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.
Decodable texts play an important role in phonics instruction. Predictable texts encourage contextual guessing, an ineffective strategy for beginning readers.
Schools are charged with the important task of choosing appropriate and high-quality texts that will benefit young learners’ skill building journey to becoming a good reader. To practice their burgeoning skills, students need texts intentionally designed to match the specific skills they are learning.
There are two kinds of texts often chosen to help young readers practice, known as “decodable” or “predictable” texts.
Decodable texts are different from predictable or repetitive texts and play an important role in phonics instruction and building confidence in young readers. Decodable books align with a code-based, phonics approach to learning how to read that teaches children how to translate a string of letters into sounds, blend them together, and produce a spoken word. For beginning readers, the only books that are truly decodable are those that contain the specific grapheme–phoneme correspondences students have already learned. A phoneme is an individual speech sound or word. A grapheme is the letter or letter sequence that represents a speech sound.
Research indicates that students should learn these grapheme-phoneme correspondences in specific, sequential order to help with mastering the written alphabetic code to read. Decodable texts limit the number of grapheme-phoneme correspondences and high-frequency words to those that have been explicitly taught in the classroom. This provides learners with the opportunity to use their developing segmenting and blending skills to read words in order to develop automaticity—the ability to recognize words quickly and effortlessly—and gain confidence in independent reading success.
Decodable texts usually contain simple, one syllable words connected to the specific phoneme/grapheme pair students are practicing.
For example:
A cat and a pig sat.
The cat sat on a mat.
The pig sat in the mud.
A dog ran to the pig.
The dog and the pig sat in the mud.
Decodable texts can be utilized as a specific and proven tool to help students develop the habit of mastering letter-sound correspondence to decipher unfamiliar words. Students can move through decodable books quickly based on the scope and sequence of the phonics skills they are learning in the classroom. However, decodable books are not designed to help students learn new, challenging vocabulary, experience meaning making strategies with complex storylines, or diverse language structures.
Predictable texts are different than decodable texts. They are designed to have the same sentences and words repeat throughout the text. These types of repetitive texts were created to align with the three-cueing systems model of reading, which research has shown to not be the most effective strategy for readers to figure out unknown words on the page. The sentences usually follow the same sentence structure with only a few different words per sentence. Students read by relying on memorizing the words that show up again and again. For example:
I can see a tiger.
I can see a lion.
I can see an elephant.
Predictable texts are designed so that beginning readers have to rely heavily on contextual guessing to read the words that are different on the page. These words often have more complex grapheme–phoneme correspondences that students have not been explicitly taught. Young readers will not be able to decode these words on their own and can only use the picture on the page. Texts constructed this way teach beginning readers to rely on repetition and use pictures to guess and recognize an unknown word.
According to research, proficient readers do not become proficient by memorizing thousands of whole words. Rather, by attending to the letter-sound patterns, good readers develop the ability to decipher unknown words accurately in more challenging texts because they have developed the skills to “crack the code.”
References
Reading Rockets, Five From Five, What Are Decodable Books and Why Are They Important?.
Teach Starter, Decodable Readers vs Predictable Texts: What the Research Says.