The Matthew Effect & How to Provide Reading Practice for Students who Can’t Read Yet!
Advice that is commonly given to teachers of students who lag behind their peers in reading is to make sure that they get lots and lots of practice. Your students who need remediation must get more practice reading than those who are reading well, we are told. You might wonder, “How can my student practice reading, if they can’t read?”
In education, the term “Matthew Effect” was adopted by the psychologist Keith Stanovich to describe a phenomenon observed in research on how new readers acquire the skills to read. It is based on a verse from the Bible, from the book of Matthew:
“For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance: But from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away”.
The Matthew Effect describes the situation in which students who struggle to read, tend to read less, and therefore their skills do not progress very quickly. At the same time, those who pick up reading easily end up reading more. The more they read, the better they get. If a student begins school lagging behind his or her peers, the gap does not disappear, and in fact it gets larger. In contrast, early success in learning to read usually leads to later successes, as the student moves through the school system (Stanovich, 1986).
The same holds true for vocabulary: Students who begin school with a small spoken and oral vocabulary tend not to undergo any change to this characteristic, as time goes by. Huge gaps in vocabulary that start when kids are young, just get larger. This is due to the reality that students who read often tend to be exposed to a much larger number of words, as compared to those who struggle. The students who struggle may avoid reading since it is difficult for them. It is quite common to avoid and dislike things that we are not good at. We enjoy and want to do more of the things that we do well.
“With this information, you can make a difference! Just get your struggling readers to read more! Get them to love reading!” is the message ….but how?
Unfortunately the students who struggle to read sometimes are further delayed in their development by the inadvertent effects of remedial programs (Clay, 1979). This is because these programs often provide support in a range of skills to improve overall development. They strive to build up the students’ pre-reading skills, such as sorting letters by similar characteristics, learning about sequencing and letter formation, improving the student’s oral language and vocabulary skills, and so on. However, much of this is time spent away from the direct act of reading – so they fall further behind. Any remedial program that results in less reading is feeding into the Matthew Effect.
As teachers, it is important to ensure that all of the students we work with spend a substantial amount of time directly engaged in the act of reading. Richard Allington, the well-known reading researchers and professor, tells us that the weakest readers we work should get even more practice reading than their peers (2013).
You might ask, “How can I have the student spend more time reading, if they can’t read?” It is true that the reason many students are referred for additional supports to specialists and resource teachers is because they have not developed the skills to be able to read. Yet, we can’t have someone practice something they simply cannot do, can we?
I have spent some time contemplating this question. “Is this a Catch 22?” I wondered. I don’t want my students to fall further behind as a result of not gaining practice reading, yet how can this practice be accomplished by a student who is not yet able to associate letters with sounds, or blend sounds together to form words?
I have come up with a short list of tasks that can be used with these very students, with components taken from a few of my favorite reading programs. Here they are:
- The Blending Drill, Orton-Gillingham Approach
- Learning High Frequency Irregular Words
- Echo Reading
- Decodable Texts
I will describe each part in detail, below:
The Blending Drill, Orton-Gillingham Approach
Here is one suggestion for how students at this very emergent stage may “practice reading”. This is the Blending Drill, from the Orton-Gilingham approach (Brainspring Orton-Gillingham, 2019).
Have the student blend sounds together by imitating you. Begin by having them blend two sounds together to make a word. Some of the “words” that you make will be “nonsense words”, since they are only so many two letter words in the English language. However, this is okay. It is the skill of blending two sounds together that is the first step toward the act of reading.
- Write the letters of the alphabet on cards, and begin with combinations of two letters: Consonant and vowel. (CV). (For example, the letters might be “t” and “a”.)
- Place two letter cards in front of the student, and point to them, one after the other, saying the sound they represent. Then blend the two sounds into a “word”. Recall that when we put slashes around a letter, it indicates that we are saying the sound that the letter represents, not the letter name.
/t/ /a/ /ta/
- Have the student do this after you, touching each letter, saying the associated sound, and then blending them.
/t/ /a/ /ta/
- Change the consonant out, and make a new “word”. Repeat steps 2 and 3.
/s/ /a/ /sa/
- Repeat with VC combinations, and slowly build up to CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant words).
High Frequency, Irregular Words
Many high frequency rules are decodable; they can be sounded out, such as “in”, “it”, “at”, “on”, “but”, “and”, “am”, an”, “can” and “us”. Others actually follow predictable spelling patterns. For example, the high frequency words “he”, “she”, “we”, “go”, “that” and “see” follow rules to do with open syllables, digraphs and vowel teams. For more information on spelling patterns, please see my post entitled Structured Literacy: The Sextuplets (Busch, Oct 2020).
However, some words must be memorized, since they do not follow any of the spelling rules in English. Words like “there”, “does”, “want”, “of”, “is” “here”, “where”, and “said” are examples of high frequency, irregular words. These words in the English language occur very frequently in print, and cannot be sounded out.
