Word decoding in recent research: issues, procedures, and materials

¶ … Decoding: Identifying Improved Techniques and Approaches for Helping Children Learn to Read

Because reading is essential to overall academic success, one of the most serious and explosive issues in the United States today is how to meet the educational needs of an increasingly diverse population of students with a wide range of developmental needs. The situation is urgent as well, since current trends in educational achievement suggest that millions of students will not acquire the education necessary to fully participate in the economic and political aspects of society. Additionally, the inequality that results from differences in the educational achievement of children is likely to further widen the gap between the rich and poor. Children cannot learn to read without an understanding of phonics.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (1996) points out that all children must know their ABCs and the sounds that letters make in order to communicate verbally. Therefore, the question in early childhood reading programs should not be whether to teach "phonics" or "whole language learning," but rather how to teach phonics in context instead of in isolation so that young learners make the appropriate connections between letters, sounds, and meaning.

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to identify the issues, research, procedures and materials that are related to the recent findings on word decoding.

Structure. This study employs a critical review of the scholarly and relevant literature concerning reading and decoding to determine what role, if any, the small group decoding instruction plays in the improvement of reading achievement for students. Determining the importance of this relationship has implications for how to effectively increase student achievement as well as how resources are allocated to achieve the best results. Given the current achievement gap between proficient readers and non-readers, the findings of this study will as a starting point, diminish this disparity and will ultimately help create more and better life-long readers. This research is significant in several ways. First, it addresses a crucial issue, important not only to school success, but the success of the public school system. It also addresses a problem that is widespread, and impacts most of America's public school students. School success seems to be an important precursor to success in careers. Therefore this study impacts not only success in school but throughout later life.

The need clearly exists and intervention programs in reading can greatly benefit struggling readers in this country, as most of them go to public schools that do not routinely offer such programs.

Review of the Relevant Literature

Background and Overview. Differences in the academic performance of children appear early. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP) (1996) reported that students from low socio-economic backgrounds and many minority students consistently achieve below the national average in reading skills. Unfortunately, there is no relief as students continue on through the grade levels. In fact, according to the NAEP study, the gap widens. The longer some children stay in school, the greater the discrepancy between their educational performance and that of white and middle-class students. Steadily and inexorably, the chances for academic achievement diminish for poor and minority students as they are seemingly put on the paths toward failure. The elementary grades, subsequently, are an essential time for students to gain much needed literacy skills. When these skills are not acquired intervention mechanisms need to be put into action quickly if we, as educators, expect to change outcomes.

There can be no doubt that basic literacy and solid grounding in reading and writing skills are critical to academic performance and future success in higher education and continuing careers (Neuman & Bredekamp, 2000). In recent years, there has been a growing interest in improving children's reading and writing skills at an early age, to prevent the failures that lead to high-school dropouts rates and remedial English programs for many first-year college students. However, the teaching of reading, unlike any other topic in education, has generated much public debate. Because reading is an essential aspect of every child's learning, it has been and continues to be the focus in schools and political arenas. Differences in reading ability can be a mirror for societal discrepancies in jobless rates and wages. The achievement gap between affluent and poor and minority children in reading is therefore a matter of special concern for educators.

Research. Today, educators are faced with a number of challenges when choosing an appropriate reading program for adolescents. Based on the integrated nature of reading, together with the fact that most such programs only address one component of reading, determining which intervention is most appropriate for the needs of students requires a careful assessment of their needs and which interventions have been shown to be effective. According to Scheffel, Shroyer and Strongin (2003), this decision is made all the more difficult because of the lack of research into adolescent reading; however, the use of phonics instruction itself is by no means a new phenomenon and date to the mid-20th century.

The 1950s and 1960s represented the early era of teaching phonics by rules, where teachers would emphasize the written symbols of letters and combinations of letters sound like. It was believed that the child could utilize these rules to decode new and previously unseen words -- the "a" in "apple" would help the child read the "a" in "cat"; the "sh" in "rush" would assist in decoding the "sh" in "bush." In the early 1970s, it was already understood that our basic twenty-six-letter alphabet, if it included sounds represented by more than one letter, "ou," "th," and "ng," for instance, consisted of at least fifty-two major spelling units; thirty-two consonant units and twenty vowels. Further research identified 211 different ways that spelling units -- "gh," "oy," and "ch," as in "ghost," "ploy," and "rich,"-- could be related to different soundings of similar spellings -- "ph" as in "telephone" and "haphazard."

This study resulted in a 166 basic rules for teaching phonics (Itzkoff, 1996). Even all of these rules failed to cover all of the bases, and approximately 10% of the words that 6- to 9-year-old children encounter in their reading in the first years of schooling (over 6,000 one- and two-syllable words), were still exceptions to the 166 rules (Itzkoff, 1996).

