Does Intensive Decoding Instruction Contribute to Reading Comprehension?

Stephen Krashen
Knowledge Quest (in press)

In the recent Reading First Impact Final Report, children participating in Reading First classrooms did better than comparisons on a test of decoding given in grade one. Reading First children did not, however, do better on tests of reading comprehension in grades one, two, and three, despite considerable extra instructional time (Gamse, Jacob, Horst, Boulay, and Unlu, 2008).

Not mentioned in the Final Report is that we have seen this pattern before: Children following an intensive, decoding-based curriculum do better on tests of decoding (pronouncing words out-loud) when compared to regular students but do not better on measures of reading comprehension.

Evidence from The National Reading Panel

The pattern of success at decoding and failure at comprehension as a result of intensive phonics instruction was present in the foundation document for Reading First, the report of the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).

The reading panel claimed, on the basis of their review of the research, that intensive systematic phonics was superior to less intensive approaches, but as Garan (2001) has noted, this superiority was present only on tests of decoding, specifically tests on which children pronounce lists of words presented out of context. Children trained with intensive phonics did not do significantly better on tests in which they had to understand what they read: For tests of reading comprehension given after grade 1, the impact of intensive systematic phonics was small and statistically insignificant. [For tests given in grades 2 through 6, the effect size in favor of intensive phonics was substantial: .49 for "decoding regular words" (17 studies) .52 for "decoding irregular words" (13 studies), but it was only .12 for "comprehending texts" (11 studies).]

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