Teaching these little words can have a large pay off, since students will come across them very frequently in reading and writing.
This reading activity can involve playing games with the letters in these words:
- Write the word on a mini white board, have the student look closely, and then turn the board away while erasing one of the letters. Turn it back toward the student and ask, “What’s missing?” (Richardson, 2016). Do this over and over again until the entire word is erased. The student then needs to spell the whole word orally to you. Give the students the letters on cards or use magnetic letters, and have them mix the letters up and sort them out again to form the word (Richardson, 2016).
- You can also teach students to read and spell high frequency words using multi-sensory techniques. Have the student form the word in sand with their finger or tap it out on their arm, while saying the letter names and the word aloud (Pride Reading Program, 2019):
“F- R – O – M, From!”
These are all ways that our struggling readers can gain practice reading. Ensure that the student says (or reads) the word aloud over and over again in practicing this with you.
Echo Reading
Finally, every lesson, including those with our most emergent readers, should include reading “connected text”, that is where letters are strung together to form words and meaningful sentences. Finding words and sentences for use with a student can be a challenge if they have learned fewer than ten letters and the associated sounds. However, students that are still learning their sounds can still imitate or repeat after you:
- Take out a short book with only one or two sentences per page. Read a few words at a time, and have the student echo read, saying the same phrase right after you.
- Guide the student to touch the words as they say them aloud.
- Ensure that the child is looking at the words, as they read them. If they are not looking, require them to highlight as they go.
- Do this line by line.
If you read the same text this way, day after day, soon the child will have memorized the sentences.
For more information on echo reading, please see Dr. Freeze’s book, Precision Reading Instructor Manual (2010).
It is true that we do not want students to think that reading is about memorization, however, this activity can support the child in gaining confidence, and in hearing how words are separated by a short pause. This teaches one to one correspondence, sequencing and directionality. Moreover, students eventually are able to read many, many words by sight, if this approach is repeated daily.
Decodable Texts
Contrast this echo reading task (above) with some decoding:
- Guide the student through the sentences word by word.
- Select some words that your student knows all of the letters and sounds for, and pause at these words, for the child to sound the word out.
- Have them sound out these words before you have them echo-read the sentence.
Another option, for students who have learned most of their letters and sounds, is to provide the child with a sentence that is decodable, except for some irregularly spelled sight words. Highlight the irregular words with a bright marker, and tell them to the student before they are given the task of reading the sentence:
The cat is on a mat.
It is about a man. He can go in the bus.
Highlight any word that is not decodable, and provide those words to the child in advance. (Show them to the student and have them repeat the words. Then ask them to read the full sentence. Expect them to solve the remaining decodable words only (Wilson, 1996).
In sentence reading:
- Provide the sight words to the student immediately. Say the word as soon as the student comes to it in the sentence, if they do not automatically say it.
- For the decodable words in the sentence, if the student does not immediately say the word when it comes up, prompt them by providing the first sound in the word. Continue to prompt sound by sound, as needed.
- Do not provide the full word to the child, for any of the decodable words. Rather, have the student break the word down letter by letter, and blend the sounds together, so that they solve the word on their own. This may be time consuming and difficult for the child, so limit the number of challenging words, and space them out with words or tasks that the child can do with ease.
It is true that these sentences are not highly engaging, but remember that this time spent on decoding is just one part of a larger literacy program, in which the child is exposed to a wide variety of high-quality literature, stories from multiple genres, poems and songs.
Also, it is possible to make it more fun by rhyming or playing a game with the words. Take out a word and put in a blank. Let the student try to fill in the missing word. Remember, your enthusiasm and enjoyment during the activity is contagious.
In addition, remember that the student should be experiencing success. If they are struggling, increase your prompting, take a step back and return to an easier task.
I hope you find these ideas helpful, in ensuring that your weaker readers get lots of experience reading every day!
Can you think of other ways to support your students who are not yet reading to gain “practice” reading? We would love to hear your ideas!
References
Allington, R. (2013). What Really Matters When Working with Struggling Readers. The Reading Teacher, 66 (7), 520-529.
Brainspring Orton Gillingham. (2018, August 1). Helpful hints: The blending drill – orton-gillingham multi-sensory tools. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbh4jkEpP_A&feature=emb_logo
Clay, M. M. (1979). The early detection of reading difficulties. (3rd. ed.). Heinemann.
Freeze. R. (2002 / 2010). Precision reading: Instructors’ handbook (2nd Edition). D. R. Freeze Educational Publications.
Pride Reading Program (2019, March 25). Orton-Gillingham lesson: Sight words. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA32NO5UN9U
Richardson, J. (2016). The next step forward in guided reading: An assess-decide-guide framework for supporting every reader. Scholastic Inc.
Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 22, 360-407. https://www.readingrockets.org/articles/researchbytopic/4862
Wilson, B. A. (1996). Wilson reading system instructor manual. (3rd Ed.). Wilson Language Training Corporation.
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