What about the new research that says phonics instruction isn’t very important?

Tim Shanahan

Teacher question:

Recently, I saw results of a meta-analysis that showed phonics instruction to have a much smaller effect size (.19) than many other approaches to reading instruction. Doesn’t that mean that we are overdoing phonics? If we want to improve reading comprehension it looks like it would make more sense to emphasize motivation, fluency, and inferencing than teaching phonics.

Shanahan responds:

Gough and Tunmer (1986) presented a model indicating that reading comprehension was the product of decoding ability (the ability to translate written or printed text into oral language – in other words, the skills that would allow someone to read a text aloud) and language comprehension ability (basically, listening comprehension which would allow an understanding of that oral rendition of the text).

According to this so-called “simple view,” reading comprehension could be completely explained by those two sets of abilities – decoding and language comprehension.

Over time, data have accumulated supporting the key roles of both decoding and language comprehension in reading (Hoover & Tunmer, 2021; Sleeman, Everatt, Arrow, & Denston, (2022), and indicating diagnostic and pedagogical benefits to the scheme.

Nevertheless, the theory tends to break down around the edges.

In response to these limitations, Duke and Cartwright (2021) have advanced a more elaborate model of reading. Their Active View Model is more specific about what goes in those word reading and language comprehension bubbles – with their model you don’t need to guess about that. Enumerating those contents complicates things, a bit, and the evidentiary support for those individual items is pretty uneven. Some of the variables have a great deal of research support, others not so much (yet anyway).

The study that you noted (Burns, Duke, & Cartwright, 2023) was an attempt to support that model.

READ MORE...