Responsive Reading

Teachers in Responsive Reading Instruction provide explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemic decoding, but the program dedicates relatively less time to the practice of these skills in isolation than the Proactive approach. Students in Responsive Reading spend about one-fourth of their daily 40-minute lesson in isolated skills instruction and practice. During the balance of the lesson, teachers observe and coach students as they apply and practice these skills in the context of reading and writing.

A typical lesson

Students in Responsive Reading are explicitly taught to use phonemic decoding, primarily at the phoneme level, to read and spell unknown words. The primary word recognition strategy taught in Responsive Reading is: (a) look for parts you know (i.e., identify known letter combinations such as th or at); (b) say the word slowly and blend the sounds (i.e., sound it out); and (c) reread the sentence with the word in it and decide whether it makes sense (i.e., check the word within the context). A second strategy taught is to decode unknown words using analogies to known words. Semantic or syntactic information is used to aid decoding only occasionally, always in conjunction with the primary strategy of phonemic decoding. Likewise, students are taught to segment words and use letter-sound associations in order to spell unknown words.

Responsive Reading places emphasis on the development of reading fluency and comprehension. To support the development of fluency, students practice repeated reading of familiar text with support and feedback from the teacher and engage in oral partner reading of familiar books. Prior to reading a new book, teachers provide explicit instruction in an aspect of comprehension (i.e., concepts such as problem, characters, cause, effect, main idea), preteach challenging vocabulary, and encourage students to make predictions to link the book’s subject matter to prior knowledge. During and after reading, teachers ask questions relating to the same comprehension focus that was emphasized before reading (i.e., “What is Mark’s problem in this story?”). After reading, students write a complete sentence to answer a question related to the same comprehension focus (i.e., “Tell me about Mark’s problem in this story.”).

Text characteristics

Responsive Reading Instruction can be implemented with any text, as long as it is on students’ instructional reading levels. This includes decodable text and “phonics readers.” In this research, teachers choose from a large collection of carefully selected student books to match students’ interests and reading level. These books are leveled for difficulty but are not intended to be phonetically decodable. The books in this system progress in complexity of word types and syntax, as well as aspects of print size and page layout (see Peterson, 1991). The use of non-decodable texts at the beginning levels of reading acquisition presents challenges for the implementation of Responsive Reading because of the emphasis on the use of graphophonemic cues for word identification. During the initial phase of the intervention, students have very limited knowledge of letter-sound correspondence. To prevent the development of a word identification strategy based on guessing or over-reliance on picture cues, the Responsive teachers use a modeling routine when students encounter unknown words. The teacher first points out any letter-sounds in the word that are known by the child, then models “sounding out” the word for the child, saying the word in a slow, connected fashion, then as an intact word. Thus, students are encouraged to employ the limited grapheme-phoneme knowledge they possess and are simultaneously supplied with words that they were not yet able to decode, as their teacher models efficient word identification. If the problem word is irregular or very complex, the teacher simply tells the child the word.

Lesson format

Responsive Reading teachers use data from student assessments and daily anecdotal records to identify student needs and strengths and plan their instruction based on this analysis and a suggested instructional sequence. Responsive Reading teachers follow a lesson cycle that determines how time is used across each 40-minute lesson. This cycle has five components: (a) fluency building; (b) assessment; (c) word work; (d) supported reading; and (e) supported writing. Teachers choose activities from a “menu” of options for each part of the lesson based on the needs of their students. The nature of these activities, as well as the texts the students read in the lessons, become more complex over time.