Reading

Reading instruction began in the United States in the early and mid-1600s with the ABC method exemplified by the hornbook, a paddle-shaped board on which were inscribed the alphabet, a few syllables, and the Lord's Prayer. Webster's Blue-Backed Speller replaced the hornbook, but instruction retained an emphasis on the alphabet and the Bible. Webster's remained at the center of reading instruction for more than a century and served mainly the upper class, as few others attended school. Those who did not attend received their education by being read to by those who did. Thus, a focus of instruction was on oral reading skills.

When the United States expanded westward, the widely dispersed people could not be serviced by a few who attended school, and everyone, those on the eastern seaboard and elsewhere, needed to learn geography and history. In 1842, in an effort to make learning to read easy for the diverse students who now attended school, Horace Mann introduced his word-to-letters approach, which employed the opposite sequence for instruction as the letters-towords approach (that of the ABC method and Webster's). Eventually Mann's approach became the whole-word approach, where little attention was given to letters.

The most common texts during this time were the McGuffey Readers, 122 million copies of which were sold between 1836 and 1920. The selections not only taught history and geography but also praised the virtues of hard work and honesty. They were read orally in classrooms and were the only source of knowledge and literature for many Americans.

In 1875 Francis Parker entered the picture with his emphasis on silent reading for the purpose of greater understanding. The pronunciation of words while reading orally was no longer a sign of a good reader. When World War I began, however, 24.9 percent of the soldiers could not read and write well enough to perform the simple tasks assigned to them. Instruction needed to change, and John Dewey led the way with an emphasis on a child-centered curriculum designed to accommodate individual differences.

Discontent with the numbers of students who continued to experience difficulty in learning to read, however, led William S. Gray to move away from student-centered instruction to a model where all students received identical lessons. He developed basal readers and created the first manuals with instructional advice for teachers. His "Dick and Jane" series, launched in 1930s, consisted of passages with increasingly difficult words instead of selections of literature. His characters, drawn from successful, suburban families, became the symbols of reading instruction at the time when the United States was emerging from the depths of World War II.

In the 1960s many reading instructors, worried about the students who continued to experience difficulty, started to return to a version of the old ABC method; they placed great importance on the sounding out of words. Phonetically spelled words in reading instructional materials became increasingly popular. Selections became even further removed from the literature selections that were favored in previous decades.

Also in the 1950s and 1960s, the differences among students expanded dramatically, and the civil rights movement brought African Americans into the mainstream public schools. As always, the evolution of the nation influenced reading instruction; many students experienced difficulty, and the search for the best method of instruction continued. In 1968 Robert Dykstra conducted a nationwide survey to find the most effective means of reading instruction, but he concluded that teacher behaviors were more influential than any particular instructional method in determining student success as a reader.

A few years earlier, in 1965, Kenneth S. Good-man's report on miscue analysis practices started to influence instruction; teachers were no longer to correct every error a student made when reading orally. If an error did not affect meaning, it was considered a sign of good comprehension. In the late 1970s Dolores Durkin, in an effort to further refine comprehension instruction, observed in classrooms and found that teachers were not teaching students strategies to use in order to compose meaning as they read. Instead, teachers asked students questions to find out if they understood what they read.

Instruction in comprehension evolved as schema theorists studied the influence of students' previous experiences on their comprehension. Teachers started to focus more attention on the inferences students needed to draw between their prior knowledge and the texts they were reading. By the late 1990s dual emphases on phonemic awareness and composition brought both comprehension (the act of composing meaning) and skills (attention to the details of letters and words) to the forefront of reading instruction.

Research on Reading Instruction

The first research on reading instruction was in the form of surveys of teaching methods and was begun in the early 1900s. In 1915 the results of reading tests were first used to compare teaching methods, and in 1933 Gray used reading tests to measure improvements in several Chicago schools.

In 1963 researchers Mary C. Austin and Coleman Morrison surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. school administrators about reading instruction and found a high reliance on basal readers and ability grouping (separating students into reading groups based upon their reading achievement levels). They recommended that teachers use a wider variety of instructional approaches and more flexible grouping plans, as differences will exist in any group despite efforts to achieve homogeneity. This survey was modified and replicated in 2000 by James F. Baumann and colleagues, and the results were compared to the original. The results of the 2000 surveys showed that basals were being used in combination with trade books and that the predominant mode for instruction had become whole-class instruction. Thus, the 2000 survey hearkened back to the earlier study where the researchers found "teachers who ignore the concept of individual difference" (Austin and Morrison, p. 219).

