Decodable Books vs. Leveled Readers: The View from the Reading League

So what’s all this scientific ruckus?

Leveled readers and decodable books have shared the same space on bookshelves in American classrooms and reading clinics for decades. Years ago when I taught struggling readers one-on-one in a clinical setting, sets of books and kits of reading exercises included a wide range of instructional choices. It would be impossible for me to provide a one-size-fits-all prescription for the children who came through the door.

Kurt’s Reading Clinic

Different instructional affordances regarding leveled books and decodable books in early reading education are important. Leveled books are written to express a meaningful story or explain an idea just as any other book but with measured levels of linguistic complexity to reduce demands on interacting psycholinguistic processes. The idea is to have a continuum from less to more complex language in order to accommodate a reader-text match at an independent, instructional, and frustration level.

I’ve often taught these levels in Vygotskian terms given the attention to complexity in the writing process tantamount to looking for a sweet spot for sensitive scaffolding. It’s worth trying to write leveled stories yourself if you haven’t done it. As a reading clinician, I wrote texts for my students during lessons drawing on their interests and word knowledge. Leveled books are designed to afford expert reading practice with a variety of cognitive processes operating simultaneously to produce comprehension at the cusp of a reader’s psycholinguistic capacity. Reading is, after all, a language process, not a perceptual process. Side-of-the-pool instruction is needed as appropriate, but guided practice in the face of as much complexity as a reader can handle productively is the engine of growth.

Decodable books are designed for a different purpose with a completely different focus during the writing process. The meaning of the written text is largely irrelevant. Instead, these books are designed under the assumption that calling attention to the meaning of a word is an instructional distraction. High frequency words—words that take up most of the syntactic slots in language structures—are a necessary evil and are kept to a minimum. Decodable books are designed to afford teachers maximum leverage in establishing joint attention between teacher and learner on letters and the phonemes they represent. My practice during my clinical era was to use these books with children either intellectually or phonologically challenged as a way to simulate authentic reading experiences. My preference one-on-one was to write texts for them in an effort to maximize interest and relevance.

In a recent Reading League YouTube prepared by its Wisconsin chapter, a presenter had the following to say about leveled books. Most of the features of such books are problematic for phonics instruction because they focus the reader on reading the words to make sense of the text rather than reading the words to learn to sound them out. Inviting cognitive behaviors like predicting and using meaning clues to recognize words as well as natural uses of high-frequency words coupled with pictures that evoke familiar words scaffold reading for understanding rather than reading for decoding.

A second presenter discussed the instructional premises of leveled books in pedagogy as an effort to expose children repeatedly to new words and to promote comprehension at the gist level. In this excerpt the bone of contention is the relative importance of guided practice in sounding out words vs guided practice in using words in print in meaningful ways. Indeed, a crucial assessment tool in the SoR view, the gold standard of achievement, is the ability to sound out nonsense words in isolation. Much of what is designed into leveled books is seen as distraction and an invitation to guess words in SoR.

Returning to the first presenter, the following clip focuses in the incompatibility between leveled readers and decodable books. Of most concern is the absence of control in terms of presenting orthographic (spelling) patterns aligned with the scope and sequence chart in a phonics program.

The crux of the matter—the root of the Reading Wars—is uncovered in the following excerpt. The SoR operates under the assumption that phonics instruction is the only type of reading instruction supported with scientific evidence while other instructional approaches are ill-informed or misguided. “You can’t decode words if you don’t know short vowels, and you can’t read if you can’t decode.”

According to the SoR view, guided instruction, that is, instruction within the learner’s zone of proximal development, must seek to imitate the cognitive behavior of an expert. Expert readers have flawless phonological production, automatic, reliable, and accurate. It seems obvious to SoR practitioners that this characteristic of expert reading behavior must be taught first before any other behavior can be addressed—building blocks. Ever more closely approximating the orchestrating behavior of an expert reader to draw on multiple interacting processes with sensitive scaffolding in the instructional mix teaches bad habits like making wild guesses at words. Witness the phonic confusion allegedly produced by thoughtless use of leveled books:

Writing decodable books is not easy. Leveled books with their concern for subject matter are fun to write and even read but make it hard to drill down on short vowels, the gulf between pre-decoding and decoding. But decodables have their problems, too. They are nonsensical. Veterans in phonics instruction acknowledge the dilemma, and they do offer infomercials on the more interesting decodables. Witness:

There you have it. The proposition that regular classroom teachers ought to be required by legislation to reject leveled readers and use decodable books exclusively until readers achieve mastery of basic phonics is gaining support. The Reading League has built a state by state slate of chapters working to establish this SoR view of reading instruction regardless of widespread criticism of its narrow, almost atheoretical perspective.

The argument does not hinge on whether a phonological loop plays an important part in reading. Of course it does. The argument turns on how best to begin reading instruction such that readers learn both the skills and strategies, the habits of mind, they will need in years to come to refine and control their psycholinguistic thinking during this most private use of shared consciousness.

Excerpts come from this YouTube: