Reading instruction is primarily composed of five components: 1) phonemic awareness, 2) phonics, 3) vocabulary development, 4) reading fluency, and 5) reading comprehension strategies (National Reading Panel, 2000).
Each component of reading instruction is complex and fascinating in its own way. But in one sense, all five components are interrelated and interact, and if students struggle with one component, it may serve as a bottleneck that hampers reading growth.
I remember trying out a new phonemic awareness exercise in my fourth-grade class of ELL students and asking my class if any of them would like more of this kind of instruction. Only one student raised his hand. Sadly, it was a boy who was repeating fourth grade. Like all of the other students, he had received plenty of phonics instruction, but this phonemic awareness instruction is what made sense to him. He was the only one in the class that didn’t have a well-developed sense of phonemic awareness—and it was holding him back—and by the look on his face, he knew it.
What’s holding your struggling students back? It is something… and it may be many things. I’ve taught fifth and sixth-grade classes where many students had not mastered their multiplication and division tables. It pains me to see this because these students are guaranteed to struggle in math for lack of a small, concrete, easily identifiable set of facts. Sadly, I’ve heard high school teachers say that they have students who struggle with those same basic math facts.
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Theory of Constraints and Bottlenecks
One of the more interesting audio programs that I have listened to was on the theory of constraints (limitations or restrictions) and bottlenecks (a point of constraint where things stop flowing or don’t flow as needed in relation to the other parts of the system). The program discussed how a bottleneck in one part of the system limits the output of the entire system. The reason the audio program was so interesting is that people often can’t see the constraints and bottlenecks that are right in front of them. They put their time and energy into what they want to do, and they can only see as far as the problem that is right in front of them. This is why complex systems need a systems engineer.
The reality is that a child’s learning and education is a complex system with many interconnected moving parts. Furthermore, every classroom is also a complex system with many interconnected moving parts. Efficient teaching is working within constraints and eliminating bottlenecks to keep the flow of learning moving forward.
Here is my own brief interpretation and model of bottlenecks:
Q Weakest Link in a Complex System Bottleneck: e.g., Every department of a car factory except one can build the parts for 1,000 cars per year. The transmission department can only build 500 transmissions a year. Therefore, the car company can only build 500 cars a year until the transmission bottleneck is resolved.
Q Straight Line Bottleneck: e.g., You are driving across the country. Your transmission breaks. You can’t go any further until this bottleneck is resolved. (Keep in mind that straight lines are usually one component of a larger interconnected system.)
Once again, the five components of reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, reading fluency, and reading comprehension strategies) form a system of interconnected skills. If students don’t have a large enough vocabulary or if they don’t acquire vocabulary as needed, it serves as a weakest-link bottleneck that hampers reading growth and reading comprehension. Worse yet, this may compound and create dire outcomes.
The Relationship between Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading Comprehension and How It Can Create a Matthew Effect
Everything in a child’s education is important, but if it serves as a bottleneck, it is even more important. We all know that reading comprehension is extremely important, but many educators don’t fully grasp how vocabulary acquisition affects reading comprehension.
Vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension have a powerful symbiotic relationship:
1. Students acquire new vocabulary by reading.
2. Acquiring new vocabulary increases reading comprehension.
3. Increases in vocabulary and reading comprehension provide fuel and motivation for students to read more and to read advanced academic texts—all of which help create academic success.
This is a true win-win relationship. It’s like compound interest, which Albert Einstein called “the eighth wonder of the world” and “the most powerful force in the universe.”
The problem is that the reverse is also true. When the reverse is true, students have the power of compound interest working against them, and this forms a vicious circle. This vicious circle is similar to the Matthew Effect, in which the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
Therefore take the talent from him and give it to the one who has ten talents. For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. But the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. — Matthew 25
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In Promoting Vocabulary Development: Components of Effective Vocabulary Instruction (2000), the Texas Reading Initiative does a nice job of explaining this problem:
“We know that, on average, students add 2,000-3,000 words a year to their reading vocabularies. This means that they learn from six to eight new words each day—an enormous achievement. Individual differences in vocabulary size also involve large numbers. Some fifth-grade students may know thousands more words than other students in the same classroom. As a teacher, you know the difference this can make: students who know the meanings of many words catch on to and understand new ideas and concepts much faster than do those students with limited vocabularies.
