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T H E I N S I D E T R A C K

W H AT R E A LLY M AT T E R S W H E N WOR K I NG W I T H S T RUG G L I NG R E A DE R S

Richard L. Allington

T here is good news and bad news on

working with struggling readers. The good

news is that we now have an essential

research base demonstrating that virtually

every child could be reading grade level by the end of

first grade. The bad news is that almost no schools in

the United States have anything in place that much

looks like what the research says young children need

to become engaged readers.

When I was a graduate student, one of my

professors told us that it took 50 years for research

findings to influence daily classroom practices!

I recall that my peers and I were aghast at that

thought. “Surely he is wrong. Surely he is too

pessimistic,” we said to each other during our

class break. Now, 40 years later, I tell my graduate

students roughly the same thing.

In this article, I hope to convey what the research

has indicated about teaching beginning reading

in plain language. I open with an argument that

entrepreneurial enterprises continue to hold much

more sway on daily practice than do research

activities (Shannon & Edmondson, 2010). Then

I note how too often “what the research says” has

been ignored and that ineffective instructional

practices continue unabated in U.S. classrooms.

I also list a few of things that we do as common

practice that research has suggested be eliminated

from the school day. I close by suggesting that

common aspects of the reading instruction currently

offered could and should be eliminated and that

we use those savings to invest in research-based

reading lessons.

Richard L. Allington is a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA; e-mail [email protected].

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Teaching Beginning Reading Based on Evidence We have just completed a decade in

which federal education policy typically

touted “scientifically based, reliable,

replicable research” as the basis for

instructional recommendations provided

teachers, schools, and state education

agencies. The cornerstone of that effort

was set out in a document entitled

Put Reading First (Armbruster, Lehr, &

Osborn, 2001), which was supposed to

be a “plain language” summary of what

the research said about effective reading

lessons. However, instead arguments

were presented in an entrepreneurial

spirit, a spirit that often conflicted with

what the research actually indicated.

Nonetheless, too many educators took

that document as “truth,” and reading

lessons were altered, as was reading

curriculum and assessment.

In the recent past, entrepreneurial

documents (as in “buy our stuff”)

proliferated, masquerading as research

summaries (see Allington, 1999;

Allington & Woodside-Jiron, 1999;

Krashen, 2004; Strauss, 2003; Taylor,

Anderson, Au, & Raphael, 2000).

This masquerading was unmasked

by the Inspector General’s reports

of federal mismanagement of the

Reading First program (Brownstein

& Hicks, 2005; 2006a; 2006b; Manzo,

2005; Schemo, 2007). After much

involvement with changing primary-

grade reading lessons, the Reading First

program was not only found to have

evidence of corruption primarily of

the entrepreneurial sort (Garan, 2005),

but also did no more to raise reading

achievement than control schools that

received no Reading First funds (Gamse,

Jacob, Horst, Boulay, & Unlu, 2009).

This combination of corruption and

ineffectiveness led Congress to defund

the Reading First program.

Misrepresenting What the Research Says About Developing Decoding Proficiencies What went wrong? First and perhaps

foremost, much emphasis was placed

on explicit and systematic phonics

instruction, although the National

Reading Panel (NRP; 2000) report

warned against such excesses

while at the same time making the

commonsense recommendation that

effective decoding instruction become

a small part of every kindergarten and

first-grade reading lesson. The NRP

report also noted that such an emphasis

produced a moderate positive effect

on later decoding performance but a

trivial positive effect on later reading

comprehension. The report noted

that no significant positive effects for

decoding emphasis lessons were found

for students, including struggling

readers, beyond first grade.

Linked to this systematic phonic

emphasis was the entrepreneurial

recommendation to include decodable

texts as an essential element of a

scientifically based reading instructional

plan. However, no research indicated

that decodable texts were necessary or

useful in beginning reading instruction

(Allington & Woodside-Jiron, 1998;

Hoffman, Sailors, & Patterson, 2002).

