Unpacking Automaticity: Scaffolded Texts and Comprehension
Article Abstract
Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative’s plot or an expository text’s description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to adequately comprehend text has been to repeatedly read texts orally. The current review first addresses evidence for this conventional treatment, concluding that students have not shown substantial increases in silent reading comprehension. Next, this review presents evidence underlying an alternative perspective for automaticity support where texts are selected to support students in increasing their automaticity with the words they will encounter consistently—the 2500 morphological families that have been shown to account for at least 90% of most school texts. Finally, guidelines for teachers are provided that address the talk, tasks, and time of instruction, as well as texts, for automaticity.
Introduction
On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2022a), 31% of U.S. eighth graders achieved the proficient level and 39% achieved the basic level. The remaining 30% achieved the below-basic level. Overall, the percentages of students in the proficient and basic groups had dropped relative to pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels, but not significantly. Even so, NAEP data are often cited as evidence of the lack of decoding prowess among American students (Hanford, 2019). In a study that considered possible reasons for students’ lack of proficiency as they moved to middle school, investigators concluded that most below-basic students had problems with fluency, word reading, and phonological decoding and that many students, as they entered middle school, could benefit from support in these areas (White et al., 2021). A flurry of legislative mandates has ensued to address below-basic performances, including in middle and high schools. In Virginia, for example, a legislative bill (Virginia Senate Bill 1175, 2023) extended mandates that literacy instruction be aligned with science-based reading research from primary grades to grades 4 through 8.For Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic students, those learning English as a second or third language, and those eligible for the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), performing at basic or below-basic levels on the NAEP is more common compared to White or Asian students who are not English learners and are ineligible for the NSLP (Zhang et al., 2020). Students at basic and below-basic levels are likely to be assigned to foundational skill interventions. However, despite available research on how to improve older readers’ decoding and fluency, the methods used are often adapted from elementary school strategies. For example, the National Reading Panel (NRP, 2000) recommended repeated oral reading for high-school students struggling with reading, but this recommendation was based on limited studies with secondary students, especially those who were linguistically or culturally diverse. To help students become engaged readers, educators need clear, effective strategies. These strategies need to have been proven effective with adolescent readers from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds.Related Resources
TextProject’s Heroes! and TeenReads are examples of scaffolded texts for teen readers.
