The Power of Decodable Text with Rachel Platt
Rachel is a 1st grade teacher based in Atlanta, GA. After falling in love with early education through studying social emotional learning in her elementary education and special education undergraduate teaching program, Rachel found structured literacy through working at Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Reading Clinic. She developed structured multi-sensory instruction for students with diverse learning needs and brought this experience to the gen ed classroom starting in 2020.
Rachel taught Kindergarten online all year during the 2020-2021 school year out of Brooklyn, NY and built her social media platform and teacher resources to support early career teachers in developing inclusive classroom communities online and in-person as well as implementing structured literacy research and practice in schools with balanced literacy programs. She discovered the equitable power of word study and aligned decodables as she worked with learners with a variety of language backgrounds and learning needs all through the computer.
In this episode, we’ll chat about
What ‘decodable’ means
What decodable books and decodable texts are
The importance of decodable text
The reasons for using decodable text vs. authentic text
Who should be reading decodable text
The 3-cueing system and leveled text
When to move on from decodable text
Episode Transcript
Hanna:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the My Literacy Space podcast with Rachel Platt. I'm so excited to talk to you today because we've chatted a little bit in our dm's, and I've seen lots of amazing posts on Instagram. So I'm excited to talk about decodable books today and the difference between decodable versus authentic texts. So welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself, Rachel.
Rachel:
My name is Rachel. I am a first grade general classroom teacher. I'm currently based in Atlanta, Georgia, but I've taught in New York City. I've also taught in Nashville and I've also taught English in Thailand. So a little bit all over the place. I started to get my introduction to the science of reading and structured literacy when I was working in a place called the literacy or the reading clinic when I was in college, which was out of the Vanderbilt University medical center, and supported kids with speech language disabilities, as well as trouble with reading and kind of learned a lot of approaches that supported kids with dyslexia or a bunch of different needs. And then really wanted to take that to the gen ed classroom, because a lot of my gen ed peers weren't necessarily getting that training and that exposure. And so then I taught in New York which is a very balanced literacy kind of space. And I was like, oh, this is not what I have learned is effective with kids. And so that's when I really realized, oh my gosh, there's this debate, there's this crazy divide.
Rachel:
And some schools are not exposed at all to structured literacy and phonics instruction embedded in reading instruction and guided reading settings or the use of decodable books. And so I had a really hard time taking data and I ended up going rogue a lot because I felt like I couldn't get a good read on how my students were doing and what they needed from me in this more balanced literacy space. And that's when I took to social media and was like, hey, maybe people don't know about this. Maybe people don't know about phonics. Maybe people don't know about decodable books because that's what I was experiencing in the school that I was in. And just got a lot of positive feedback from that from parents and other teachers and people who are new to the research. And that's how I got started on social media and sharing stuff about decodable books, as well as structured literacy as a whole.
Hanna:
And I think what you tapped into right there is part of it is that there is this lack of knowledge. There's this like empty space where many of us have just gone along doing the best we thought was the best at that time. And as soon as we know better, we need to be shifting. We got to do better once we know better. So I think that our community is so amazing for just sharing tons of free information. I think this just does not happen in a lot of spaces. The information is held quite closely to the chest and it's follow me over here and pay for my content. And yet we're just trying to say we're in it for the kids. Like we are here to support kids on their reading and spelling acquisition journey. So we got to share this information. So let's talk a little bit about what is the difference between what we would say as authentic text versus level text versus decodable text. So give us some insight on that.
Rachel:
Yeah. So authentic text to me is just like a picture book that you pick up in the classroom, and you wouldn't really see it as, oh, this is a level A book or this book has this phonics pattern as a focus. It's just the general picture book. And not to say I don't have those in my classroom. I have a ton of picture books. I have an obsession with picture books and have way too many. And so that's one type of text. And it's great because there's so many out there on different topics. And so it can be really motivating for readers who might really like trains, but aren't that motivated to read. Or really like a series of books about animals. And so that's what I use what I would call authentic text for. And then we have leveled text, which typically comes out of the curriculum or a program.
Rachel:
Scholastic does a bunch of different level texts. And that's when you'll see, this is a level A book or level B book. Some programs do level one, level two level three. And what I found with level books is sentences get longer. I guess there's like more words on the page, but there's no explicit this is what this reader has to know and be able to do to read this book. And across the same level, there's no specific this is what the reader has to know and be able to do. So you can find one level C book where the kid really needs to know all their digraphs and they also really have to know about farms and another level C book where there's no digraphs, but you need to know R controlled vowels. And you also have to know about all the types of birds. And so what we're seeing in terms of assessing kids with leveled books is they don't really tell you a whole lot about what the child can do other than what their background knowledge is, and how good they are at essentially guessing words that they don't know.