Research conducted later (Jenkins,

Peyton, Sanders, & Vadasy, 2004) found

that decodable texts and predictable

texts produced the same reading

outcomes for first graders in 11 urban

schools when the decoding lessons were

constant for both groups of children.

Still, many, many schools had already

purchased decodable texts and placed

them in students’ desks.

Another related curricular shift was

a focus on teaching young children

to pronounce decodable nonwords

(also known as nonsense syllables).

This was, supposedly, a true test of

decoding prowess, which was touted

as the solution that was needed. Along

with this focus came assessments

that measured how accurately and

quickly children could pronounce

nonsense words. It never occurred to

anyone that having children attempt

to pronounce nonsense words might

undermine their use of cross-checking

and other self-regulating strategies

when they finally moved on to actual

texts (Pressley, 2002; Walmsley, 1978).

Children can be taught to pronounce

nonsense words, but this should

not be confused with teaching them

“In the recent past, entrepreneurial documents

(as in ‘buy our stuff’) proliferated, masquerading

as research summaries.”

“Children can be taught to pronounce nonsense

words, but this should not be confused

with teaching them something useful as

developing readers.”

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something useful as developing

readers.

None of this is to suggest that

children don’t need to learn to decode.

Effective decoding proficiency is a

hallmark of good beginning readers, but

it is hardly the only hallmark. However,

as the NRP noted, there are many

ways to develop decoding proficiencies

in young children. That is, there is no

single method of teaching decoding that

has been shown to be the most effective

approach. Cunningham (2011) argued

that:

The key conclusion of this research is that children do need systematic phonics instruction, but there is no one best way to teach phonics. This conclusion is disturbing to those who would like for there to be a specified best way so that everyone could be mandated to do it that way. (p. 221)

Every primary-grade teacher needs to

know how to teach several decoding

approaches effectively—several because

no single approach works for every

child, and effective teachers adapt

their teaching until they locate the

best method for developing decoding

proficiencies for each child.

There is more to do than simply

helping primary-grade teachers

develop the expertise in providing

explicit decoding lessons. Fostering

phonemic awareness is a critical aspect

of emergent literacy development. It isn’t

clear why primary-grade teachers rarely

use inventive writing in kindergarten

and first grade, but we have good

evidence, as Adams (1990) noted almost

25 years ago:

The evidence that inventive spelling activity simultaneously develops phonemic awareness and promotes understanding of the alphabetic principle is extremely promising, especially in view of the difficulty with which children are found to acquire these insights though other methods of teaching. (p. 387)

Inventive writing works, in large

part, because as Adams also noted,

instruction in letter–sound relationship

is of little value or utility unless the child

is interested in using those letter–sound

relationships to read or write (Adams,

1990). Inventive writing provides just

that motivation, and “sound stretching”

as a complimentary task focuses

attention on the individual phonemes

that compose English words (Clarke,

1988; Gough, 1998; Morris, Bloodgood,

Lomax, & Perney, 2003).

However, on my visits to primary-

grade classrooms, I have noticed almost

no inventive writing activity, while also

noting many decoding worksheets that

have been assigned and completed.

Unfortunately, those worksheets are

largely worthless and instead make

up what Adams (1990) called the

“inherently intractable, slow, inefficient”

(p. 292) basic phonics curriculum.

As I noted earlier, developing

effective early decoding proficiencies

is an essential task of primary-grade

teachers. Unfortunately, the emphasis

on decoding brought to U.S. classrooms

almost nothing of what we know about

how to accomplish this effectively and

efficiently.

Fidelity of Implementation Replaced Developing Effective Teachers as Our Goal The past decade has seen a return of the

commercial core reading program as

the primary guide for delivering reading

lessons. This is another example of the

entrepreneurial influences on teaching

children to read—entrepreneurial

because not a single reliable study

supports the use of any of the

commercial core programs (What Works

Clearinghouse [WWC], 2007).

In fact, of the 153 different reading

programs reviewed by the WWC,

only one had “strong evidence” that it

improved reading achievement! One!

That program was Reading Recovery, a

first-grade reading intervention program

that features a yearlong intensive

professional development component in

which teachers learn how 6-year-olds

get confused and begin to struggle with

reading acquisition.

Beyond the research reviews

provided by the WWC, McGill-Franzen,

Zmach, Solic, and Zeig (2006) studied

third-grade reading achievement in

Florida and found that it didn’t matter

“However, on my visits to primary-grade

classrooms, I have noticed almost no

inventive writing activity.”

“Of the 153 different reading programs reviewed

by the WWC, only one had ‘strong evidence’

that it improved reading achievement! One!

That program was Reading Recovery.”

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which of the core reading programs

school districts adopted; a quarter of

the children still failed the state reading

test and were held back in third grade.

Almost half of the children held back

the first year were held back for a third

year in third grade in Florida schools,

thus providing them with three years

of reading lessons from the same core

reading programs that had led to their

initial failure. Their failure to acquire

reading proficiency seems related to the

fact that no research supports the use

of core reading programs in fostering

reading growth.

Dewitz, Jones, and Leahy (2009)

analyzed five core reading programs

and noted that if developing children’s

reading comprehension was a goal,

then core reading programs had little to

recommend them. They noted that these

core reading programs don’t provide

the same amount of guided practice

as is provided in the research, don’t

consistently follow the gradual release

of responsibility model researchers

have developed, and don’t consistently

follow the research on providing explicit

instruction, nor on having teachers

relate strategies to one another or

make their impact on reading clear. In

other words, commercial core reading

programs typically provide lessons

that bear little or no relationship to the

research on fostering the development

of reading comprehension. The authors

concluded that “Fidelity to a flawed

program is not a virtue” (p. 122).

Nonetheless, fidelity to flawed core

reading programs became a goal in too

many schools, especially schools serving

low-income children. The irony here

is that this was done in the name of

“scientifically based, reliable, replicable

research.” This is ironic because no

research existed then, or exists now,

to suggest that maintaining fidelity to

a core reading program will provide

effective reading lessons. Instead of

focusing on what research has identified

as the critical factor in the quality of

reading lessons offered, the expertise

of the teacher (Nye, Konstantopoulos,

& Hedges, 2004; Stuhlman & Pianta,

2009), in the past decade, federal, state,

and district policies have focused on

mandating the use of an approach that

has generated no support in the research

on teaching beginning readers.

Too Often We Don’t Have Expert Teachers Working With Struggling Readers Too often, struggling readers work

with paraprofessionals in their

reading intervention services. This is

unfortunate because paraprofessionals

are usually the least expert adults

working with children in schools. Over

a decade ago, the federal Title I program

evaluation noted:

Progress in using Title I to support improved instructional practices at the school-level remains limited by the continued use of paraprofessionals who provide instruction—particularly in the highest-poverty Title I schools.... Phasing out their use in instruction and promoting their use as parent liaisons or in administrative functions should be a priority. (United States Department of Education, 1999)

However, if any change has occurred

in Title I programs over the decade

since that indictment was written, it

is that paraprofessionals continue to

provide an even greater proportion

of Title I reading interventions. The

aforementioned concern was driven

by a continuing series of research

reports noting that paraprofessional-led

reading interventions rarely produced

the accelerated reading growth

necessary if one ever hopes to turn

struggling readers into achieving readers

(Anderson & Pellicier, 1990; Boyd-

Zaharias & Pate-Bain, 1998; Croninger

& Valli, 2009; Puma et al., 1997; Rowan

& Guthrie, 1989; Slavin, Lake, Davis, &

Madden, 2011; Wasik & Slavin, 1993).

Nonetheless, paraprofessionals

working in schools now far outnumber

available reading specialists. Again,

National Center for Educational

Statistics (NCES; 2004) Schools and

Staffing Survey data indicated that

there were 29,000 individuals who were

working as reading specialists in U.S.

schools, but only one-third of those

individuals reported holding a graduate

degree with an emphasis on reading.

