The Path to Reading Proficiency

Emily Gula has worked in a variety of critical roles here at Great Minds. She's been a lead writer for Wit & Wisdom® and Arts & Letters™ and a Geodes® author, and now she is an associate director of curriculum. She previously taught kindergarten and first and fourth grades in and around New Orleans.

Nancy Zuckerbrod on the Great Minds marketing and communications team recently sat down with Emily to talk about literacy instruction and the path students take on the thrilling—and sometimes challenging—journey toward becoming a proficient reader. Please find highlights from our conversation below.

What does it mean to be a PROFICIENT reader?

Emily: It’s incredibly complex. Proficient readers must be able to decode text and make meaning from or comprehend that text. Breaking that down a bit, decoding means students can sound out written words. Comprehension is a complex process that requires an understanding of the broader context, including vocabulary, syntax, semantics, and content knowledge.   

The Simple View of Reading, a concept presented by researchers in 1986, explains that reading has two basic components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension (ability to understand spoken or written language). The idea is that a student's reading comprehension—their ability to understand text—depends on their decoding and language comprehension abilities. 

Scarborough's Rope, a concept developed in 2001 by Hollis Scarborough, expanded on the Simple View of Reading. Hollis Scarborough spoke of the components of skilled reading being akin to the strands of a rope. The reading rope is made up of two strands, one for word recognition and one for language comprehension. Word recognition includes phonological awareness, decoding, and being able to recognize familiar words by sight. The upper part deals with knowledge, vocabulary, and understanding language structure. When all the strands are woven together, you get skilled reading.

Describe what we should see in a classroom when students are learning to read PROFICIENTLY.

Emily: You want to make sure the top and bottom strands of the rope are being addressed, beginning in kindergarten. You want to see a combination of systematic and explicit foundational skills instruction and ELA instruction that helps students build reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary, and language skills while deepening their content knowledge. This is done through read alouds of rich, complex texts. Then, students need explicit phonics instruction and the opportunity to practice and apply what they've been learning through reading books that help them grow as readers. The texts that are best used for this applied practice are decodables.

Tell us about THE USE OF decodables in THE classroom.

Learn more about different types of texts that commonly show up in early literacy classrooms and the research behind which texts are right for your beginning readers in our research brief.

Emily: Decodable readers are often read in early elementary grades when students are learning foundational skills. The kids are learning to sound out words and need texts to match their foundational skills lessons. So, for example, maybe they just learned a phonetic pattern and need to practice that in a connected text. Reading decodable texts is a great way to get into the habit of sounding out words. I like to compare decodable texts to riding a bike with training wheels. Are you moving forward? Absolutely. Are you learning to balance? Sure. But you're not going as far and as fast as you would on a regular bike. Decodable texts are helpful. But you don't use training wheels forever. To grow into skilled readers, students need practice with knowledge-building books that bridge structured decodables and less-structured, complex texts. 

Tell us about your understanding of and experience with the Science of Reading when you were in the classroom teaching.

Emily: Some aspects of the literacy curriculum weren’t aligned to Science of Reading research when I was teaching, which was hard. The small group reading lessons used the three-cueing system, which asked kids to guess at words they didn't know by looking at pictures or based on the first letter of the word. We now know that's an ineffective and harmful way to teach reading. 

But I did have LETRS training early in my teaching career, and that was great professional development. And we did use a foundational skills program that explicitly taught phonics and decoding. So it was a mixed bag. But I was better off than many others who didn't have good training and weren't explicitly teaching the building blocks of reading using a foundational skills program. 

HOW SHOULD TEACHERS USE SMALL GROUP TIME EFFECTIVELY?

Emily: One of the best things teachers can do is spend time listening to their students read. The teacher can provide real-time feedback and correct students as needed. They're looking to see if they are reading accurately, with expression, and at a generally appropriate rate. Teachers are listening for whether students can apply the phonics patterns they have been working on, whether they can read high frequency words with automaticity, and whether their expression indicates that they are also comprehending what they read. Listening to students is an essential part of figuring out how to move them towards proficiency. Based on their observations and student data, teachers can plan targeted instruction, or responsive teaching, to support students in growing in their reading abilities.  

There is incredible power in rereading as well. Students benefit from reading the same decodable text multiple times to build their fluency. Students can read the text independently or with a partner as the teacher moves onto a new group.

HOW CAN GEODES FIT INTO THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM?

Geodes are a very unique component that can help students move from the decodable text where they are practicing very specific phonics patterns with limited words, into becoming more fully proficient readers. There’s still a bit of a gap there, both in the types of words they’re used to encountering and the complexity of the text when it comes to syntax and topic.

For more information on the learning design behind Geodes books and how to implement them across Level K and Levels 1 and 2, please watch our webinar series.

Researcher Linnea Ehri explains how students move through the four stages of reading development. The first is called Pre-alphabetic. That's typically when kids are preschool age. They might recognize features of words, but they don't really know their letters yet. The next is Partial Alphabetic, around kindergarten. That's when they know letter shapes and names, which might allow them to begin to read and spell very simple words like "cat." Then you have the Full Alphabetic phase, generally around first grade, perhaps toward the end of the year. Kids can decode regular one-syllable words that follow patterns and recognize high-frequency words like "the." Then you have the Consolidated Alphabetic phase, around the end of second grade or third grade. That's when kids can read multisyllabic words. Many words they're reading may not be familiar to them at this point, but they have ways to attack those words and decode them.  

You see there’s quite a jump from full alphabetic to consolidated alphabetic. Students need lots of practice with text to make this jump. If they only practice reading strictly decodable text, they don’t develop the skills to attack new words. Geodes are a perfect tool for students to build these word attack skills. They are mostly decodable; however, they include content and academic vocabulary as well. They are also knowledge-building, so students are strengthening the top strand of Scarborough’s Rope at the same time. Since Geodes include richer content and more typical narrative and informational elements than decodable texts, they are a great option for teachers to use in those small group lessons to evaluate students on their reading progress.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE FOR YOU TO TEACH EMERGING READERS? 

Emily: I just loved it. I have so many stories about the joy students felt when they were able to sound out a word on their own and understand what it meant. One time, an aunt of one of my students emailed me during the summer between kindergarten and first grade. She described taking her nephew to a local water park and getting worried when he went up the steps to the slide but then stopped at the top. He wouldn't come down, and she got worried she was going to have to go up too, which she really didn't want to do, because she thought he was scared. But then he happily came sliding and splashing down and told her with a big grin on his face that he was just taking his time up there because he wanted to read all the safety rules written on the signs. That’s exactly what we want—students going out in the world and understanding what's happening around them. Teaching is the best, and reading opens up the world to kids.

We're so grateful to Emily for sharing her stories and strategies with us. If you're a teacher, we'd love to hear your stories about helping students become proficient readers. You can find us on social media at @GreatMindsEd.