Text Leveling
and Little Books
in First-Grade
James V. Hoffman, Nancy L. Roser,
Rachel Salas,
Elizabeth Patterson, and
Julie Pennington
The
Retrieved on Feb. 5, 2007 at http://www.ciera.org/library/reports/inquiry-1/1-010/1-010.pdf
1
Soon after
the Greeks borrowed and perfected the alphabet, young boys
were taught to read. According to some historians, the
challenge for the
teacher of the day was that there was nothing for children to
read between
the alphabet and Homer (Guéraud
& Jouguet, 1938, as cited in Harris,
1989). The evolving story of
reading instruction has been (at least partly)
the story of filling the gap between single words and great
works with texts
intended to support the developing reader (Smith, 1965/1986).
For example,
a beginning reader in colonial
New England Primer, a text which provided the basic elements of literacy—
letters, syllables, and rhyming couplets—all intended
to “prime” the child’s later reading
of the more difficult scriptures. Later, “spellers” were
introduced as yet
another bridge to more challenging readers (Venezky, 1987).
By the middle of the nineteenth century, arrays of
increasingly difficult readers
began to be associated with grade levels. By the
mid-twentieth century,
students’ basal series comprised a collection of leveled texts
arranged in
graduated levels of difficulty, as verified by readability
formulas. Typically, a
first grader was offered three “preprimers”
to build the recognition vocabulary
required by the primer, and a “first reader” to stretch the
beginner further.
The control over the difficulty level for these texts
was achieved
through careful selection, introduction, and repetition of
words (Smith,
1965/1986).
For the beginning reader, standard instruction through
the mid-1980s meant
practicing in texts that provided for substantial success and a
modicum of
challenge. In the late 1980s, calls for more authentic
literature and less contrived
language for beginning reading instruction led basal
publishers to
abandon their strict leveling procedures and vocabulary
control (Wepner &
Feeley, 1986) and provide young readers with reproduced
trade literature.
This “quality literature,” with its naturally
occurring rhymes, rhythms, and
patterns, replaced the carefully leveled vocabulary-controlled
texts. Trade
book anthologies became the standard basals
of the 1990s. The publisher assigned
levels within these basal programs were perhaps driven more
by
instructional goals and/or thematic integrity than a clear leveling
of the
CIERA Report 1-010 materials according to one or another standard of
difficulty
(Hoffman et al.,1994).
Classroom research focusing on this shift toward
“authentic” literature in
first grade revealed mixed effects (Hoffman, Roser, & Worthy, 1998).
Although teachers found the new materials more
motivating and engaging
for their average and above-average readers, they
reported difficulties in
meeting the needs of their struggling readers with texts so
challenging and
variable in difficulty. In an attempt to address the need,
both basal publishers
and others offered supplementary or alternative texts
that provided for
smaller steps—more refined or narrow levels of text
difficulty. Called “little
books,” these 8-, 12-, or 16-page paperbound texts were
designed to provide
for practice by combining control (of vocabulary or
spelling patterns) with
predictable language patterns—the latter an attempt to ensure interest
and
to include literary traits.
Precise leveling of these little books has been an
elusive exercise for both
developers and users (Peterson, 1991). Traditional readability
formulas, relying
on word frequency and syntactic complexity, have not
been able to
account for variations within the first grade (Klare, 1984). Neither do
traditional
readability formulas consider features of text support associated
with
predictable texts (
Although procedures exist for judging the
appropriateness of text–reader
match when children are actually reading (e.g., informal
reading inventories,
running records), the set of teacher tools available for
making
a priori judgments
and planning decisions regarding the challenge level of texts is quite
limited. Neither are there clearly developed benchmarks for
publishers in
standardizing the challenge level of the texts they produce.
Finally, there are
no existing data to validate the text leveling systems
that teachers rely upon
to array the plethora of practice materials in
beginners’ classrooms.
References
20
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