Hanna:
Right. So you're meaning like it's not showing their skills as a reader, right?
Rachel:
Absolutely. It's just showing this background knowledge and how they can, it's almost like a standardized test. You know how there are people who are really good at standardized tests, and those aren't necessarily the people that know the most stuff, they just know how to take the test. That's what I find is similar with leveled books. So I would have kids who would come in and they had really high oral language skills. They had a lot of background knowledge and they figured out that a lot of the level books had the same pattern on each page. So they didn't have to know any of the words. They just had to repeat the same pattern and plug in a word that they could find in the picture.
Hanna:
Yeah. Let me give an example, because I think some people still don't understand the difference between like authentic, leveled, and decodable. So for an example, there's a leveled book that is, I think it's level C and it's all about Socks, this little cat. You're recognizing the book already. And it goes through this very simple progression, which we think, okay, at first glance you might think this is readable, but when you start looking at the specific words, they jump very quickly. So it's a predictable pattern about Socks the cat, and Socks is sleeping all over the house. So Socks was sleeping on the chair, Socks was sleeping on the mat. Socks was sleeping under the window. It's all this whatever. And you are realizing that they're not really reading because if I took that sentence out of the book and just had it like on a sentence strip or a random piece of paper, they might be able to read Socks.
Hanna:
Maybe they know was. Maybe that might be a site word. It's a high frequency word. Maybe it's in their site word bank. They might be able to read on an app, but as soon as we get to window, they have to know quite a bit there. So I think that's the point you're trying to make is like they're predictable sentences. They flow, it's repeating over and over again. So we think, oh, this kid really knows how to read. Look, they just read this whole book. And yet if that kid is not good at reading a picture for a clue, which has been debunked, that's not a great strategy. If they aren't good at that, they will bomb that book.
Rachel:
Exactly. And some books at level C are harder than others. So the other level C book for that assessment you're talking about is called shopping. And it's about a mom and a kid going to the store. And some of my kids didn't have the English words for the different foods. And so they had all been shopping, but because they didn't know the English word, even if they were able to look at the picture and tell me exactly what it was in Spanish or whatever their home language was, they weren't reading the book. But they knew about shopping, but that's not what we're testing. We're testing their reading skills, their ability to decode the words. I have another example, literally in the book Socks, there's a page where Socks was sleeping by the window. And I think she's on like a window seat. And so I had a kid that knew what a window seat was.
Rachel:
And so she read Socks is sleeping on, because on had been a previous word in the pattern, she didn't even look at the different word, on the window seat. And so someone in the more balanced literacy camp would be like, oh look like she knew this was a window seat. This is great. And it's like, if you showed her the word window and window seat, she actually read that word like you said, out of context. And the answer is probably not, but we literally don't know. And that's the issue there. And what is great about a decodable text, I like to say that a decodable text, it isn't the end goal, but it's a scaffold where kids are actually having the chance to explicitly practice the phonics skills that you have taught them. And those patterns and spellings will come up in that book, as well as patterns and spellings that they've previously learned.
Rachel:
So it's like a review and a show you the new skills all in one. So for example, in a book where the focus is R controlled vowels and the sound is R spelled AR ascendance might be like, the cart is on the hill at the park. And so you would know that you have explicitly taught them high frequency words. At and on are regularly decodable, but there's no other sounds other than those regular alphabet sounds and short vowel sounds and that R controlled vowel AR. And so you can tell, okay, what skill is the kid struggling with? Have they mastered that AR spelling in reading in a word, and have they retained past skills I've taught them? Do I need to go back and do a re-engagement lesson on a double L at the end? Did they say hillo and voice the second L?
Rachel:
So in terms of an assessment piece, to inform your instruction, in terms of a practice piece for getting kids to really practice what they've been taught, and also in terms of a prompting piece, whenever I was using a leveled book with a kid and they would get stuck, the prompts were so variable. You could say, they would want you to say, why don't you look at the picture or what makes sense here? And lots of different prompts could or could not work. It really depended on the kid, but in a decodable book, focusing it on AR spelling the sound R, you could say, oh, look, there are those letters together. What sound does that spell? Do you remember?