Clearly, no ordinary child should be compelled to undergo learning that many rules and exceptions in order to learn how to comprehend language at an early age. "Just imagine what happens to children who are attempting to work their way through a sentence using systematic phonics, even with some efficiency. They must struggle against time through the sentence, before their short-term memory gives out. Then they have to bring to the front of their minds rules that were memorized earlier" (Itzkoff, 1996). In this regard, children are not only trying to read the meaning of the words, they are also trying to decode to sound and think about the rules that apply as they sound them out. Today, it is established that to sound out, no matter how many absolute rules the child learns, the unique meaning of the word will continue to be defined by the sounded-out pronunciation. According to Itzkoff, this is the tedious regimen that is required of a young novice reader who is forced to use the pedagogical rules of systematic phonics. In reality, in order to be a truly fluent reader, the transition from sight to meaning must be rapid and automatic. "For the child taught solely through systematic phonics instruction, the only result can be memory breakdown and mental fatigue, and ultimately, revulsion for the reading experience" (Itzkoff, 1996). According to Nicholson and Tan (1997), reading is a multicomponent skill in which the reader has to use a number of different cognitive processes involving word recognition, access of word meanings, parsing of sentences, semantic analysis of sentences, and interpretation of the overall text. A number of these linguistic processes are already automatic in that they demand little or no cognitive effort for the native speaker, inasfar as they are part of general language comprehension. However, one process that is not automatic, and one that must be taught to beginning readers, is word recognition. This is a skill that takes several years to learn, and even then most pupils will not have the speed and fluency of skilled adult readers (Gough & Hillinger, 1980). Nevertheless, there is more to the overall picture than that and the relationship between fast decoding and comprehension is not simply that the faster students read, the better they will comprehend. In fact, Carver (1990) showed that individuals increase their comprehension when they are provided with additional time to read. This adjustment serves to take into account the influence of text difficulty because some texts will require more or less time to comprehend. The concept of verbal efficiency, though, applies only to word recognition, which needs to be automatic, thereby enabling full use of a student's cognitive resources for comprehension and these processes may involve varying amounts of time, depending on the difficulty of the text (Gough & Hillinger, 1980).

The automatization of word recognition generally comes after a long period of extensive reading practice (Nicholson & Tan, 1997). In their study, Nicholson and Tan investigated the automization of word recognition in 42 below-average readers, between 7 and 10 years of age. The subjects were given single-word training, phrase training, or no training. These researchers determined that trained children learned to decode target words quickly and accurately, using flashcards; by contrast, untrained children only discussed the target words and read them once. In this study, trained and untrained children read aloud passages that contained target words and were tested on their comprehension; they found that trained children had better comprehension than did the untrained children when questioned about passages and asked to retell them. These results suggest that an emphasis on rapid word recognition can benefit poor readers improve the decoding transition from sight to meaning (Nicholson & Tan, 1997).

The majority of studies to date have examined effective strategies for younger students and have generalized the effectiveness of this information to older students; consequently, funding is primarily provided to establish and research early intervention and elementary school programs (Moje, 2000). When this type of research is conducted, the studies frequently lack the components of reliable research, such as control groups, long-term intervention to show progress, consistency of instruction, and adequate subject size (Scheffel et al., 2003); however, the most consistent use of control groups and scripted intervention to date has been reported for reading and decoding programs (Alexander et al., 1991). In their book, Learning to Read (1991), Perfetti and Rieben confirm that understanding how children learn to read, and particularly how children are taught to read, continue to be problems of scientific interest and sustained pedagogical debate.

The fundamental question involved are fairly straightforward. How do young learners eventually come to make sense out of squiggly lines on a page? However, a number of further issues emerge from this simple question. When children learn to read, is it largely an extension of the already acquired language abilities to print, and if so, does a new type of code comprise this extension? If it does not, what is the precise nature of the new learning involved? "The questions multiply" (Perfetti & Rieben, 1991, p. vii) but fortunately, there has been considerable research progress in addressing some of these issues in the recent past. While it can be maintained that there is still insufficient credible theory concerning the acquisition of reading that is both specific in detail and developmentally sensitive to the long-range nature of the acquisition process, there has been a great deal learned about the basic processes that take place as part of learning to read.

To date, one of the most important findings has been that learning to read requires mastering the system by which print encodes the language (known as the orthography) (Perfetti & Rieben, 1991). In turn, mastering this element requires a child to achieve understanding of how the spoken language actually operates. "If the child is learning to read an alphabetic orthography, then this mastery specifically requires that the child come to appreciate, at some level, that the speech stream contains units that correspond to the orthographic units" (Perfetti & Rieben, 1991, p. vii). Nevertheless, in spite of these findings, the controversies continue long after the debate has been resolved empirically concerning whether children should be taught to decode and whether phonological awareness is significant. A number of reading specialists continue to be trained in the school of whole word instruction, as well as its extension into whole language; these types of approaches may be relevant and effective to the extent that they allow the principles of decoding, particularly the alphabetic principle, to be learned by the child; however, in some of their purest versions, these pedagogical approaches tend to ignore much of what has been learned in research on reading (Perfetti & Rieben, 1991).