“Poor readers often lack adequate vocabulary to get meaning from what they read. Consequently, reading is difficult and tedious for them, and they are unable (and often unwilling) to do the large amount of reading they must do if they are to encounter unknown words often enough to learn them. This situation contributes to what are called ‘Matthew Effects,’ that is, interactions with the environment that exaggerate individual differences over time, with ‘rich get richer, poor get poorer’ consequences. Good readers read more, become even better readers, and learn more words; poor readers read less, become poorer readers, and learn fewer words. Indeed, the vocabulary problems of students who enter school with poor or limited vocabularies only worsen over time!”
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Unfortunately, this disparity begins early in life. In The Influence of Reading on Vocabulary Growth: A Case for a Matthew Effect (2015) Duff, Tomblin, Catts say, “There are large differences between individual children in their vocabulary knowledge on school entry (e.g., Hart & Risley, 1995), and these differences in vocabulary extend into the school years. For example, Biemiller and Slomin (2001) reported that in the second grade, children at the lowest quartile for vocabulary had approximately half the number of known words compared to students in the top quartile. Furthermore, according to the Matthew effect model proposed by Stanovich (1986, 2000), those individual differences in vocabulary may even increase over time.”
The Percentage of Known Words for Effective Reading Comprehension
Students must know and be able to decode a very high percentage of the words in a text to be able to comprehend the text. In The Percentage of Words Known in a Text and Reading Comprehension (2011), Schmitt, Jiang, and Grabe noted, “Earlier studies have estimated the percentage of vocabulary necessary for second language learners to understand written texts as being between 95% (Laufer, 1989) and 98% (Hu & Nation, 2000)… Results suggest that the 98% estimate is a more reasonable coverage target for readers of academic texts.”
These studies and others provide insights on the following commonly accepted Functional Reading Levels.
Q For Independent Reading: Students should know and be able to decode at least 95% or even 98% of the words.
Q For Instructional Reading: Students should know and be able to decode between 90% and 94% or even 97% of the words.
Q The Frustration Level: If students don’t know or can’t decode at least 90% of the words, they are frustrated readers and will have difficulty comprehending the text.
When students are reading at the level of frustration:
1. They have problems comprehending the text.
2. They have problems acquiring new vocabulary, as they are unable to use context clues effectively.
3. They have problems reading with fluency.
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A Short Summary of the Research on Vocabulary Instruction
If I have done my job properly thus far, you now see how important vocabulary development is. But before you begin passing out worksheets or teaching new word-learning strategies, you must know a few basics about what works and what doesn’t work in vocabulary instruction.
In The 40 Years War (2018), Stephen Krashen says, “For the last 40-plus years, we have been engaged in a war between two hypotheses, two views on how we acquire language and develop literacy.” In short, it’s a war between these two hypotheses:
Q Incidental Learning: We acquire language and develop literacy incidentally by receiving messages and sending messages when reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
Q Intentional Learning: We acquire language and develop literacy by learning skills and then by applying those skills in the real world.
Here is an excellent model to guide you in moving forward. In Reading for Meaning: Fostering Comprehension in the Middle Grades (2000), Graves outlines four essential components of well-rounded and effective vocabulary instruction: 1) Wide Reading, 2) Teaching Individual Words, 3) Teaching Word-Learning Strategies, and 4) Fostering Word Consciousness.
In every aspect of language, the research always comes to the same conclusion: Isolated skill drills don’t work. Nagy and Townsend make this point clear in Words as Tools: Learning Academic Vocabulary as Language Acquisition (2012). They say, “Vocabulary learning must occur in authentic contexts, with students having many opportunities to learn how target words interact with, garner meaning from, and support meanings of other words… We use the metaphor of ‘words as tools’ to reflect our understanding that instruction in academic vocabulary must approach words as means for communicating and thinking about disciplinary content, and must therefore provide students with opportunities to use the instructed words for these purposes as they are learning them.”
In Conclusion
For those who effectively acquire new vocabulary, it amounts to the compounding of interest—i.e., they get richer. In contrast, for those who don’t, it can become a vicious circle. So yes, vocabulary development is extremely important. And it is never too early for teachers and students to take it seriously. Fortunately, we now have many excellent ways to teach vocabulary in context with reading and writing. But I save that for another day.
