Tell publishers to stop selling predictable texts!
6 RepliesSomeone from a major educational publisher rang me today to extol the virtues of their new range of decodable texts. I think she was hoping I might help promote them.
I’ve had a look at their decodables, but haven’t bought any for our decodable books display, because (A) our budget is tight, (B) I’ve been fairly underwhelmed by the new decodables from mainstream publishers I have bought, and (C) the last time I checked, they were still selling predictable/repetitive texts.
The only thing I like about predictable/repetitive texts is making spoof AI ones:
I consider predictable/repetitive texts harmful products for vulnerable beginners. Anyone who works in literacy intervention can tell you that undoing the bad habits encouraged by these books is hard work. They encourage children to memorise and guess words, not decode them. Here’s a daggy video I made nearly a decade ago explaining what’s wrong with them:
As education academics Simmone Pogorzelski, Susan Main and Janet Hunter wrote in their excellent 2021 AARE blog post Decodable or predictable: why reading curriculum developers must seize one: “there is no instructional value in using ‘levelled’ predictable readers to support children’s development once formal reading instruction has commenced”.
Margaret Goldberg of the Right To Read Project has some great ideas for repurposing predictable/repetitive books already in schools. By now there should be no market for new predictable/repetitive books for beginning readers. Are they really still available? Check publisher/vendor websites for yourself, e.g. here, here, here and here.
If you’re speaking to publishers/vendors keen to get a slice of the booming decodable books market, but still selling predictable/repetitive texts, please tell them this is not smart marketing. It shows they’re newcomers to the difficult task of producing decodables, and not fully committed to teaching young kids to decode, not memorise and guess. If they want their decodables to be taken seriously, they need to ditch predictable/repetitive texts.
There’s now such a confusopoly of decodable texts available, I don’t envy teachers and librarians the task of deciding what to buy. I’m a bit confused myself, and we have heaps of them, we aren’t relying on website or catalogue information. Which are good quality? How many of each? Which ones are OK to use with older kids? What about struggling readers who will only read about gaming/unicorns/football/princesses/cars? Please share your thoughts and thorny questions in the comments.
Alison Clarke
6 responses to “Tell publishers to stop selling predictable texts!”
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The Spelfabet shop has affordable, downloadable spelling teaching resources.
Of equal concern is that representatives from organisations, such as Down Syndrome Victoria, who are viewed as reputable by the educators they visit and the parents of students they support, are still promoting predictable texts and a balanced literacy approach to reading.
Oh dear, that’s not good. I looked for a recent meta-analysis on Google Scholar re the evidence on how best to teach people with Down Syndrome to read, and found a 2012 article called “Reading skills in children with Down syndrome: A meta-analytic review” by a very well-respected international team, which isn’t consistent with a Whole Language approach but says that vocabulary is more of a factor in learning to read for kids with Down Syndrome than phonemic awareness. The link is here: https://www.academia.edu/download/113587600/j.ridd.2011.09.01920240421-1-hf2bmp.pdf. Perhaps the people from Down Syndrome Victoria think predictable/repetitive texts develop vocabulary? I’ll have to take a look at their website. Thanks for pointing this out, we have a client with Down Syndrome who is making slow progress and were just discussing how to best help her make progress yesterday, so it’s a good time for us to research this. Alison
I share your frustration . As a reading teacher in a primary school , I am constantly educating teachers to understand what a good quality decodable text looks like. Every time the next ‘shiny’ and new’ series comes out by publishers that also produce levelled texts, I hear ‘but it says decodable’ . A closer look at the texts show little understanding by the writers what is required to best serve students with learning difficulties and all children learning to read. Parents are also part of this. Choosing books on online platforms in preference to what I consider to be ‘gold standard’ books available at our school.
My main recent personal experience of repetitive texts was some readers that had been translated into Japanese. For them it was good sounding out practice because Japanese hiragana has good grapheme-phoneme correspondence. The one different word per page was easy to guess the meaning of thanks to the illustration, even if I didn’t know all the words in the repetitive sentence. For Japanese children, the text would probably be able to be decoded and understood.
This wouldn’t work in English for people coming from a different language due to the reasons you state. I’ve heard that phonics readers are used by some language teachers to teach English to Japanese students.
Yes, Margaret Goldberg suggests using predictable texts with English Language Learners, and they could be very useful for teaching vocabulary and sentence structure. Hopefully they all get repurposed well, nobody likes throwing books away, especially fairly new books, even cutting them up and using the pictures for artwork would be better than wasting them.
Thank you Alison. Your latest video on demonstrating the confusion between teaching single letter phonics and throwing “readers” at the students that have greater lexical complexity that they cannot access readily, is the sharpest presentation to non-believers in phonics and phonological awareness that I have ever seen, although everything you put out is great! Yes, there is a confusopoly of “readers” out there. I use the LLLL Big World books successfully with older readers (even grade 5 and 6) because they are topical to match interests and are still decodable. The other series is Fox Kid, that looks like a graphic novel. It blends into the class with the Diary of a Whimpy Kid etc as read by the more able readers. These LLLL resources are very helpful for Dyslexic students as well.
Adam Tate