As noted above, researchers on both the phonics-based and whole-language approaches to reading instructions have been at war over the course of many years. A truce of sorts in this regard has developed with recent research, such as Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998), which confirms that the teaching of reading requires concrete skill instruction, including phonics and phonemic awareness (awareness of the separate sounds in words), contained in enjoyable reading and writing experiences using authentic literature that facilitates the construction of meaning. This balanced literacy instruction unites the best of phonics instruction and the whole-language approach to teach both skills and meaning to meet the reading needs of individual children.

According to Itzkoff (1996), educators and parents naturally want children not merely to decode the visual graphemes (letters), to their sound equivalents, but also to create words and sentences out of them. "After all, we read to gain meaning from print, not merely to hear the sounds embedded in the letter combinations. Phonics instructions should give the child the easiest version of the regularity in sight to sound that exists in our written English" (Itzkoff, 1996, p. 37). In light of the widening gap in achievement in reading among poor and minority students and their white and middle-class counterparts, many educators are advocating a return or at least a renewed emphasis on phonics instruction. This current retreat "back to basics" is by no means a cure-all to the reading problems that afflict so many students. Phonics must not be taught as a separate "subject" area with an emphasis on drills and mere rote memorization and the key to effective phonics instruction is a balanced approach and attention to each child's individual needs (National Association for the Education of Young Children 1996).

In order to accomplish this goal, teachers must keep in mind several key points, according to Strickland (1998): First, teaching phonics is not the same as teaching reading; phonics is a merely a tool for readers to use. Second, reading and spelling require much more than just phonics; spelling strategies and word-analysis skills are equally important. Third, memorizing phonics rules does not ensure application of those rules; teaching children how to use phonics is different from teaching them about phonics. Fourth, learners need to see the relevance of phonics for themselves in their own reading and writing" (Stricland, 1998, p. 11). However, according to Itzkoff, phonics decoding to sound and then to words and meaning is not an instantaneous process. "Either listen to a five- or six-year-old read by this process or try to mimic this approach as an adult, and you will readily understand the basic drawback. It is slow going. Too often, the child will forget the words at the beginning of the sentence before she has finished decoding to the end, and therefore lose the general meaning of the entire sentence" (1996, p. 37). This is because young children have not developed the memory skills required to accomplish the smooth transition from seeing the word and understanding its meaning.

Procedures and Materials. According to McGuinness and McGuinness (1998), the creators of the Phono-Graphix approach to teaching children to read, learning to read is the most important thing children undertake during the school years. Learning to read allow children to share the information that others have written down. "It will allow him to share his own experiences with others, to put his questions, his beliefs, his thoughts and dreams on paper. It will offer him hours of enjoyment, decrease his likelihood of depression, unemployment, and low self-esteem" (McGuinness & McGuinness 1998, p. 1). Equally important to the student, learning to read is just one of those things that everyone else can do too that demonstrates capability to enter into the realm of the educated world (McGuiness & McGuiness, 1998). In their book, Reading Reflex, the authors point out that the Phono-Graphix to teaching children to read uses what they already know -- the sounds of language -- and teaches them "sound pictures" (or letters) that represent those sounds.

Phonographix (McGuinness, & McGuinness, 1998) is a newer program based on Orton-Gillingham ideas. When this approach is implemented with students ranging in age from 6 to 15 years, Phono-graphix instruction in one study resulted in significant gains in word recognition and word attack after 12 hours of intervention. Two years after the initial intervention, a survey of parents indicated that the subjects were no longer identified as learning disabled and all had improved grades (McGuiness, McGuiness, & McGuiness, 1996).

The theoretical underpinnings of Phono-Graphix are straightforward and sensible, a factor that may account for its rapid spread and popularity among teachers. The authors base the Phono-Graphix approach on the premise that the missing piece of reading instruction is code knowledge. This book is about how to teach a code and the best way for children to learn it. The code used in the book maps 26 symbols to nearly 40 sounds; there are a number of different ways to spell most sounds, and many symbols stand for more than one sound.

The approach is based simply on the nature of the English code, the three skills needed to access that code, and teaching these in keeping with the way children tend to actually learn. Dias and Juniper note that the English written language is a "phonetic code," meaning that each sound in a word is represented by a symbol or "sound picture." "The English language contains sound picture that are made with:

one letter: such as the sound pictures in the word "cat," where each letter represents one sound (i.e., c-a-t);

two or more letters (such as "boat": b-oa-t, and "out": ou-t) (Dias & Juniper, 2002).

