What Works and What Doesn't
To help all children in Arizona learn to read proficiently by the end of third grade, LEAs, schools, and educators can focus their efforts and resources on instructional strategies that are proven by research studies to produce their intended results. And, very importantly, they should no longer use practices without such solid evidence of effectiveness. The following sets the record straight, according to current research, on the efficacy of some commonly-used literacy practices.
Three cueing doesn’t teach children to read. It teaches them to guess.
The three-cueing system asks students to use three cues or strategies when they come to a word they cannot recognize. The strategy, also known by an acronym MSV, invites students to guess what the unknown word could be by associating it with: (1) some meaning they can decipher from pictures on that page of text (2) looking at the syntax or structure of the word (3) using visual information from the word, such as familiar letters or parts of words to make a good guess. Using this model, teachers might coach students to “look at the picture,” “skip the word and come back to it,” or “try a word that makes sense.”
The three-cueing model is based on the belief that good readers are good word guessers based on context or visual clues. According to this model, readers do not need to attend to or read every letter in a word to recognize it. Teaching students to decode or sound out words was thought of as unnecessary.
However, researchers have since discovered that this cueing method is actually what poor readers will do to try to identify words on the page if they do not have good phonics skills to be able to actually decode a word.
Science has shown that three cueing is not the best strategy for good readers to figure out unknown words on the page effectively. Words cannot be decoded accurately by looking at a picture. By asking students to ignore decoding letters and sounds of the exact word they do not recognize, readers are encouraged to rely on their memory of other whole words that could fit the visual on the page or make sense given the context.
For readers to be able to handle unknown words and more challenging texts quickly and effortlessly on their own, readers need to be taught to attend to letter-by-letter processing of a word and to connect letters and letter sequences to their corresponding sounds.
The three-cueing model does not provide students with the systematic phonics teaching necessary for them to be able to make the explicit connection between the printed and the spoken word.
To be sure, using context and visual clues can help a reader understand the meaning of a word that has already been decoded and identified, but should not be the primary strategy used to identify an unknown word accurately while reading. In fact, good readers do and should use context to double check that they’ve decoded the word correctly and it makes sense and to construct overall meaning from what they’ve already decoded on the page.
References
Excel In Ed, Why the three-cueing systems model doesn’t teach children to read.
Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, 3rd Edition (2019).
Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Rayner, et al., 2001, How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading.
Scientific American, Rayner, et al, 2002, How Should Reading Be Taught?.
International Journal of Disability Development and Education, Tunmer, et al., 2002, The Contribution of Educational Psychology to Intervention Research and Practice.