TRT Podcast#42: The difference between balanced and structured literacy
It’s time to take a good look at what we’re doing when we teach children to read. I considered myself a “balanced literacy” teacher for many years. It’s the approach I learned in graduate school, the approach I used as a classroom teacher, and the approach I (used to) teach on my website and in my online course.
However, after a great deal of research into the science of reading, I now see things differently. I now advocate a structured literacy approach to reading instruction.
Listen to the episode here
Full episode transcript
Related links
- Original blog post: What’s the difference between balanced and structured literacy?
- The Reading League podcast episode: Interview with Anita Archer
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Dave Smith
HI Anna. I think I’m the kind of teacher you’re asking for a comment from. So… I guess I’m “balanced literacy” but at the same time… yes, phonics needs to be explicitly taught and I always have, just usually not with a corporate produced program (and sometimes with things I’ve downloaded from your site… keep up the good work!).
I guess I’ve always had my students memorize sight words (and the thing is, they can and do remember them, lists of them actually, even the struggling readers I work with as a special ed teacher)… but I’ve also always encouraged my students to “sound them out.”
3 cueing system? Read, read, red. Brown, grown. Tough, bough. Phonograms (a balanced literacy thing) suck. How does a new reader know which pronunciation to use? Semantics. Syntax (is it a verb or a noun and why do you think so?). It’s the VISUAL cue that many BL teachers over-rely on, I guess. And that’s too bad.
Lots of reading? Good fit books? I still use the concept everyday in my classroom. Structured literacy teachers would want to see “decodeable” books be the sole type of book in a primary school classroom library like mine. But you know what? I find that so-called “leveled” books are decodeable too! Even with some repetition of words in there, in most of the Level E decodeable books in my classroom, kids need to: decode long vowel words, know or decode approximately 12 different high frequency words, some VCCV words, and plenty of CVC words. No matter what text you use, there is no escaping phonics. The difference would be in execution. Does the teacher just tell the students to guess at the word? Use the picture? Just use the first letter? Ignore the rest? When a student guesses at the first letter and says “house” for “horse”, I immediately cue with something like, “Hmm. House? I see an r. Try it again.” If they can’t seem to get it right, I’ll say something like, “There’s a little sight word in the middle of that word (or). Do you see it?” I guess this is a BL method… but it’s also phonics. After decoding happens, I’ll wrap up this teachable moment by saying something BL like, “You know something, I’m glad you figured it out. Because that cowboy would get awful sore riding a house instead of a horse.” That’s the semantic cueing system… but I say it AT THE END and not the beginning to reinforce the fact that making meaning is ultimately the purpose of reading.
Yes, phonics first. Always. But there is nothing inherently wrong whatsoever with your sight word readers or ANYTHING you’ve ever put on your website. And since I know you’ve taught your own kids to read well, you know BL works for the vast majority of readers. We’re talking about a persistent 30% approximately who don’t pick up the code on their own fairly easily. That is the percent I teach, and I strongly emphasize the code and always have. But I haven’t had to throw everything BL away to do it. It’s execution, pure and simple.
I suppose my final thought would be this: keeping kids safe from books that we adults feel they’re not ready for (because they may have spelling patterns we haven’t explicitly taught them yet) is a strange thing to fear. That said, I’d question a student of mine who thinks they can read Harry Potter. Of course, they can’t. They can barely decode a word like “blame.” But I think it rather silly to protect them from words like “monkey” or “refrigerator” that might pop up in a leveled book. They will, on their own, struggle with the word. They might even “guess” at the word. A picture may even cue them to what it means… though again, I’ve never been big into telling kids to rely on pictures. But if so, okay. It is not the end of their world if they guess it or even skip it. I can’t be the word police.
It’s a tough call. In the average second grade classroom, for example, the majority of kids will already be able to decode fluently and even spell accurately most of the phonetic patterns you would be teaching in a highly structured, systematic phonics program. And those take so much time to do whole group, that other learning gets squeeze out (the learning about things, people, places… the background knowledge that is so crucial to later reading comprehension). It’s dreadfully boring for kids… even though it’s very necessary for the few in the room who need it. Striking the balance is tough.
Have a good day!
Anna Geiger
Thank you for your thoughtful comment, Dave! A few thoughts:
1- I agree; most if not all balanced literacy teachers fully acknowledge that phonics must be taught.
2- Frankly, not all researchers say that students shouldn’t memorize “sight words.” This issue is that it will be much more effective when we draw students’ attention to sounds and spellings. And we also know that students can only successfully memorize a limited number of words. But I’m glad your students are having success with your method!
3- The issue with the three-cueing theory is that it’s based on the belief that skilled readers don’t look at all the letters as they read and mostly read by using syntax and semantics. However, we know from eye movement studies that skilled readers do, indeed, look at all or almost all of the letters in each word, and pay attention to all the words, except sometimes function words. In addition, we want students’ eyes on the words themselves so that they sound them out and so orthographic mapping can occur. That said, we can and should absolutely CHECK our reading using syntax and semantics, as you noted. But we attempt to read the word first. Unfortunately, as you noted, many teachers (I include my former teaching self here) draw attention to context FIRST, because they’re giving their students texts with too many phonics patterns they don’t know. With these particular texts and beginning readers, three-cueing is the only way TO “read” the words!
4- The thing about decodable texts is that they are only decodable for a child if they child has been taught most of the sound-spellings within them. So, yes, any book is decodable for you and me, but not necessarily for the child in front of us. We need to choose first texts carefully so that students can actually practice the skills we’ve taught them – or they’ll start to see those skills as useless and take the easier way out, which is guessing using context and pictures. I think that some teachers are keeping kids in decodable texts too long; I hope that research will help us navigate this better.
5- According to Nancy Young’s Ladder of Reading (backed by research), learning to read is relatively easy for up to 45% of kids. That leaves over half of our students who need a more structured approach.
6- The reason I took those sight word books down is because they were designed based on (my) flawed understanding of how reading works. You can’t convince me there was nothing wrong with them. 😉
7- I don’t think we should stop kids from accessing text we haven’t taught them to read – or we’d have to cover their eyes! But I do think we need to be careful and intentional about the texts we have beginners read for practice.
8- 2nd grade is tricky, especially these days when many second graders are behind because of school closures two years ago. But without these gaps, I would think that a typical second grader would need less phonics and little decodable text. You’re right – striking the balance is tough.
Thank you again!
Kathi Haller
Thank you for articulating what I’ve always known about “structural reading”. It’s the way I learned to read back in 1961 when most the nation’s children were literate.
I homeschooled for 18 years and used a program called “Read Write Sing and Spell” which I still use at the public school I teach at for RTI. It is fun and colorful and uses music. Who doesn’t remember jingles from commercials of their childhoods?
Again, you did a beautiful job explaining why structural literacy is best!
Anna Geiger
Thank you for sharing a program that worked for you, Kathi, and for your kind feedback! I’m so glad to hear that structured literacy worked well for you.