S7 E4 – The Top 5 Mistakes We Make When Using Decodable Texts

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Hello and welcome to the Structured Literacy Podcast. I'm Jocelyn Seamer coming to you from Pataway Burnie, Tasmania, and today we're diving into the practical side of using decodable texts effectively. In our last episode, we talked about what the research actually shows us about decodable text versus other types of texts. Today I want to get really practical. We're going to unpack what features make decodables effective, the biggest mistakes I see schools making, and most importantly, what you can do to get the most out of this resource. Before we get into all of that, let's examine a couple of ideas about decodables that I think get in the way sometimes of us having a sensible conversation about them.

Idea Number 1: Good and Bad Books

Idea number one, some books are good and some books are bad. And I've said this before and I will say it again and again and again as many times as is needed. Books are just books. They're bits of paper with words on them. Nothing more, nothing less. Now, I say this not because I don't think the distinction about the types of texts is important. Trust me, I absolutely do. But because if we're going to have a measured conversation about this issue, it's really helpful to take the emotion out of things and just take the judgement out of the whole conversation. Because we start by judging the books and we end up judging the people. And while ever we're judging others, and ourselves, we're never going to get anywhere. The question that needs to be answered isn't whether any particular type of book is good or bad, but rather when is a book most suitable for students to read at a particular point of their reading development? And if we answer this question using what we know from research and take a common sense approach to fill in the gaps where the research isn't as robust as we would like it to be, we're all going to be just fine, and so will our students.

Idea Number 2: Texts on a Continuum

The second idea that we need to address is that different texts exist on a continuum. So this idea says that decodables are at one end of a book continuum and that levelled texts in the traditional sense, that we've read books that have a number or a colour or a letter assigned to them, are at the other end and this is simply not the case. They are different types of books written for different purposes, and they do different things. There will be times when a student might be exclusively reading decodables. They will then have a time into the future where they will be reading only these other texts that I just call "mostly decodable" texts, and then there's a time where there's overlap for a particular purpose.

Decodables are temporary books that enable novice readers, regardless of age, to practice reading with the graphemes they know. They help students focus on and stay focused on the code, and they help them stay out of the guessing zone. What we want to avoid is texts that are full of patterns children haven't learned yet when they are novice readers. We also want to avoid there being nothing to work out, no surprises for a student that has the skills and knowledge to tackle that and work with it and learn from it.

Mistake Number 1: Not Letting Go of the Old

Now let's get into the biggest mistakes that I see being made in this area. Mistake number one is not letting go of old, I'm just going to call them, decoding strategies, the way we tell children to work to lift the words off the page. So this looks like using a decodable text, but not changing how we prompt students when they make an error. So if we're still prompting children to look at the picture and think about what makes sense before we prompt them to pay attention to the graphemes in the word, then we're undermining the entire purpose of the decodable text. When working with decodables, we need to consistently prompt students to sound it out and blend first, looking at all the letters, sounding them out and then putting them together. Now the research is clear on this that decodables improve decoding outcomes when decoding is emphasised. If we allow other cueing strategies to take over, we're basically turning a decodable into just another text where children practice guessing.

Mistake Number 2: Both Levelled and Decodable Texts Together

Mistake number two is giving novice readers both levelled and decodable texts at the same time. As I've already said, and you know, decodables are a code practice tool, they're brilliant at what they do, giving children high success opportunities to apply their phonics knowledge and practice reading those irregular high-frequency words that are necessary. But they don't do everything. They don't build vocabulary on their own, and they don't help children work with sophisticated sentence structure or engage with rich narrative language. That's not their job. Levelled text or less controlled texts do have a role as a bridge to uncontrolled texts, that's why I call them mostly decodable. They provide the opportunity for using set for variability and they can have more natural language in them, which might be a little bit more interesting to read, no question there. The mistake that I see is that a decision is made that all students will have both types of books at the same time, often from the start of Foundation. Many schools are still using decodables in the classroom and then sending levelled text home for reading.

The danger for beginning readers, for novice readers, and let's define that properly, because this is where some of the confusion comes, we don't define what we mean by a beginning reader. I'm talking about a student who is learning the basic code, which means that they are learning the fundamentals of the alphabetic principle, and they're still learning the complex code, such as learning about vowel digraphs and that different phonemes are spelled with different graphemes. Those are beginning readers, those are novice readers. They're not yet ready to tackle less decodable text because they don't have a broad enough knowledge and well-developed enough skills to do that without guessing. So the danger for beginning readers is that when we give them the levelled text to send home, we're distracting them from the primary skill we need them to learn. That is paying attention to the code and sounding out. Yes, we are going to give students different types of texts as they develop in their reading, and I'm coming to that in just a moment. But both types of text for everyone right from the start or at some predetermined designated point in the year for everyone doesn't reflect what we know about early reading.

Mistake Number 3: Staying or Not Staying with Decodables

Mistake number three is keeping children reading decodables for too long or not long enough. So some schools keep children reading only decodables well into Year 2 or even Year 3. And you might be thinking, "Jocelyn, don't be silly, nobody does that." Except that if you are a school who is new to this space in the last 12 months, you have been busting yourself to do the right thing, but you're coming from a very strong balanced literacy background where you're not really sure of all of the nuance, you can find yourself in the position of using decodables for group rotations in Year 5, and I have heard of that. In that instance, the decodable is limiting and unnecessary. But we also do see the opposite, where schools have abandoned decodables far too early before children have the prerequisite skills to decode and self-correct effectively. Most of the time, this happens because all of the Year 1s are treated in the same way, or all of the Year 2s are treated in the same way, rather than being data informed and looking at where the student is sitting in their development.

The key here is to watch your students carefully. When they can decode basic patterns fluently, when they can use set for variability, that is when they can have a go at sounding out an unfamiliar word, get an approximate pronunciation, and then fix it up using their vocab knowledge, that's when they're ready to move into mostly decodable texts. But if they're still guessing from first letters, if they stop and look at pictures when they hit an unknown word, they are not ready yet. So there's some aspects of this that's about knowledge, and there's some aspects of this that is about habit. And if a student is using inefficient strategies to read unfamiliar words, they need an adult to read with them to prompt them.

Mistake Number 4: No Alignment

Mistake number four, not aligning decodables with your actual phonics sequence. And we've all seen schools invest in beautiful sets of books and then realise that those decodables don't match their phonics program at all. So now we've got books sitting on shelves that you can't use, or worse, they're being used out of sequence, which defeats the entire purpose. So before you purchase decodable texts, map them against your phonics scope and sequence. Make sure they actually align with what you're teaching and where you're teaching it. And I see a lot of confusion in this area, and I know how difficult a job it is.

And I want to make a recommendation to you, and please know that I get no money for this recommendation. I just know the great work this person's doing. And the team at Seelect Education Supplies in Adelaide, they have someone on their team named Felicity. And if you live in Adelaide, you know Felicity, everybody knows Felicity at Seelect. And Felicity will work with you, with your school scope and sequence to help you make really wise purchasing decisions so that you get what you need and you don't end up with books sitting on the shelf that the kids can't read. But anyway, let's move on.

Here's what the research shows us. In the early phases of reading development, and remember I said that's learning the basic code and beginning to develop some fluency with the complex code, decodables should be very tightly aligned to your phonics scope and sequence. This is where the research shows the clearest benefit for word reading and pseudo-word decoding. That is being able to read those alien words or nonsense words that tell us that a student will be able to use that knowledge to read unfamiliar words.

Closely aligned to this mistake is one that I see when people then try to finagle the scope and sequence of the different series and just add bits here and add bits there, and they're doing their best with the best of intentions, but ultimately it just makes a mess. It messes with the cumulative nature of well-written decodables and frankly, well-written phonics programs that build on what has come before.

The way that I managed this when writing the first edition of Reading Success in Action, our phonics program, was to literally look at the text of every single text I was aligning to, considering both phonics and high-frequency words, because you can't believe what it says on the back of the book. This is what it's focusing on, because it might not even have that in that book, and there's not necessarily all of the information you need from the broad category of this fits into this set here. I then placed all of the books in a continuum very, very carefully to make sure that we weren't going to send any students into the guessing zone.

Now, in this second edition of Reading Success in Action that we're working on now, and oh my gosh, I'm so excited, it is amazing. We have written our own texts that will be available as printables, you don't have to go and spend a billion-ty dollars, that will align with the sequence of phonics, morphology, and high-frequency words as they are introduced. But that doesn't mean that if you use our program, you shouldn't read texts from different series. Having a range is really good, but we do have to be incredibly careful. Having decodables in the mix or just one of the types of books that students are reading isn't enough. They need to be used intentionally so that they're aligned with what you're actually teaching and are an opportunity to practice what the students are actually learning.

Key Recommendation Number 1: Make Decodables Your Main

So those are the big mistakes. Let's get into the key recommendations, which are kind of just a flip of what we've said, don't do. So recommendation number one is make decodables your main source of independent reading for beginners. So when children are learning to read CVCs, common digraphs, and building their phonics foundations, when we're asking a student to read on their own, or we're asking the student to lift the words from the page, whether that be with an adult or a partner, we're going to see the greatest gains in decoding accuracy and fluency when we use decodable text. And that's coming out of the research.

Key Recommendation Number 2: Focus on the Decoding

Recommendation two, keep your prompting focused on decoding. And as I said, when a student gets stuck, we want them to look at all the graphemes and sound out as their first and primary strategy. Even when we start to move students onto less controlled texts, once they've learned the basics of the complex code, we need to keep their focus on sounding out. So if they say the wrong phonemes or sounds because it's a word they haven't encountered, such as sound out the word steak as 'steek', we still need their focus on decoding. We will then teach them to tidy this up using oral language and the context of what they're reading. And this is the process at the heart of set for variability.

Key Recommendation Number 3: Use Them Right

Recommendation three, use decodables for what they're good at. Decodables are excellent for practicing recently taught patterns, providing cumulative review of earlier patterns and high-frequency words, and helping you track whether children are actually using their decoding skills. They are not terrific to build vocabulary, to build comprehension, to build syntax knowledge. Yes, they can be a stimulus for some of that, but the primary work of that top of Scarborough's rope reading elements sits in a text-based unit with a beautiful rich text.

Key Recommendation Number 4: Plan a Staged Text Diet

Recommendation four, plan a staged text diet across the early years or across those early phases of learning to read. So think about the text choices through what we typically see in Foundation, Year 1 and 2 as a staged diet. Decodables in the early phase dominate independent reading. Then there's a transitional phase which for many children sits in late Year 1 and into Year 2, or when the core of the complex code has been learned. You gradually increase the proportion of those less controlled texts, or mostly decodable texts, in shared and supported reading across the curriculum, while still keeping the decodable texts there for the express purpose of practicing new code the students are learning. So there's an overlap period. And of course we're using rich text, beautiful narratives for text-based units at the same time. So we've got different types of text in the mix for different reasons.

There will come a time, though, when you want the students to be reading less decodable texts on their own, in order for that to happen, we have to help them flex the sounds in the words. And that means having a go and then helping them reconcile the attempt with meaning and context.

So it might sound like this. The student might read the word hoped as hop-ed. And ideally they stop. We've taught them to stop when it doesn't make sense, to use comprehension monitoring.

And you ask, "Does that sound right? Does hop-ed sound like a real word?"

And they might go, "Oh no."

And then you point to the letter O and ask, "What else do we know about this letter? That's right. It also spells O. Give that word another go."

And when the students say, "Hope-ed, hoped, oh hoped," you can ask, "Oh, does that make sense now? Let's read that sentence and see if that works."

