What Reading Means

Oftentimes at the secondary level, reading is getting meaning from text. Language arts teacher training programs almost exclusively focus on reading comprehension, with maybe a little fluency and vocabulary thrown into the mix. While this may seem to fit the majority of secondary readers, it doesn’t include all of them. It privileges those who have had neurotypical, middle-class, and/or native-English experiences. Those are also the people that teach most of our language arts classes. This becomes a problem when vast privilege in the area of English literacy biases us to assume that the students have and will learn literacy as we did.

Introduction to Teaching Reading

According to Achieve the Core’s “Reading as Liberation–An Examination of the Research Base,” there are actually five areas that when taught, accelerate reading growth.

• Foundational Skills
• Background Knowledge
• Vocabulary
• Writing with Evidence
• Reading Comprehension

These domains work together to accelerate reading growth for students. These are bulleted, not numbered, because they do not happen in linear fashion. A student does not need to master foundational skills before they can comprehend. When my daughter was a toddler, she comprehended the stories we read together with few foundational skills. Of course, if her foundational skills were neglected forever, she never would have unlocked delightful summer afternoons reading independently. She wouldn’t have experienced the confidence that comes from controlling your own literacy.

The reading wars were recently reignited, primarily at the elementary level. I am not here for metaphors of violence in education. Reading is such a rich, nuanced experience. We are lucky there are so many domains at our disposal that will connect with students. I’m thankful to the researchers who have examined these domains (though I’m always for more research!).

Foundational Reading Skills Strategies

Foundational skills are about learning the relationship between oral and written language. Children develop an awareness of the alphabet, the sounds (phonemes) represented by that alphabet, how those phonemes translate into written language (graphemes), high-frequency words, which are all put together to create fluency (a fluid, automatic, expressive reading of text). If students haven’t mastered foundational skills before reaching the secondary level, the abstract, multisyllabic words in their classes will prove difficult. I have listened to enough students read passages where they skip every multisyllabic word to know they have “Swiss cheese understanding” at best. I shudder to think what will happen when they must read a jury summons, sign a loan, or vote on a proposition. 

By combining engaging texts with clear rules for breaking down multisyllabic words, we can include students who most likely have a reading goal on their IEP emphasizing decoding or fluency (though sometimes these students are not identified for an IEP). Beginning English Learners are also included when working on foundational skills, especially if they speak a language with a very different phonetic system or come from a primarily oral language experience.  

On page 30 of Achieve The Core’s report, the authors continue, “In fact, the ability to read fluently resides in a completely different part of the brain; it is like a muscle that can grow stronger when exercised.” I love how this find divides the two. It shows how older students learn foundational skills best alongside grade-level content.

General Education Practices

• When introducing key multisyllabic words, preview them aloud and have students say the words back to you. Reinforce the words with reading, discussion, and writing. The more ways students encounter and use the words, the better!
• Check for understanding when students are reading. Have them mark words that they want to hear you say aloud (or show them how to use Google Read and Write to hear unknown words aloud). What matters most is that they also say the words aloud or at least go back and reread the words to internalize them.
• Have students play with content-rich sentences. Pull important sentences from course reading. Have students divide long sentences into shorter sentences, combine shorter sentences into longer sentences, or turn statements into questions (or vice versa).
• Incorporate 3 minutes of fluency practice daily. Mix in reading aloud while students actively follow along, partner read-alouds, choral reading (all read together), or repeated reading. One way to do repeated reading is simply to ask questions that invite students to reread to find the answer.
• Make sure your school has a way to systematically identify and teach foundational skills. I love a short-term, adolescent-respectful, research-based curriculum like Rewards. 

Ways to Build Background Knowledge

Practicing a skill in isolation (e.g. summarizing, tracking a theme/main idea, questioning) does not transfer to other texts because the knowledge demands are different across texts. Being able to summarize a children’s book will not help a student summarize an unrelated research article. Knowledge matters.

It doesn’t just matter for comprehension; it also increases student motivation. I have seen this firsthand from students who tell me, “We actually learn something in here!” In one study, there were also more substantial results for African-American and Latinx students. This may be because when a class intends to build knowledge, it gives everyone the same funds of knowledge. Without that intentionality, the course defaults to the teacher’s fund of knowledge, which in the U.S., is predominantly white, female, cis-gender, and heterosexual.