This federal agency concluded that

the typical reading specialist had less

educational preparation in their field

than did other specialists working in

U.S. schools. Most U.S. schools, then,

employ few teachers who know much

about reading development or how to

facilitate it. The NCES data suggest that

for every school that employs a reading

specialist with appropriate graduate

preparation, there will be 10 schools or

more that have no such person on their

staff.

I suggest that U.S. schools will

rarely deliver high-quality reading

lessons that struggling readers need

until every school employs multiple

reading specialists who have earned a

“This is ironic because no research existed

then, or exists now, to suggest that maintaining

fidelity to a core reading program will provide

effective reading lessons.”

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graduate degree with the appropriate

reading emphasis. U.S. schools will not

deliver high-quality lessons if there is a

continued reliance on paraprofessionals

to deliver reading lessons in intervention

programs, either through Title I or

special education programs. We have

too much evidence that expertise in

reading matters for any child who is

struggling while learning to be literate.

Stuhlman and Pianta (2009) reported

that less than a quarter (23%) of first-

grade teachers provided high-quality

reading lessons, lessons of the sort that

might enable every student to complete

first grade as a successful reader. They

also noted that almost as many teachers

offered low-quality reading lessons

that would enable few students to be

successful readers at the end of the

year. Scanlon, Gelzheiser, Vellutino,

Schatschneider, and Sweeney (2010)

and McGill-Franzen, Allington, Yokoi,

and Brooks (1999) demonstrated the

potential powerful effect that targeted

professional development can have on

the reading instruction provided by

kindergarten and first-grade teachers. In

both studies, emergent readers at risk for

becoming older struggling readers were

largely eliminated after their teachers

had participated in 30 or more hours of

targeted professional development, in

addition to having classroom coaching

available to support their efforts to

become truly effective reading teachers.

Vellutino and Scanlon (2002) noted

that some primary-grade children who

are struggling are easy to remediate

and turn into achieving readers. These

children who began kindergarten at

risk of reading failure became achieving

readers with just two weekly sessions of

one-on-one expert tutoring during their

kindergarten year. A second group is a

bit more difficult to bring up to grade

level; these children improved as a result

of the kindergarten tutorial but were still

at risk entering first grade. However,

after about 12–14 weeks of expert

tutoring in first grade, they had become

achieving readers.

A third group of children needed

more than 12–14 weeks of tutoring in

first grade to become achieving readers,

and some needed a full first-grade year

of expert tutoring to become achieving

readers. However, virtually every child

in these schools could be brought up to

grade-level reading performance when

they received sufficient expert tutoring.

Furthermore, most of these formerly

at-risk readers maintained their on-level

reading achievement at least through

the end of fourth grade.

Not at all children find learning to

read an easy accomplishment. Some

children need more expert instruction

and need more reading lessons than

others if they are to be expected to

succeed as readers. The work of Vellutino

et al. (1996), that of Mathes et al. (2005),

and that of Phillips and Smith (2010)

provide powerful testament to the

potential of expert reading lessons as

the solution to the problems U.S. schools

are experiencing with too many children

who find learning to read difficult.

Struggling Readers Are Often Asked to Read Texts That Are Too Difficult Struggling readers are often asked to

read text that is far more difficult for

them to read than the texts their better

reading peers are assigned (Allington,

2012). Since Betts (1946) first established

the criteria for optimum text difficulty,

there have been a number of studies

validating the potential power of

engaging children in reading where

their accuracy is high.

Ehri, Dreyer, Flugman, and Gross

(2007), for instance, noted that the

reading development of primary-grade

struggling readers who were tutored

“appeared to be explained primarily by

one aspect of their tutoring experience—

reading texts at a high level of accuracy,

between 98% and 100%” (p. 441).

