Teaching Reading: Why the "Fab Five" Should Be the "Big Six".

The Report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) identified five key elements that were critical to the development of reading, and these have been widely accepted by educational jurisdictions as providing definitive guidelines for early reading instruction. This paper presents a case for the inclusion of oral language and early literacy experiences as an additional and foundational element. The pervasive influence of a child’s early experiences on future reading achievement must be understood if teachers are to maximise the opportunities of all children to become independent readers. Note: Portions of this paper have previously appeared on two educational websites. www.decd. sa.gov. au/literacy/files/links/UtRP_1. 0.pdf www.eduweb. vic.gov. au/edulibrary/public/teachlearn/student/vinsresmono05.pdf Background and Context The quest to determine the most effective way to teach reading has been the focus of research endeavour and debate for many decades, with the major point of contention being whether or not alphabetic knowledge needed to be explicitly taught. Jeanne Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate (1967) was the first large-scale investigation of how best to teach reading. Other large reviews of the reading research were conducted by Anderson, Hiebert, Scott and Wilkinson (1985), Adams (1990), and Snow, Burns and Griffin (1998). There was a compelling consistency in the findings and recommendations of these meta-analyses, all of which acknowledged the importance of alphabetic knowledge as one of the requirements to develop independent reading. Nevertheless, debate continued, causing confusion and in some cases great division among researchers, teacher educators and teachers. In a further (and some might say optimistic) attempt to end what had became known as the ‘Reading Wars’, the United States Congress called on the National Academy of Sciences to convene a panel of experts ‘to assess the status of researchbased knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read’ (p.1). Thus the National Reading Panel (NRP) was formed. Its distillation of many hundreds of studies of reading interventions was drawn from a survey of over 100,000 studies, and those included in the review needed to meet stringent standards relating to the research methodology employed, the size of the study, and the specific skills measured. In addition to reviewing this body of research, the Panel conducted regional consultations and received over 120 submissions from educational policy experts, scientists, university faculty, teachers, parents and students. It is now well over a decade since publication of the Report of the National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000), and its identification of the following five components as being critical to the development of independent reading: Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 39, 12, December 2014 154 • phonemic awareness • phonics • fluency • vocabulary • comprehension. These findings were consistent with the earlier reviews, and have since been supported by the Australian National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (DEST, 2005), and the British Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose 2006). The strong predictive value of phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge for later literacy achievement was also acknowledged by the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP, 2008, p. iii). Since 2000, the ‘Fab Five’ has been widely disseminated across the Englishspeaking world as the framework for evidence-based reading instruction through publications directly emanating from the NRP review (Armbruster, Lehr, & Osborn, 2001; Burns, Griffin & Snow, 1999; Kameenui & Simmons, 1999; Moats, 1999); on university, educational and commercial websites; and by educational consultants and publishers. The term is even referred to in academic journals (for example Fang, 2008). It is understandable that educational communities, and particularly those responsible for teaching young children the critical life skill of reading, welcomed such a highly-credentialed framework, especially when packaged as five easy steps to reading success, as so many publishers and websites have done. And most of those packages have offered teachers exactly what they have been searching for: specific guidelines to help them teach reading, secure in the knowledge that they are following evidence-based practice. It is indeed likely that the classroom practice of many teachers has been immeasurably improved by such guidelines. While the evidence linking these five elements directly to successful reading acquisition is compelling, the strict criteria used to select research studies for inclusion in the NRP review, particularly the need to be directly linked to reading outcomes and to demonstrate growth within a particular time frame, served to exclude many studies of the role of oral language. Thus the underlying and pervasive influence of children’s language abilities in relation to reading was not included. Dickinson, Golinkoff & Hirsh-Pasek (2010) argue a similar point in relation to the findings of the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP, 2008), which investigated the skills present in children up to age five that were most predictive of later reading, writing and spelling achievement. Eleven skills were identified: a set of six which had strong associations with reading development, and a ‘second tier’ of five predictors with moderate to weak associations. Oral language featured in the second group. Dickinson et al. argue that this does not acknowledge the indirect impact that language facility has on reading, or the duration of the language effect in the longer term: that is, beyond the narrow developmental time frame that was the focus of the report. Their primary concern is that teachers will overlook the importance of developing strong language abilities in children. The NELP Report itself acknowledges that there is ‘a need for more careful study of the role of oral language in literacy development’ (NELP, 2008. p. 78), and scientific studies have found relationships between oral language and different aspects of reading. Nation and Snowling (2004) report that variations in oral language abilities account for differences in reading comprehension, and are in fact more Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 39, 12, December 2014 155 significant than age, non-verbal ability, or non-word reading. Biemiller (1999) found a strong link between early vocabulary development and later reading; and the connection between oral language and the development of phonological awareness has been widely reported (Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, & Poe, 2003; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Share (1999) convincingly describes how decoding skills are supported by vocabulary, syntactic and semantic understandings. Roth, Speece and Cooper (2002) also report a relationship between early semantic abilities and reading comprehension in their longitudinal study of the connection between oral language and early reading. They also suggest that the contribution of different aspects of oral language to reading varied at different stages of reading development, and with readers of different abilities, thus confirming the complexity of the relationship between the two. Importantly, there is evidence that children with low levels of oral language often have reading difficulties (Snowling, 2005). While Al Otaiba & Fuchs (2006) found that this group makes little progress on reading intervention programs, Fielding-Barnsley and Hay (2012) reported that language interventions supported the beginning stages of reading; and Oakhill, Cain and Bryant (2003) and Muter et al., (2004) found that language instruction led to improved comprehension results. It is clear that there is much still to learn about the precise contributions of different aspects of oral language to later reading development, but these studies highlight the need for teachers to understand the link between oral language and reading. While the NRP’s ‘Fab Five’ includes vocabulary and comprehension, both of which contribute to oral language, oral language as a global construct does not appear. Vocabulary and comprehension strategies do not necessarily build more general oral language facility. In fact most comprehension strategies concentrate on reading comprehension rather than oral or listening comprehension. The danger, as Dickinson et al. (2010) point out, is that teachers will miss the significance of oral language skills, particularly for children who do not arrive at school with the rich language experiences that provide the basis for learning to read. The framework outlined in this paper therefore incorporates oral language. And because listening to stories and becoming familiar with how print works in the preschool years helps children bridge the gap between the oral (informal) language they hear at home, and the more literate language they will hear at school, these early literacy experiences are also included in the first and foundational component of the reading process, transforming the Fab Five into the ‘Big Six’. This framework remains an extremely simplistic representation of a highly complex skill, but is offered as one way of focusing teachers’ attention not only on the five elements identified by the NRP, but also on the underlying importance of oral language to the development of reading. The six elements, and the role of oral language in the development of each, are discussed in the following sections. 1. Oral Language and Early Literacy Experiences Oral language has recently been described as ‘the substrate for literacy’ (Christensen, Zubrick, Lawrence, Mitrou & Taylor, 2014, p. 18). From the moment of birth, children are immersed in an environment that will have an immense impact on their long-term language and literacy outcomes, as interactions with parents and other significan