Yes, we are using context to confirm that where we've landed is the right place, but the primary method of reading is still decoding. This kind of prompting keeps phonology on the table and uses meaning to flex and refine the decoded form, rather than allowing the students to guess from looking at the pictures.

Do they prevent learning critical skills?

And I want to come back to a criticism of decodable texts, that they prevent students from learning the critical skills of reading unfamiliar words, that they don't give students the opportunity to develop set for variability because nothing is ever variable. If the texts students are reading are only 100% decodable, if we've given students the misconception that our language is a one-to-one correspondence affair, then yes, that would be exactly what we're doing. We would be impacting quite negatively children's reading development. But here's my counter to that argument. The moment you teach students to read and spell the word 'is', pointing out that the letter 's' can spell both /s/ and /z/, we are introducing the idea of set for variability. When we teach students that 'ea' can spell /long e/, like in treat, and /short e/ like in head, we are setting the scene for set for variability.

So yes, we absolutely have to be strategic and intentional in the way we stretch students beyond 100% decodability. But it's not that we aren't doing that at all with what we currently call decodable texts. The bit that we're likely missing is the part where we make conscious choices about which books a student will read based on a range of factors that go beyond their age and what the tests from our decodable text series tell us. Because, like it or not, there's a big chunk of our profession who is still stuck in the land of, I can't give a student a book to read if I haven't done the test that tells them what book they can have. And I have enormous compassion for that because it feels scary. Something that felt safe in our levelled text assessment is now not really fit for purpose, and then it was replaced with something that we thought was better and it was, but still didn't go far enough to help us make really precise decisions based on our knowledge of what students need to learn in order to read. The reality is that different children will be ready for this stretch at different times, and we need to be responsive to their needs. It's that nuance that will help us get every child, not just decoding, but thriving as readers of rich text.

From Phonics to Uncontrolled Text

To help teachers think more specifically and intentionally about choosing texts for students and to help you communicate with parents about the goals that students have for reading, I developed a tool and it's called From Phonics to Uncontrolled Text, An Instructional Framework For Moving Into, Through, and Past Decodable Texts. Now, this is freely available on our website. Just go to JocelynSeamerEducation.com and navigate to Free Resources. Click there and it'll tell you what you need to do. I've also unpacked this tool in a podcast episode that we will link to in the show notes. And for Resource members, you have access to both a one hour mastermind and a four hour course on how to use this tool to make strategic decisions and then use the lessons and units inside the Resource Room to help students build all the critical skills that they need. And I do need to mention that this tool is referenced. So for every instructional decision I have made in putting this progression together, I reference research and you have a full reference list included in the tool so you don't have to take my word for it. I don't want you to take my word for it, I want you to be sure. So we've got a brief explanation of the research and then the references so you can check it out for yourself.

Conclusion

So to bring it all together, decodables are an essential tool in our literacy toolkit. The research shows us that the primary benefit of decodable texts is they help students practice decoding with the code that they have learned. What doesn't happen is that a decodable on its own will not get students to reading less controlled texts. When we tightly align the decodable text to the code we're actually teaching, that's when we're going to see the best outcomes. When we emphasise decoding strategies consistently, and when we understand which type of text is best for which student at which point in their development, then we can get close to the point of having universal success for every student in our school.

As always, if you found this helpful, I would love to hear from you. And if you're looking for more resources on implementing effective instruction, head over to JocelynSeamerEducation.com or comb through the many, many, many podcast episodes we have in the catalogue for this podcast.

Until next time everyone, happy teaching. Bye.

Show Notes:

Seelect Education Supplies

From Phonics to Uncontrolled Text, An Instructional Framework For Moving Into, Through, and Past Decodable Texts

Summer Series - Tracking Reading Growth Without a Benchmark Assessment

Looking for Reading Success in Action or the one-hour Mastermind and four-hour Course on From Phonics to Uncontrolled Text? Join us inside The Resource Room!