Rachel:
And that prompt is very explicit to get the kid to recall that. And so it actually to me is a lighter burden on teacher work, on parent work, to be able to support the kid through the book. And it's a little reassuring to the kid as well, because I can say for a fact, we've gone over all of these sound spellings. I can remind you if I need to, but you've seen how these sound spellings work before. And as a child who is a struggling reader, or is still in the process of learning all their sounds and spellings, that feels really good. And they feel empowered to try and struggle through each word, which they might not feel if they know I've never seen a spelling like this before. I'm just going to look at the first sound and guess.
Hanna:
Yeah. I want to pick up on a couple of things that you just said. One of the things you said was that a decodable book is a scaffold. So let's talk about the scaffold is temporary. If you think of building a big, huge structure in a neighborhood, the scaffold is not there to infinity and beyond. It's only there until the next level is produced or the materials are finished. And then they remove the outside scaffolding and we've gone inside until all the drywall sheeting is up and things like that. So similarly it is those decodable texts are the scaffold that should, at some point, be removed when we know that they are able to then shift over to that authentic text.
Rachel:
Absolutely. And what's really cool is I'll see my students. So like I said, I currently teach first grade. And so we do learn all the vowel teams. We learn all the syllable types. We learn diphthongs. As we're progressing through these different spelling patterns, you'll see them choose a free read book that's an authentic text and notice, oh, look, there's AR spelling AR in this book, I can read this word now. And so they might not be able to completely independently read a free choice book that they've picked because they are interested in it. But they're building explicit skills that they're able to read more and more authentic text by themselves, which is really cool to watch and to watch them feel empowered to use those sounds and spellings that they've learned and generalize them to text beyond decodable that we might read in group.
Hanna:
Right. I think the other piece there too, in a decodable book is there is a scope and sequence that many of us are teaching for teaching those sounds. Well text though is only decodable if they know the code, right? So that's also part of it. I put together a massive list that will be in the show notes all about decodable texts, but I put a big disclaimer on it because I said these different series that you can find in different books, like you can't just assume that I'm going to buy this whole set and it's going to one and done. It's literally looking through those scope and sequence that you are providing for instruction and then finding those books or piece of text that will match that so that kids are successful. Otherwise it's still almost an authentic text. Even though it does have specific skills, if they don't know those skills, it's still not decodable.
Rachel:
Absolutely. So if you're looking for a decodable book about long A spelled A consonant E with the magic E at the end, but you're looking through and it contains some spellings of long I spelled I consonant E and you haven't taught that yet, that's not a decodable book for that reader necessarily yet. Because they might know that on their own terms or whatever, but you haven't explicitly taught it yet, so you can't expect them to know it. So it's really important that even if you're choosing a book that says, oh, this goes over diagraph. If it includes something that you haven't taught yet, even a high frequency word that you've pre-taught because they really needed at that point in the, you have to have taught that first because otherwise it's inequitable for us to expect that the kid knows that word. Even if it's just a couple of words here and there in that book, I wouldn't expect the kid to be able to read that because I haven't taught them. And so if they can, that's going above and beyond what I've done.
Hanna:
So I was thinking earlier in the week about why do we think that decodable books have like a bad rap? Why are people... And here's some of the things that I've seen in posts that people have written, or just comments, even with parents, because they don't understand the whole scope and sequence piece, or they don't understand that structured literacy in the science of reading has told us information about leveled text that is prompting guessing and promoting that kids just think about what could fit there or looking at the pictures. And then when people know the reasons why that is no longer efficient or sustainable, they start to think, okay, then what do we use? And when we start talking about decodable texts, they're like, but isn't that kind of babyish? Isn't that for like really little kids?
Hanna:
Maybe there are some if we think about [inaudible 00:16:51] books, I might not want to pull that out with a grade three student that I'm working on some intervention, but there's some fantastic, even just like a passage rather than a book that might have simpler illustrations compared to an authentic text, but we are addressing vocabulary. You can absolutely address comprehension. And they're going to be different than an authentic text for sure. But just flippantly saying they're boring, they're babyish, they can't work on comprehension. So I'm just going to use... Tell us, you've had some really good posts where you've talked about how we can address comprehension or use the passages rather than just a book.