Intentionally building knowledge includes students who may or may not have a reading goal on their IEP for fluency and/or comprehension (though sometimes the students are not identified for an IEP but still reveal the need for fluency and/or comprehension development). Most English Learners need intentional knowledge building by their teachers.

General Education Practices

• Build conceptually-related text sets for students to read. For more tips on this, check out my Instagram post on the topic.
• Directly teach vocabulary that builds knowledge (specialized or general academic words that will recur in the text set and beyond).
• While building common funds of knowledge is one of the great democratic practices of school, so is welcoming and centering students’ personal funds of knowledge. Include authors and experts that represent your student populations. Connect school learning to community, cultural, and/or adolescent experiences.
• Read aloud sometimes. Students can access knowledge that they may not be able to read independently yet. You can editorialize to explain difficult concepts if their eyes start to glaze over:) 
• Provide opportunities for students to read book-length informational texts. This is a concept-builder in and of itself, but the diction of the author can also help students learn academic language used for research and argumentation. Check out my favorite book-length informational texts to share with students.

Relationship Between Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension

Vocabulary is the feature of complex text that causes students the most difficulty. In addition to general academic and specialized words that are directly taught, students learn new words in context when they are taught to notice words.

Vocabulary and knowledge are not the same. Knowledge has to do with the wider concepts and background information students would need that may or may not be reduced to discrete terminology. Focus reading around a cluster of texts that builds knowledge rather than hoping everyone in class has they prior knowledge to avoid perpetuating privilege.

Intentional vocabulary support includes everyone in the learning. As students move into more abstract coursework in high school, they will need intentional vocabulary building (almost every class has its own language!). Students especially needing this work may or may not have a reading goal on their IEP for fluency, vocabulary, and/or comprehension. Most English Learners will also be included by this instruction.

General Education Practices

• Build conceptually-related text sets. According to Cervetti’s 2016 study, this practice grows academic vocabulary at four times the rate of unrelated texts. By sustaining one topic students were able to learn more vocabulary than if the readings hopped between topics. With the knowledge repeating to some extent, their minds were free to handle the cognitive load of learning new words.
• Direct instruction on morphology. This is a fancy way of saying playing with how words change. For example, pull out a word that students may know in a different context with a different meaning and have them discuss how that applies to the new context (or how the meaning has shifted). Teach morphemes using word trees. Membean has some beautiful root trees. You could play this Family Feud-style where students must guess words on the tree. I have also had different class periods or groups brainstorm as many as they can in a cooperative/competitive way.
• Communal close reading and study of high-value words. This is essentially the same as my FREE four moves every literacy lesson plan needs template. All students read and then all students discuss the reading. Here are some of my favorite question stems for discussion that students could be taught to make for each other.
  • NEW WORD means DEFINITION. What might the word mean when the author says ________?
  • PART OF THE NEW WORD (e.g. pre-, -ism, bio-) means DEFINITION. What might NEW WORD mean?
  • The author writes ________. How might you define NEW WORD?

Importance of Evidence in Writing

Writing is the great solidifier. Because it requires a level of both cognitive and physical output, it helps students retain new vocabulary. Writing invites them back into the text (which builds fluency and comprehension). Finally, writing establishes the students as the authorities on their own reading. There is something official about even the most casual writing tasks. It brings students’ thoughts out of their heads in a somewhat permanent way. They see evidence before their very eyes that they read and can now communicate something meaningful about what they read. I want to heap up these experiences with my students to develop their voices as scholars, thought leaders, and artists. Basically every single student is included in classes that use writing for learning. Students needing writing acceleration may or may not have an IEP. They may be working on fluency, vocabulary, and/or comprehension. Most English Learners will need this support.

In short, students who can write about a subject have retained the foundation, knowledge, and vocabulary to produce in that subject. By bringing those first three accelerators along with writing, students can make significant reading gains.

General Education Practices

• Have students write at least weekly if not daily about the text they are reading. It doesn’t have to be long, but writing helps with content retention. Also, the more frequently students write, the more accustomed to it they become, which helps them establish a personal academic voice in writing.
• Teach students directly how to find and use evidence. This is the type of writing students should do most frequently to improve reading because it invites rereading and vocabulary internalization. It requires students to make decisions about what is important in the reading.
• Have students complete course-related research on subtopics of interest. Assuming students have learned how to use evidence in your course and had ample practice writing shorter tasks, this personalization brings relevance and agency to the content, allowing students to become specialists in areas they may have previously felt did not belong to them. 

