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Psychology of Literacy and Literacy Instruction

than the ones currently being used by the young reader (Clay,

1993; Lyons et al., 1993). For example, to encourage the de-

velopment of directionality, the teacher prompts the child to

Read it with your finger, pointing to each word as it is encoun-

tered in text. At first, this can require the teacher actually hold-

ing and directing the child’s hand, but eventually the child

internalizes the left-to-right and top-to-bottom movements

during reading. In order to increase the child’s understanding

of the concept of individual words, the teacher prompts the

child to write words with spaces between them, using the strat-

egy of putting a finger space between written words. The

teacher teaches the child to sound out words by saying them

slowly, breaking words into discrete sounds (e.g., cat into the

C, short A, and T sounds). Consistent with the demonstration

by Iversen and Tunmer (1993) that Reading Recovery is more

effective when it includes systematic teaching of chunks and

how they can be blended with letter sounds as part of reading,

Reading Recovery now includes more making and breaking

of words that share chunks (e.g., bake, cake, lake, make, take,

etc.) to highlight blending of individual sounds and spelling

patterns. The Reading Recovery teacher also teaches the

young reader to check decodings by determining whether the

reading of a word makes sense in that semantic context. In

short, the Reading Recovery teacher instructs the struggling

readers in the strategies that effective young readers use; the

ultimate goal of Reading Recovery is the development of

readers who use effective reading processes in a self-regulated

fashion (Clay, 1991).

As is the case for many forms of strategy instruction

(Duffy et al., 1987; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Pearson &

Gallagher, 1983; Pressley, El-Dinary, et al., 1992), there is a

gradual release of responsibility during Reading Recovery;

the teacher is more directive and explicit at first, and the child

takes over as lessons proceed and competence develops—that

is, the strategy instruction is scaffolded (Wood, Bruner, &

Ross, 1976). The teacher provides just enough support so that

the child can complete the task; then the teacher reduces the

support as the child becomes more competent and able to as-

sume greater responsibility for reading. Of course, the intent

of such an instructional approach is to develop self-regulation

in the child—first by permitting the child to tackle a task that

is beyond her or him and then by allowing self-controlled

functioning as the child becomes equal to the task.

Also, as is the case with many forms of strategy instruction,

evidence indicates that scaffolded teaching of processes well

matched to the target task is effective—that is, a large propor-

tion of children who experience Reading Recovery improve as

readers, and improvement is greater than that occurring when

comparable children do not receive Reading Recovery, at least

when reading achievement is measured immediately after

Reading Recovery occurs (see Pinnell, 1997). An important

distinction is between Reading Recovery students who gradu-

ate and those who do not make enough progress in the pro-

gram to graduate—that is, Reading Recovery does not always

work; when it does work, however, it seems to produce sub-

stantial improvement (Elbaum, Vaughn, Hughes, & Moody,

2000). As is the case with many early childhood interventions,

if students are simply returned to the classroom without addi-

tional support, however, the advantages of Reading Recovery

fade, and such Reading Recovery students are often not dis-

cernibly different in reading achievement measured several

years after the completion of the treatment (Hiebert, 1994).

Studies of Exceptional Primary-Level Teachers

Phonemic awareness instruction, phonics, and Reading

Recovery are theory-driven educational interventions—that

is, based on theory, researchers devised instruction they felt

would promote beginning reading, and their instructional stud-

ies served as tests of the theories that inspired the interven-

tions. There is another way to discover effective instruction,

however, which is to find very good reading teachers and not-

so-good ones and document what occurs in effective versus in-

effective classrooms. Pressley and his colleagues have done

exactly that with respect to Grade 1 in particular.

In both Wharton-McDonald et al. (1998) and Pressley et al.

(2001), the researchers observed first-grade classrooms over

the course of an academic year. In some classrooms, engage-

ment and achievement was better than in other classrooms.

For example, in some classrooms, a higher proportion of stu-

dents were reading more advanced books than was observed

in more typical classrooms; in some classrooms, students

were writing longer, more coherent, and more mechanically

impressive stories (i.e., stories with sentences capitalized,

punctuation, correctly spelled high-frequency words, sensible

invented spellings of lower-frequency words) than were stu-

dents in other classrooms. Most striking was that the more

engaged classrooms also tended to be the ones with more ad-

vanced reading and better writing.

What went on in the really impressive classrooms? 

• There was a lot of teaching of skills, and this instruction

was very consistent. Much of this instruction was in re-

sponse to student needs, however, with many minilessons

on skills.

• Fine literature was emphasized; students read excellent

literature and heard it during teacher read-alouds.

• The students did a lot of reading and writing.

• Assignments were matched to students’ abilities, and the

demands were gradually increased as students improved.

Such matching requires different assignments for differ-

ent students (e.g., one student being urged to write a

First Grade and the Primary Years

341

two-page story and another a two-sentence story, with the

demand in each case for a little more than the child pro-

duced previously).

• Self-regulation was encouraged; the message was consis-

tent that students were to make choices for themselves and

were to keep themselves on task.

• Strong connections were made across the curriculum; sci-

ence and social studies occurred in the context of reading

and writing, and science and social studies units were

filled with good literature and composing.

• The class was positive and very reinforcing, with much

cooperation between students and between teachers, other

adults, and students.

• The teacher’s classroom management was so good that it

was hardly noticeable at all, with little apparent need for

disciplining of students.