Rachel:
Yeah. One of the things that I found frustrating when I was using leveled texts is the picture would give it away. The questions about kids making inferences about these texts, they were very obvious to me, or they were completely random and there could be multiple answers. And I wasn't really sure what they were trying to get at. For decodable books, because the picture doesn't necessarily have to align with, it'll all be a story, it'll all make sense, but the picture, isn't a picture of a cat because the sentence says, look at the cat. You can ask some more specific questions and really pull a lot of decodables that I read with my kids, they'll be like, this book is really funny. And they'll talk about the humor of what's happening in the picture versus what is happening in the words. They are really interested in making predictions because the text is not predictable at the bottom in terms of the sentence structure.
Rachel:
So they don't necessarily know what's going to come next. And sometimes there's surprise endings because it's not following a pattern like that. This idea that decodables can't be used for comprehension always baffled me because I found that my comprehension conversations could actually be more engaging to the students and they could pull out little details that I wasn't even necessarily thinking about because they were having to do some more finagling with surprising pictures or facial expressions that didn't really match what the character was saying because they were trying to make a joke or things like that. And especially as you get to by the end of the year, like I said, because we've gone through a scope and sequence where my kids have learned all the vowel teams, the books are pretty complex in terms of sentence structure as well. And so the kids will have grammar conversations about the books and punctuation conversations about the book.
Rachel:
Why does this character say this with an exclamation point on this page? Why is this character talking in brief sentences versus this character's talking in long sentences? There's some really meaty stuff that you can pull out. And I would say that sometimes when we're using decodables and when we're following a scope and sequence, it can feel really slow at first. But we're building the most solid foundation. Like concrete is a long process to dry and we have to pour another layer and dry again. But it's worth it because if your house is built on a not good foundation, it's crumbling, it's missing pieces. It didn't dry all the way over here. The house is not going to be good. And you're going to have to go back and fix issues later, and it's going to be harder because you've already built this house that's unstable on top of it.
Rachel:
So you're going to have to do some really tricky engineering there. But if you're taking your time and building this kind of slow foundation and build up on it and review back and really make sure that kids are getting a chance to practice all of the phonic skills that they learn and review them, then your house is going to be really strong and they're going to shoot up at a certain point in a way that surprises me literally every year. I'm like, wow. Even my kids who are the most struggling readers at the beginning of the year, without a doubt, the growth is always incredible because of the time we spend building that foundation. Even though to me, it feels really slow sometimes.
Hanna:
Exactly. I wanted to touch on a point too when we were talking about thinking about that scope and sequence or that big push, when all of a sudden they've got all this information sort of in their tool belts of being able to... I love that by the way that we're all using construction little analogies here. I'm like building a [inaudible 00:21:19] concrete. Now we're on a tool belt. But it is that it's really thinking about it in that really systematic way just like you would build a construction. Because it is really important to have that foundation and it won't be sustainable if we don't have those beginning pieces really in effect. So when we think of the scope and sequence, but even I was sharing with a parent the other day, because they had a little bit of pushback, they've always used the pictures for a clue and it has worked.
Hanna:
And I said, well, here's where it's going to stop working. It's going to stop working so it's not sustainable when they go to use those authentic texts rather than a level text, because in a regular picture book, I'm a picture book reviewer, I have thousands of books that I've looked at. And when we think about in a regular book, not a level book where they've finagled the picture to match the sentence to support. In a regular authentic text, these illustrators are phenomenal and they are like literally beautiful works of art in some of these picture books. And what are the kinds of words that kids often struggle with? They're usually pretty good with nouns and in the picture, those are the things that are easy for an illustrator to draw or paint or whatever their medium is. But we get to adjectives or conjunctions or adverbs or prepositions.
Hanna:
And those words are harder to illustrate. So then there's all these parts of speech that are not accessible to kids, because all we've said is use the picture for a clue. And I love that one. I forget who said it, but the best cue to the word is actually the word itself. Like literally keep your eyes on the prize. When we take our eyes off, we're no longer reading the word. So maybe the picture in an authentic text will help for some sort of visual representation or visualizing the story or imagination and maybe just painting the scene. It's not necessarily helping decoding those words. It's just adding to the general gist of the story. And the other part that I was thinking about too is so it's not sustainable, it's not efficient. And then at some point there are no longer pictures in books.