Reading Comprehension

At the secondary level, “reading comprehension” becomes the catch-all diagnosis for any student that seems to be struggling with reading. Based on what I’ve outlined so far, you probably have a good idea why this is a bad idea.

In order to isolate “reading comprehension” as the actual issue, a teacher would need to be able to rule out foundational skills, background knowledge, and vocabulary gaps as equally culpable. While foundational skills needs are rarer in secondary, the content is so much more abstract that background knowledge or vocabulary could very well be causing the issue, no matter how many comprehension skills (e.g. summarizing, inferring, questioning) a student may be able to perform. 

And this makes total sense.

This quote from the Achieve the Core report continues, “it is not a cluster of observable skills. It exists in the reader’s mind. Scientists refer to this existence of comprehension in our mind as ‘representation” (59).

So what does reading comprehension really mean?

Attaining a mental representation of a text. This representation (i.e. reading comprehension) requires

• Surface-level understanding. Students must have the foundational skills to accurately recognize and fluently read words before they forget what they just read. They don’t need to be speed-readers. The reading just needs to flow.
• Text-based understanding. This includes understanding the text’s overall structure (e.g. play, poem, lab report, speech, equation) as well as understanding how individual sentences and paragraphs work. 
• A situation model. This is the ability to connect new reading to a reader’s existing knowledge so long as that new learning is relevant and accurate. This doesn’t work when a reader has a different model. For example, if you don’t know what a run means in a baseball article, you may struggle to graft that onto what you know of actual running. This simple concept can get complicated quickly. This is why asking students to make as many connections as they can to a text can actually distract them rather than help, something Nancie Atwell pointed out ages ago in The Reading Zone.  Connecting also may force students closer to triggering content than they may want to go.

Assuming that foundational skills, background information, and vocabulary are also being taught as needed, a teacher can teach reading comprehension by teaching the structure of the genre or sentences, as well as how to suppress irrelevant ideas or select relevant ideas. The latter is why writing (accelerator #4) is so important. That is a concrete practice in prioritizing and deprioritizing content. This instruction will yield greater understanding than telling students to practice one skill like inferring. As the Achieve the Core report states, “When that one-skill-at-a-time instructional method reigns supreme, students’ focus will become too narrow to develop a full model of the text” (61). In order to be constructed, the full model will require different types of information and skills.

The Standard of Coherence

Another area of research discussed is the “standard of coherence.” Basically, this is the expectation a reader has that the text will make sense. It will come as no surprise that strong readers have a higher standard of coherence. They expect it to make sense. When it doesn’t, they repair it. This self-fulfilling prophecy may be rooted in privilege (which begets more privilege). When readers don’t have those early wins (or underperform due to stereotype threat), they are less likely to expect the text to make sense. And another self-fulfilling prophecy takes shape.

When students are confused, we often tell them to bootstrap their way to understanding with one or two “reading comprehension skills,” but we have a collective responsibility for reading comprehension. Have we taught them what they need to know to understand the text or allowed pre-existing privilege to determine who will comprehend?

At the secondary level, we could potentially be unpacking more than a decade’s worth of a student’s “evidence that I don’t get it.” The student doesn’t know that this is actually evidence that collective responsibility excluded them. And again, this is where one-skill teaching fails: “Reading for a single purpose rather than understanding and gleaning information from text is a disjointed, incoherent approach, the opposite of what driving for coherence demands” (65).

I totally understand the instinct to pick one skill to reduce cognitive load, but it actually increases the cognitive load because it doesn’t support any other thing happening in the text. I also get that it’s a lot less time-consuming to tell students to do one thing in a school system where teachers’ needs for extended planning time are disregarded and devalued.

General Education Practices

• Communal close reading–in short, the FREE four-move literacy lesson plan template will set you up for this.
• Focus students’ attention on text cohesion and connective words (understanding how different parts of the text work together to build understanding).
• Ask questions and design writing tasks that help students sift relevant information from extraneous details.
• Use instructional decision-making based on the complexities of the text.

Elegant Reading Instruction

Teaching does not have to be complicated. It does need to be intentional. This allows you and your students to see the results of your (and their) hard work. It also releases you from the pressure to do all the things. Do what matters. Do it sustainably. 

To plan for all the accelerators with ease, use the FREE literacy lesson plan template. 

This is the template I use to teach all students in a sustainable, results-driven way.

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