Those of us who have hoped Common Core would hasten the demise of dry and deleterious skills-driven literacy practices at the elementary level can only be heartened by Education Week’s recent in-depth report on building early literacy skills. The package is deeply practice-based and will cheer those who have championed the cause of content knowledge and vocabulary development as a means of raising proficiency—particularly among low-income kids, for whom early reading success (or lack thereof) establishes a trajectory that is devilishly hard to alter.
Highlights include Catherine Gewertz’s first-rate dispatch on the transformation of early-grade read-alouds: Teachers increasingly ask “text-dependent” questions that can only be answered with “detailed understanding of the material, rather than from students’ own experience.” She focuses on a collaborative effort of more than three hundred teachers called the Read-Aloud Project, which was launched by the Council of Great City Schools and Student Achievement Partners.
One of the most important pieces in the package ever-so-slightly misses its mark. Liana Heiten’s report on vocabulary development correctly notes—heavens be praised—the limits of direct vocabulary instruction. (Do the math: there’s not enough time to grow the fifty-thousand-word vocabulary of a literate adult by memorization or word study alone.) “A better approach, some say, is to have students focus on a topic—anything from the musculatory system to the Great Depression to Greek myths,” she writes. This is kinda, sorta right, but it’s misleading to say that the best way to grow rich in “tier-two” academic vocabulary is “by becoming expert in one particular topic.” Single-subject expertise isn’t the secret sauce; the key is familiarity with a broad range of subjects, enabling young readers to make inferences smoothly and reflexively across topics. A child, for example, may read that “annual flooding in the Nile Delta made Egypt ideal for agriculture.” If she’s doing a unit on ancient Egypt, she has the background knowledge to contextualize the unfamiliar word “annual.” If she knows nothing of Egypt and the Nile, or has no idea what agriculture or a delta is, then “annual” is just one more word in a stew of non-comprehension. The child who knows those things learns a new word; the child who doesn’t falls one more word behind. Repeated exposure to new words in familiar contexts in and out of school—Native Americans observed annual rituals; it’s time for your annual check up; some plants are annuals while others are perennials—solidifies the child’s understanding until the word becomes part of her working vocabulary, even without explicit study. In elementary school, reading comprehension and vocabulary development are key, and breadth of knowledge builds both.
I hope I’ll be forgiven for arguing what may seem like a point of orthodoxy, but these details matter. Still, let it not overwhelm the broader takeaway: Those of us who have long argued for content-rich curricula and a laser-like focus on elementary school will find much to like in Education Week’s package on building early literacy. For low-SES students, it gets late early.
SOURCE: “Building Literacy Skills: The state of reading instruction in grades K–3,” Education Week (May 2015).