Likewise, O’Connor and colleagues

(2002) found that sixth-grade struggling

readers benefitted more when tutors

used reading level–matched texts than

when they used grade-level materials.

Jorgenson, Klein, and Kumar (1977)

reported that struggling readers were

more likely to be engaged when the

texts they were reading better matched

their reading levels as compared with

engagement when texts were at grade

level. Gambrell, Wilson, and Gantt

(1981) reported the same results, as

did Fisher and Berliner (1985) and

Anderson, Evertson, and Brophy (1979).

In short, too many struggling readers

have desks full of grade-level texts that

they cannot read accurately, texts that

will foster neither engaged reading nor

reading development.

It is the better readers in U.S.

classrooms who daily engage in much

high-success reading activity (98%

accuracy or higher) and who develop

“U.S. schools will not deliver high-quality

lessons if there is a continued reliance on

paraprofessionals to deliver reading lessons

in intervention programs, either through

Title I or special education programs.”

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into our good readers. In too many

classrooms, their struggling reader peers

engage in daily hard reading activities

and continue to flounder as readers. As

Adams (1990) noted decades ago, “The

most important activity for developing

literacy is that of inducing students to

read independently. Yet, when a text is

difficult for children, they comprehend

little, learn little, and tire quickly” (p.

295).

Reading with 98% accuracy, or

better, may seem to imply providing

texts that are too easy to foster reading

development. However, consider that if

adults typically read texts at this level

of difficulty, that would mean they

would encounter approximately six

words on every page of a paperback

novel they had not seen before

and would have to work out the

pronunciation. The problem here is

that most adults don’t encounter such

a word in almost any text they read!

In fact, most adults consider texts they

can read with only 98% accuracy as

hard texts. Most adults will work to

avoid reading any such difficult text.

They will look for alternative texts,

texts that are easier—texts they can

read accurately without actually using

their decoding abilities.

Struggling readers just participate

in too little high-success reading

activity every day. This is one reason

so few struggling readers ever

become achieving readers. We could

change that, but such change runs

counter to the dominant one-size-

fits-all entrepreneurial curriculum

framework that dominates schools

today and seems the dominant model

for the future (National Governors

Association Center for Best Practices &

Council of Chief State School Officers,

2010). It is our struggling readers who

will continue to pay the price for such

ill- begotten plans.

Minimizing the Time Spent on Independent Reading During the School Day Although we have hundreds of

correlational studies reporting that

better readers spend more time

engaged in silent reading of self-

selected books (see Krashen, 2004, for

a review of these studies), the NRP

(2000) only examined experimental

studies in which the volume of reading

was manipulated. There are fewer of

these studies for reasons that should

be obvious. The NRP reported on the

dearth of experimental studies and

concluded that “based on the existing

evidence, the NRP can only indicate

that while encouraging students to read

might be beneficial, research has not

yet demonstrated this in a clear and

convincing manner” (p. 3–3).

Pearson (2007) noted that

the problem the NRP had with

independent reading was that there

was not a large number of randomized

field trials, so they concluded there

was no evidence to support the

efficacy of school-based programs

that promote independent reading.

However, there was evidence from

a few small-scale experiments, from

naturalistic epistemological studies,

from best-practice studies, from many

correlational studies, and from studies

for which the research was on foreign

populations that did not speak or

read English. He pointed out that the

situation was very different from saying

“no evidence” was available to support

school-based independent reading.

However, Armbruster and colleagues

(2001), in their widely distributed

booklet entitled Put Reading First, went

a step further and recommended that

“rather than allocating instructional

time for independent reading in the

classroom, encourage your students

to read more outside of school” (p. 29).

This guidance effectively removed

independent reading during the school

day.

Cunningham and Stanovich (1997)

noted that “individual differences in

exposure to print can predict differences

in growth in reading comprehension

ability throughout the elementary

grades and thereafter” (p. 940). They

found that differences in early reading

proficiency predicted differences in how

much children read, which predicted

10 years later who would be a good

reader and who wouldn’t.

Much of this debate centers on

the potential role of self-teaching,

or learning without lessons. Self-

teaching is one of those largely ignored

but potentially powerful aspects of

engaged reading. I think it is clear

“Struggling readers

just participate in

too little high-success

reading activity

every day.”

“They found that differences in early reading

proficiency predicted differences in how much

children read, which predicted 10 years later who

would be a good reader and who wouldn’t.”

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that vocabulary knowledge is largely a

product of independent engaged reading

(Stahl & Nagy, 2006). However, there is

also evidence that almost everything,

from phonemic awareness, to phonics,

to comprehension, is developed through

independent reading and writing

(Allington, 2009a).

Our most recent study examining

the self-teaching hypothesis involved

providing 12 free self-selected books

every summer to children from low-

income families (Allington et al., 2010).

What this study found was that we could

eliminate the summer reading loss that

produces most of the reading achievement

differences found between the children of

low- and middle-income families in U.S.

schools. The poor children to whom we

provided free self-selected books gained

reading achievement during the summer

months, whereas the control group of

children who did not receive the books

lost ground, or experienced summer

reading loss.

Our intervention provided only the

free books; there was no corresponding

reading instruction attached to the book

distribution. Nonetheless, even without

summer reading lessons, just reading

during the summer months fostered

reading growth! The observed summer

reading development equaled the

achievement growth found in an earlier

meta-analysis of the effects of summer

school on reading achievement (Cooper,

Charleton, Valentine, & Muhlenbruck,

2000). The experimental evidence is

clearer today perhaps than a decade

ago that the actual volume of reading

activity is an important component in

the development of a myriad of reading

proficiencies. Still, however, schools

seem to largely ignore independent and

voluntary reading as important aspects of

their curricular and instructional plans.

Struggling Readers Are Assigned Less Reading But Do More Worksheets In addition to limiting the volume of

independent reading that children do

during the school day is the evidence

that we do not design lessons so

that those who are struggling read

more every day than their peers who

have successfully developed reading

proficiency. That is, we fill struggling

readers’ days with tasks that require

little reading. If we want to foster

reading development, then we must

design lessons that provide the

opportunities for struggling readers to

actually read. Torgesen (2004) made a

similar argument:

Schools must focus powerfully on preventing the emergence of early reading weaknesses—and the enormous reading practice deficits that result from prolonged reading failure—through excellent core classroom instruction and intensive, explicit interventions for children who are identified through reliable indicators as at risk of failure. (p. 365)

For any number of reasons, struggling

readers in U.S. schools do far less

reading than good readers. Some

of this, undoubtedly, has to do with

reading motivations. That is, children

who struggle with reading engage in

less voluntary reading than do good

readers. However, we have convincing

evidence that the design of reading

lessons differs for good and poor readers

in that poor readers get more work on

skills in isolation, whereas good readers

get assigned more reading activity

(Allington, 1980; 1983; 2002; Allington

& McGill-Franzen, 1989; Collins, 1986;

Cummins, 2007; Valli & Chambliss,

2007; Vaughn & Linan-Thompson, 2003).

Linked to engaging in less reading

during reading instruction is the fact

that struggling readers also do more

oral reading during their lessons than

do better readers. Much of this oral

reading is done in the round robin oral

reading style (Allington, 1983; Allington

& McGill-Franzen, 2010). This occurs

even though round robin reading has

been criticized as a lesson component

(Ash, Kuhn, & Walpole, 2008; Rasinski

& Hoffman, 2003) and shown to be a

less effective use of instructional time

than other alternatives (Taylor, Pearson,

Peterson, & Rodriguez, 2003).

A primary problem with the round

robin reading activity is that only a

single child is reading while others in

the instructional group are, at best,

following along as their classmate

reads aloud. In silent reading activity,

everyone is engaged in reading, so

“We have convincing evidence that the design of

reading lessons differs for good and poor readers

in that poor readers get more work on skills in

isolation, whereas good readers get assigned