Defining Leveled Texts
Shanahan appears to define leveled texts according to the once widely adopted Fountas & Pinnell leveling system, writing: “What began with a book for each grade level, now has metastasized into twenty-six supposedly distinct text levels. Classrooms—and school libraries—are replete with level-labeled book bins, books branded with color-coded dots, and shelving systems aimed at ensuring that no child strays into books beyond their prescribed challenge level.”
As the Science of Reading movement began to take hold, the Fountas & Pinnell approach was debunked for its lack of validating research evidence, as critics highlighted the flaws in the measures the system used to differentiate between texts assigned to each of these 26 levels. But the prominence of the Fountas & Pinnell approach does not mean that it encapsulates the entire concept of levels.
Levels are a fundamental part of all learning. In fact, we readily accept the concept of levels in other contexts: You don’t take calculus unless you’ve completed algebra 2; you don’t earn a black belt in karate before you earn a blue belt. You don’t start learning piano with a Chopin piece but with a simple song. In reading, too, levels play a crucial role. Within structured literacy, phonics development itself relies on scaffolded levels as students progress through decodable texts according to a scope and sequence that increases in complexity. (Decodable texts, used with beginning readers, contain words based on the phonetic patterns that students have learned, enabling readers to sound out words in a structured way.)
When leveling systems get debunked or disproven by research, it is often because they are arbitrary and not tied to concrete skills students need to read proficiently. As Hollis Scarborough first proposed in her 2001 paper, “Connecting Early Language to Later Reading (Dis)abilities,” skilled reading requires language comprehension and word recognition to work together. Both require students to have a proficient understanding of background knowledge, vocabulary, language structure, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge, phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words. These are the “strands woven into skilled reading,” as illustrated by Scarborough in her Reading Rope, a visual model that portrays how language comprehension and word recognition are interwoven in the complex process of learning to read. A leveling system based on skill development and mastery (for example, a scope and sequence for decodable books) must be treated differently than lettered levels informed by subjective metrics. Conflating multiple measures of student proficiency into one overarching leveling system can undermine a mastery-based approach to reading success. One of the challenges with the leveling systems that Shanahan accurately references is that they rely on subjective “strategies” (for instance, finding the main idea or identifying the author’s purpose) rather than “skills” (for example, decoding multisyllabic words or analyzing an informational text based on its text features) in order to assess and assign complexity levels.
Reading comprehension can be impeded by things like complex sentence structures, vocabulary deficits, or a dearth of background knowledge. The interaction of these strands of literacy varies across students, subjects, and texts. While educators must attend to the important role of knowledge in students’ understanding of texts, they must also pay attention to a text’s accessibility in terms of decodability, word recognition, and syntax.
Consider this example: “Life on the farm changes with the seasons. Farmers work each day to plant seeds and grow crops.” If you have lived your whole life in the city, you likely do not have enough background knowledge to visualize this scene very well, or even to decipher what a crop is. Your teacher, however, can show you a quick picture or video clip to contextualize farm life and pre-teach the word “crop.” Meanwhile, the phonics and syntax of this sentence are relatively accessible. Equipped with those additional scaffolds, a “low-level” reader could both decode and comprehend the sentence.
Now, let’s look at this sentence: “Life on the farm follows the rhythms of the seasons, where long hours of labor are balanced by the quiet satisfaction of watching crops grow from seed to harvest.” Here, the teacher could provide similar previewing activities—addressing words like “harvest” and “labor” up front. And yet, even with those same knowledge scaffolds, this sentence is still much more challenging for a struggling reader to access because of its complexity in terms of decoding (“rhythms”), its vocabulary (“satisfaction”), and its length and structure.
Both sentences require background knowledge. But, if we momentarily remove background knowledge from this equation, don’t we also feel comfortable acknowledging that these two sentences are written at different text levels?
We must be cautious about trying to erase the complexity of reading proficiency by perceiving the literacy strands as though they exist in silos. Instead, we can consider how each strand interacts—and how we can leverage a range of text levels to remove key barriers for our students.
