days, regarding reading aloud as a terrific resource during science, social studies, math, etc.
Teachers should also conduct interactive read-alouds to explicitly teach reading strategies and the skills of higher level comprehension. To do this, a teacher first reads the text aloud, noticing aloud the mind-work that s/he does while reading. The teacher supports the development of a particular comprehension skill demonstrating the skill and scaffolding children in using that skill along with many other skills and strategies in their own reading. Whatever skill you aim to teach, it‘s essential that you read in ways that not only demonstrate skills, but that above all bring stories to life. Read with expression, fluency, intonation, and good pacing so that children feel like they are a part of the story and understand what good reading sounds and feels like.
Shared Reading
Shared reading occurs when the teacher and the students negotiate a text together. The text is enlarged so that all have access to the print. Teachers may use “big books” or projected text or text written on white boards for example. Shared reading can be enlarged texts of fiction or nonfiction, and can include songs, charts, poems, lists, and memories of shared experiences, such as field trips. The purpose of shared reading is to make available aspects of the texts that children could not navigate on their own. For example, kindergarten children learn about concepts of print as the teacher tracks the text from left to right and top to bottom with her finger. Children learn about punctuation and its purposes. They learn to recognize high frequency sight words as the teacher models. They learn strategies readers use to solve unknown words.
Finally, children who struggle with fluency (that is, children who read slowly and robotically) need opportunities to participate in shared reading and in repeated oral readings. They develop literacy appreciation through exposure to various genres of text. As with read-alouds, they hear fluent reading of text and develop the ear to recognize when their reading “sounds right”. Comprehension strategies are modeled in shared reading as children learn to make inferences, predictions, and share their reactions to the text. Features of words such as word endings, compound words, and vowel patterns are analyzed.
Guided Reading
Guided Reading refers to instructional, teacher-supported work that children do in small groups with peers who have similar needs in the reading process. It is based on the Vygotskian model of apprenticeship with a more capable person. The teacher, or reading “expert”, carefully selects a text that is in the children’s zone of proximal development – this means the text is too difficult for them to negotiate on their own, but with carefully designed supports or scaffolds, they are able to read it. At ABS in grades K-3, we use Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention sets to support teachers in their guided reading instruction. In the upper grades, much like in the primary level process, Guided Reading is a short, fast-paced instructional strategy which is extremely effective in growing and developing the reading process. Guided Reading is conducted in small groups of not more than five students.
Guided reading groups follow a predictable structure. There is a text introduction, followed by each child being engaged in the text while the teacher takes turns listening to individuals read. The teacher prompts for use of strategies to solve unknown words. The strategies have been explicitly taught and modeled, either in the guided reading setting, or in a shared reading experience. After the reading of the text, there is time for word work (vocabulary and spelling strategies) and/or writing that supports the use of new strategies. There is always a discussion of the text. The instruction is intentional and explicit.
Students are grouped homogeneously, according to assessed need and reading level. Guided reading groups should be flexible. Students should grow into new text level groupings as skills develop. This mobility should happen relatively often and with fluidity. On-going assessment will help determine a child’s readiness to work at a different text level. The components of the Guided Reading lessons are described in the chart below.
The Structure of the Guided Reading Lesson
Literature Circles or Book Clubs (5-8)
Literature Circles or Book Clubs are another vehicle for small group reading instruction in upper grades. These groups tend to be heterogeneous. Books are chosen by students from a number of texts that have been pre-selected by the teacher. It is important that the texts are well-written and meaningful. Series books are typically not recommended for literature circles, for example, since they are not usually connected to themes and issues which will sustain meaningful conversation. Students are assigned a text or a portion of the text. They are instructed to make notes or use stickies in order to remember points of interest, wonderings, or confusion. They then join the group for discussion. The teacher’s role is to intervene as little as possible. In the most successful Literature Circles or Book Club groups, the teacher merely listens and only occasionally guides the conversation. Students may need to be taught or monitored in this process. Literature Circles are distinct in that they are student-led, and should not be used to replace Guided Reading in grades K-5, which is teacher-directed instruction.
Often, and especially in the beginning of the process, students will need more active support from the teacher. The teacher may need to model effective reading with the selected text demonstrating fluency, pointing out features of the text, and thinking aloud (metacognition) about the text in order to demonstrate comprehension strategies. The goal, however, is always to move toward a fully independent and student-led conversation (gradual release of responsibility). Literature Circles or Book Club groups can discuss picture books, short stories, short or long novels, or provocative magazine articles. The text selected can be highly effective in support of content area instruction. For example, historical fiction novels having to do with The Revolutionary War would be an excellent text for students to discuss as they engage in study of this time period in the Social Studies curriculum.
Independent Reading
Students should be provided with DAILY opportunities to independently engage with self-selected texts for an extended period of time. As children mature in their abilities, they are able to engage in extended periods of independent reading; therefore, teachers should increase the amount of time allowed for independent reading throughout the year and across grade levels.
The level of support has been gradually released to the child through shared reading and guided reading. In independent reading, the child assumes full control of the reading process, Therefore, it is critical that the child have opportunities to read text that is at his/her independent level – that is, the child can read text with a high degree of accuracy, applying the strategies s/he has been taught, without teacher support. Classroom libraries should have collections of text at many levels so that each child has choices for books that are at his “just right” independent reading level. This should also include informational text in the content areas.
Independent reading sessions are most often preceded by short mini-lesson of focused explicit instruction. Then during independent reading, the teacher may choose to confer with individual students about their thinking in response to the mini-lesson. In this way the teacher helps the student develop the ability to decode and comprehend while the student is engaged in independent reading.
At upper grades, as a part of independent reading, students may keep a reading response journal or notebook. In this journal, the student records titles read, and maintains a list of reading interests including favorite authors, subjects, and genres. Another important part of the response journal can be a weekly reader’s response letter. The student gathers his or her thinking from throughout the week and compiles the thinking in a friendly letter format. The teacher responds in kind. In this way, the teacher is able to assess and guide the student’s thinking and also to establish a social context for independent reading.
Real-life readers have tastes in authors, re-read favorite texts, express likes and dislikes of author’s craft, fall in or out of love with characters and are free to select and abandon books based on personal preference and choice. They respond to text on a personal level by exchanging understandings and wonderings with friends and acquaintances, and clarify confusion or ambiguity for each other. Literate adults read many types of texts for a multitude of purposes. They read to be informed of world events, to research personal or political choices, to increase expertise about hobbies or past-times, or simply for leisure and escape. A literate individual reads food labels, op-ed pages, catalogs, magazines, invoices, web pages, and novels. If we expect our students to become flexible and life-long readers we must expose them to authentic texts in multiple genres.