Hanna:
So then what? And then we see, oh my child or my student is really stuck at level, insert whatever letter or number that you're using in that leveled system. And you're like, you're right, because those leveled systems have not followed a specific scope and sequence. So all of a sudden when you're teaching a specific scope and sequence in your class and the leveled book has way far that it's just gone to multisyllabic words and lots of affixes, kids are stuck. They will be stuck for a long time at that certain level because they haven't been given enough practice with the scope and sequence that you're using. So I think that those kinds of pieces, as soon as you can address those, it becomes like really important that decodable text for a time is needed to help them progress through those specific phonics patterns that you should be teaching. So a question that has come up as well is how do we know then when we move on, if that's a scaffold, how do we know then I can start pulling it away and move to some authentic text?
Rachel:
For me in my classroom, my kids always have the option to go and choose an authentic text from the library. But I typically start including that in my small group instruction when we've made it through all the sounds the first time. So in the curriculum that I currently use at school, we make it through the sounds I would say in February or March, and then we're pretty much reviewing. And so for those kids, even the kids that like really needed all of that sound work, they didn't have any of that information coming in, I start throwing in kind of a book club piece around that time in addition to the decodable. They go hand in hand and eventually the decodables kind of fade out as we go back through and review and switch to more of this book club setting, where we're talking about more fluency pieces and scooping words and phrases and things like that.
Rachel:
And for me, it's not just a we stop decodable, we start authentic text. It's a, we've taught all the sounds. The kids have the tools to read these decodable texts. And when I'm assessing them, I know, okay, these are the sounds maybe they struggle with still, but that's three sound spellings and we can shift a little bit and overlap for a while and shift ultimately to authentic text. And obviously there's different strategies. Not obviously, but there's different strategies to choose appropriate, authentic text and in a scaffolded way as well. So for example, like I'm not going to have a kid read a frog and toad book all by themselves the first time. We're going to do some shared reading and some readers theaters, some stuff that kind slowly builds up the cognitive load, as opposed to just being like, okay, bam, here's a book that's not designed to be a codeable at all, read it all by yourself.
Rachel:
We're making that shift really kind of slowly together. And we are not necessarily petering off the decodables yet until they've really mastered all those sounds because that practice is really helping. And so in my kids, they sometimes have like free read bags after a certain point in the year when I know that they can like actually do some free reading time by themselves and not at the beginning of the year, for sure for coming in first graders. But there are some books that I choose for them that are like specific based on the phonic skills I know they have at that point. And then they can choose some books for themselves.
Rachel:
And it's really cool because they'll ask me like in a book that they've chosen for themselves, how do you sound out this word? I don't know this spelling yet. And I'll be like, yeah, you don't. Good noticing and looking in the word. That spelling sounds like X, whatever, we'll learn that in a couple of weeks or whatever. And so they've already gotten in the habit of looking in the word for specific spelling patterns and graphings that they know and know themselves metacognitively what they know and what they don't know phonics wise. And so they're asking really strategic questions on words that they need help with, which is super cool and independent for a six year old.
Hanna:
Absolutely. Yeah. And when I'm tutoring with my students, we call that being a word detective. And it's literally like looking for the tiniest clue, and then can we build on from the tiniest clue to like figure out the whole word. What are the parts you know about the word? And is there any part about this word that doesn't make sense? And it's different on a one on one basis because I can just pause and be like, let's teach you this little sneak peek and then we'll come to it eventually, but I'm going to give you a little sneak peek at it right now. And they start to eat it up.
Rachel:
They do.
Hanna:
Which is a different feeling than when it was just working through random level texts. They want to find the books that make sense when they read them that they can decode a whole sentence. And they're like, I just read a whole, and now I read a mini chapter book. And that's why I think they take off a little bit faster because they can actually crack that code. So anything else you want to add about decodables versus leveled versus authentic texts that we haven't maybe covered?
Rachel:
There's always so much. Feel like I could go on about decodable text forever because I just feel like almost personally hurt when someone's like, that's not a real book. Don't you talk about my son that way. But I just think that the most important takeaway is that equally as important as the structure of what the decodable is trying to help a kid practice, so whether that's a diagram sound, whether that's short A CVC words is the reader themselves and what they know. A text is, like you said, it's decodable based on how it's written in that it doesn't have kind of random phonic skills. It has purposeful phonic skills, but it's decodable because the reader is ready and has the skills to decode that particular book. And so that's always the biggest take away for me. Is it decodable to this student? And as a teacher, we need to know that based on what we have explicitly taught them. And that can help us help them when they need support in a book. That's really important.
Hanna:
I love that. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. Have a good rest of your week.
Rachel:
Thank you.