Large-scale, systematic comparisons of various approaches to beginning reading instruction, using objective measures of outcomes, were conducted in the 1960s and 1970s. The U.S. Office of Education sponsored the Cooperative Research Program in First Grade Reading Instruction, finding that no one program or single instructional method was superior for all classrooms or teachers. Project Follow Through, a second government study of the same era, sought specifically to determine which instructional approaches worked best to foster and maintain the educational progress of disadvantaged children through the primary grades. Again, no one instructional approach was strong enough to raise reading test scores everywhere it was implemented.

The quest for the best methods of reading instruction has continued into the twenty-first century. In 1997 the U.S. Congress authorized a national panel to assess the effectiveness of various instructional approaches to teaching reading. The National Reading Panel (NRP) conducted a meta-analysis of the effects of scientific research (experimental or quasi-experimental research) on reading instruction. The NRP limited their review to the major domains of instruction deemed essential to learning to read by the National Research Council. These domains included alphabetics (phoneme awareness, phonics instruction), fluency (oral reading accuracy, speed, and expression), and comprehension (vocabulary instruction, text comprehension instruction, strategy instruction).

In the domain of alphabetics, the NRP reported that teaching children to manipulate phonemes in words was highly effective under a variety of teaching conditions with a variety of children. In addition, systematic phonics instruction produced significant benefits for students in kindergarten through the sixth grade. In the domain of fluency, the panel concluded that guided, repeated oral reading procedures yielded significant and positive impacts on word recognition, fluency, and comprehension across a range of grade levels. In the domain of comprehension, the panel concluded that vocabulary instruction led to gains in reading comprehension and that seven types of comprehension instruction were supported by the scientific research.

Another form of research in reading instruction consists of qualitative, descriptive research within classroom settings. It includes observational studies that link classroom procedures and interactions to student outcomes and teacher behavior. Such research has the potential to distinguish between the characteristics of an instructional method and how it is actually used. According to Rebecca Barr, descriptive research "complements the research on effectiveness by revealing how an instructional approach works and how teachers differ in using it" (2001, p. 406).

Classroom observational research linked critical features of the Project Follow Through studies to student outcomes. These studies revealed high correlations between the amount of time that students were engaged in academic tasks and their academic growth. The work of these researchers influenced much of the research on effective teaching practices conducted in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and other descriptive studies of reading instruction view teaching and learning as responsive, interactive forms of socially constructed activity, and such studies capture a more complete picture of instructional contexts than research labeled scientific does. Qualitative, descriptive research has revealed that interactive learning produces more growth than instruction in which students are passive. Active engagement appears to be more important that the exact method of reading instruction.

Reading Instruction within the Overall Curriculum

Prior to the 1980s reading instruction barely existed within the content areas of the curriculum; reading was taught during times of the day called reading and/or language arts. Within the content areas, students were given textbooks and were expected to be able to read them. But because one textbook did not accommodate the reading levels of all learners, secondary teachers often used the textbooks to determine the content they would teach and delivered lectures accordingly. Elementary students often engaged in round-robin reading as their way of using the text. At all levels, students wrote answers to endof-the-chapter questions, so that teachers could assess their student's retention of the content.

During the early 1980s the textbook began to lose its position as the sole source of subject area knowledge. Teachers started to use manipulatives (small objects such as beans and buttons that students count and move about into various groupings) to teach math, hands-on activities to teach science, and community resources to teach social studies. They supported this instruction with a variety of children's literature, rather than a single textbook. Based upon a new view of reading largely influenced by theories on meaning-making in reading that Goodman and Frank Smith put forth, even the basal readers used to teach reading started to contain more natural-sounding language.

In the 1990s falling test scores and a new political climate forced a reexamination of reading instruction within the curriculum. Researchers, teachers, administrators, and government officials formed a set of national education goals called Goals 2000. They did not agree, however, upon the approaches needed to meet these goals. Various approaches, therefore, continue to influence the direction of reading instruction in the curriculum.

One of these approaches advocates the teaching of a specific body of knowledge found within state curriculum standards. Educators create these standards to reflect the content they believe is essential to the formation of a common knowledge, and teachers use these standards to guide their instruction. Teachers across grade levels work in collaboration to ensure that the content builds in a manner that allows students to use prior knowledge and make meaningful connections across the curriculum. Teachers access online resources and handbooks for a multitude of instructional suggestions.

Thus, reading instruction related to state-directed content involves the use of textbooks, trade books, computer programs, lectures, demonstrations, specific writing models, and hands-on activities, thereby providing students with opportunities to learn the material in a variety of ways. Reading materials on many reading levels address much of this content, and schools provide additional support to students who struggle. In these various instructional arrangements, students learn the reading and writing strategies they need in order to learn about and share knowledge.

Another approach to reading instruction across the curriculum focuses on the contexts present in the classroom, rather than upon a body of content. Researchers and teachers explore interactions among the learners, the teacher, the classroom, and the texts. These interactions lead to instructional arrangements unique to individual classrooms, in which the students use their own knowledge, interests, and personal cultures to make the curriculum meaningful and to create new understandings.

In 1998 Vivian Gadsden endorsed this contextual approach in response to the increasing diversity of classroom populations. In her collaborations with primary-grade teachers, the teachers incorporated a wide range of literacy experiences specific to the cultures of the students and involved students' extended families and community in planning the endeavors. These literacy events crossed the curriculum, becoming part of the family histories students wrote with family members. Students compared their histories to texts found in the classroom, building critical literacy.

Similarly, students in some urban high schools study U.S. history in accordance with their personal histories. They move beyond textbooks, using personal artifacts, historical documents, magazine articles, and photographs in their compositions. In these different grade level contexts, reading instruction involves learners in making connections among various texts, themselves, and the world.

Text-based and context-based approaches continue to define the role of reading instruction in the curriculum during the early part of the twenty-first century. New programs advocating a core curriculum, developed outside the classroom, arise at the same time that teachers and researchers develop new instructional arrangements based upon classroom contexts. In 1992 Judith A. Langer and Richard L. Allington urged researchers to reconceptualize reading and writing instruction within the curriculum, to abandon fragmentation of study, and to consider "the relative roles of content, skills, discipline-specific thinking, and the student in the instructional agenda" (p. 717).

Trends, Issues, and Controversies

Increased immigration in the early twenty-first century is bringing more changes to U.S. schools. In 1993 Kathryn H. Au wrote about the need for teachers to consider the various forms of literacy that are significant in the lives of students of diverse backgrounds and to include critical literacy in their instruction.

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, brought the notion of critical literacy to his country in the late 1960s, and at the turn of the millennium his work began to influence reading instruction in the United States. It is becoming increasingly important for students to critique power relationships within U.S. society.

In 2002 Arlette Ingram Willis reported on her study of the complex relationships among literacy, knowledge, privilege, and power through the lens of one institution, the Calhoun Colored School in Alabama from 1892 to 1945. She showed how the school's white founders controlled the aspirations of the school's students. Willis acknowledged the failure of countless attempts to discover the best methods of reading instruction but implored educators to remember the relationship between knowledge and power. She urged literacy instructors to critically examine the ways by which they provide opportunity for all.

This call for complexity in instruction becomes even more complicated when the nature of research enters the picture. Of the three types of research on reading instruction, the scientific method has predominated since the early twentieth century. Increases in the quantity of experimental studies have paralleled increases in immigration and scientific advances, from the beginning (the Industrial Revolution) to the end (the Technological Revolution) of the twentieth century.

According to Barr, however, this methodology treats teaching as a unidirectional variable, "an activity introduced to observe its effect on some out-come" (2001, p. 406). While outcome-based research on reading instruction yields important information about the effectiveness of instructional approaches, it does not reveal how the instructional approach works and how teachers differ in using it. Observations are necessary to elucidate the reality that scientific methods are supposed to discover. Socioconstructivist approaches to research in reading instruction examine teaching and learning in an interactive context and allow interactions among the teacher, student, and text to be seen.

These approaches have their dangers too, for if all classrooms are unique, then teachers will never benefit from the generalizations made possible from broad-based conceptualizations of teaching that guide the critical decisions teachers make in providing instruction. Detailed descriptions are helpful when they show the day-to-day decisions teachers make when they select appropriate reading materials; achieve an effective balance of reading, writing, and word study instruction; differentiate instruction to meet diverse student needs; and empower students to take ownership of their own learning.

This call becomes complicated in the context of the standardized tests that influence reading instruction across the curriculum at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Given that many states use the results of the tests to determine school funding, teachers and school administrators often base the curriculum on the knowledge needed to answer specific items found within the tests. Teachers choose reading materials pertinent to the test content and focus reading instruction on retention of this material in the subject areas.

Educators use various kinds of reading materials to teach the above information, but textbooks occupy an important position in many classrooms. In 2000, however, Suzanne E. Wade and Elizabeth B. Moje reported on the lack of engagement of secondary school students in textbook reading. Wade and Moje advocated change and described classrooms that integrate the textbook with government documents, magazines, student-generated texts, novels, and hypermedia to provide students with opportunities to expand their perspectives on curricular concepts.

Also in 2000, the National Reading Panel reported on the lack of research into the use of technology in reading instruction in the curriculum. Given the workplace emphasis on accessing, processing, and communicating information via computers, and the increasing number of schools and homes with computers and Internet access, the roles of hypermedia and the Internet remain important areas for future exploration.