The Phono-Graphix system is based on the skills of blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation. At the first level, the child is introduced to all the sound pictures that represent one sound so that he learns to read and spell phonically regular three-letter words (e.g. van, bit, jug). Later on, the child learns most of the sounds that are represented by more than one picture (e.g. boat, slow) and then where some of the sound pictures are used for more than one sound (e.g. show, frown). These authors provide a five-goal framework to help teach the basic code to facilitate the learning process:

Goal No. 1: That your child understands that letters are pictures of sounds.

Goal No. 2: That she knows the correspondence between all the sounds and sound pictures that make up the basic code.

Goal No. 3: That she understands that spoken words are made up of sounds.

Goal No. 4: That she understands that written words are made up of sound pictures which represent the sounds in words.

Goal No. 5: That she understands that the sound pictures in written words occur in a sequence from left to right (McGuiness & McGuiness, 1998, pp. 51-9).

According to Cooper, Phono-Graphix in particular lends itself to the word level part of literacy instruction. Cooper reports that her students play games and use letter fans in their lessons which keeps them engaged, active and motivated by the success of reading and writing real words from the start. Further, a number of the Phono-Graphix activities employ multi-sensory strategies that are appropriate for a range of learning and teaching styles. The table-top objects in particular are popular with all the children and are a great stimulus for spoken language.

One of the features identified in successful schools has been a culture that promotes the introduction of phonics in curricula (Model schools, 2001). The culture at Cooper's school emphasizes the need for ongoing assessment and refinement of the phonics-based program to keep it fresh and relevant for the students. "Synthetic phonics is not a miracle cure. We are not complacent. As the children learn, we learn, and our teaching develops, but their enthusiasm is certainly infectious" (Cooper, 2001, p. 4). Cooper adds that she adapted the games suggested in published NLS resources, Additional Literacy Support and Progression in Phonics, to use with Phono-Graphix (1999). Dias and Juniper report that the issue of literacy has been a contentious topic for a number of years between those who support teaching children to read using a phonics approach and those who were advocates of using "real books" (Dias & Juniper, 2000). Furthermore, even among those educators who embrace one approach over the other, there remains controversy about which specific techniques and assessment tools are best. Based on their comparative study of Phono-Graphix use in the classroom, Dias and Juniper report that this approach is superior to those mandated by the U.K. government to support their literacy endeavor (known as the "National Literacy Strategy"). These authors note that despite the constraints introduced by the unpredictable nature and anticipated problems of undertaking real research such as this, some clear findings were shown throughout, including:

Both the experimental and comparison groups were well matched at the start of the project;

All groups made considerable progress during program delivery;

The Phono-Graphix group achieved significantly higher results than the comparison group on all but one of the literacy-based tests;

None of the children taught using the full Phono-Graphix program were identified as requiring additional literacy support; whereas in the comparison schools, teachers predicted that between 25 and 30% of the children would require such support the following year (Dias & Juniper, 2002).

The authors qualify these results by pointing out that this single piece of research was not able to confirm whether or not the Phono-Graphix intervention itself was the critical factor in the observed differences, nor whether such results would be achieved in the long-term. Despite these constraints, Dias and Juniper suggest that it would seem rationale that the successful ingredient of the program might well be the structured and incremental teaching of the specific skills of segmenting and blending phonemes. "It is hoped that a longer-term study will clarify some of the questions raised by this research. Only by tracking the cohort through formative literacy acquisition years can the efficacy of the Phono-Graphix program be evaluated objectively" (Dias & Juniper, 2002, p. 37). Nevertheless, while the benefits of such long-term longitudinal studies are well-established, millions of children continue to struggle with reading comprehension today. The high-stakes nature of academic testing today demands excellent comprehension in language arts as well as mathematics, social studies, and science; however, comprehension is not generally expressly taught. Pressley (1998), citing a study of the nature of literacy education in grades 4 and 5, said, "We observed explicit literacy instruction only rarely, despite a great deal of research in the past two decades on how to promote children's comprehension." He also noted that there is "a great deal of testing of comprehension but very little teaching of it" (p. 198). According to Fischer, it is unfortunate that most required comprehension activities such as those that are available in workbooks, questions at the ends of chapters, or questions at the completion of a selection in a literature book and so on, tend to assume that, if students do enough of them, their skills will naturally improve as a result; however, rarely does simply repeating an act allow students who do not know how perform the act correctly to learn how to do it correctly. For instance, Allington and Cunningham (1996) reported that, "Children are routinely asked questions after reading but are infrequently provided with demonstrations of the comprehension strategies needed to answer the questions posed" (p. 46). Similarly, Manzo, Manzo, and Estes (2001, p. 48) added, "Thinking is not completely, or even primarily, a function of intelligence. Instead, thinking is a myriad of strategies and cognitive habits that can be identified and taught through cognitive modeling (Fischer, 2003).