How different the effective classrooms were really be-

came apparent in analyses that contrasted the effective and

ineffective classrooms explicitly—analyses designed to iden-

tify what was very different in the excellent compared to the

not-so-excellent classrooms:

• Many more skills were covered during every hour of in-

struction in the most effective compared to the least effec-

tive classrooms.

• Word-recognition instruction involved teaching multiple

strategies (i.e., using phonics, noting word parts, looking

at the whole word, using picture clues, using semantic

context information provided earlier in the sentence or

story, using syntactic cues).

• Comprehension strategies (e.g., making predictions, men-

tal imagery, summarizing) were explicitly taught.

• Students were taught to self-regulate.

• Students were taught to plan, draft, and revise as part of

writing.

• Extensive scaffolding (i.e., coaching) took place during

writing—for example, with respect to spelling and elabo-

rating on meanings in text.

• Printed prompts for the writing process (e.g., a card

about what needs to be checked as part of revision) were

available.

• By the end of the year, high demands to use writing

conventions (e.g., capitalizing, using punctuation marks,

spelling of high frequency words) were placed on students.

• Tasks were designed so that students spend more time

doing academically rich processing (i.e., reading and

writing) and relatively little time on nonacademic process-

ing (e.g., illustrating a story).

• The class wrote big books, which were on display.

In short, excellent first-grade classrooms are very busy—

filled with teaching of skills and demands but also filled with

support and opportunities for rich intellectual experiences.

Although phonics is taught as skills advocates would have it

be taught, it is only part of an enormously complex curricu-

lum enterprise that includes many holistic experiences—that

is, systematic skills instruction does not happen first before

getting to literature and writing in effective first-grade class-

rooms; rather, skills are learned largely in the context of

reading literature and writing. Although literature and writ-

ing are emphasized as the whole language theorists would

have it, holistic experiences are constantly intermixed with

the systematic and opportunistic instruction of specific skills,

and skills were much more an emphasis than many whole

language theorists would consider appropriate. Excellent

primary-level classrooms—ones in which growth in reading

and writing is high—cannot be reduced to a very few in-

structional practices; rather, they are a complex, articulated

mix of practices and activities.

The most recent work of Pressley and colleagues (Raphael,

Bogner, Pressley, Masters, & Steinhofer, 2000) has taken a de-

cided psychological turn. They observed first-grade class-

rooms with the goal of determining how excellent first-grade

teachers motivate their students to participate in literacy-

promoting activities. In part, this research was stimulated

by the engagement perspective, which posits that literacy

achievement depends on instruction that motivates literacy

engagement (e.g., Guthrie & Alvermann, 1999). Such engage-

ment is promoted when classrooms emphasize learning rather

than student competition, meaningful interactions between

students and ideas, student autonomy and self-regulation,

interesting content, teaching of useful strategies, praise con-

tingent on literacy engagement and progress, teacher involve-

ment with students, and evaluations that make sense to

students (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). From this perspective,

it was expected that classrooms loaded with mechanisms

promoting literacy engagement in fact would be classrooms

high in student literacy engagement.

What Raphael et al. (2000) found was that first-grade

teachers who had students who were highly engaged in read-

ing and writing constructed classrooms filled with positive

motivational mechanisms compared to teachers overseeing

classrooms in which engagement was not as certain. Thus, in

classrooms where engagement was high, the following moti-

vational mechanisms were observed:

• Much cooperative learning took place. 

• Individual accountability (i.e., students were rewarded for

doing well and held accountable when they did not) was

demonstrated.

• As they worked, students received much coaching.

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Psychology of Literacy and Literacy Instruction

• Strong library connections were maintained. 

• Students were encouraged to be autonomous and given

choices.

• The teacher was gentle, caring, and inviting. 

• Much one-to-one interaction took place between teachers

and students. 

• Strong home-school connections were maintained. 

• Many opportunistic minilessons were taught. 

• Deep connections with students were maintained. 

• Appropriate risk taking was supported. 

• The classroom was fun. 

• Strong connections to other classes in the school were

maintained.

• The teacher encouraged creative and independent thinking.

• The teacher encouraged rich and detailed learning. 

• The class took a clear positive tone. 

• Assignments were appropriately challenging. 

• Students produced meaningful products (e.g., stories). 

• Depth in coverage was favored over breadth in coverage. 

• Assignments and units matched student interests. 

• Abstract content was made more personal and concrete.

• The teacher encouraged curiosity and suspense.

• Learning objectives were clear. 

• Praise and feedback were effective. 

• The teacher modeled interest and enthusiasm. 

• The teacher modeled thinking and problem–solving. 

• The teacher communicated that academic tasks deserve

intense attention. 

• The teacher inserted novel material into instruction. 

• The teacher provided clear directions. 

• The teacher made apparent the relevance of learning to

real life.

• The teacher encouraged persistence. 

• The teacher encouraged cognitive conflict. 

• The teacher communicated a wide range of strategies for

accomplishing academic tasks. 

• The teacher encouraged self-reinforcement by students

when they did well. 

• The teacher provided immediate feedback. 

• The teacher urged students to try hard. 

• The teacher expressed confidence in students. 

• The teacher encouraged students to attribute their successes

to hard work and their failures to a need to work harder.

• The teacher had realistic ambitions and goals for students. 

• The teacher encouraged students to think they can get

smarter by working hard on school work. 

• Classroom management was good. 

• The teacher provided rewards that stimulate students pos-

itively (e.g., gift book). 

• The teacher monitored the whole class. 

• The teacher monitored individual students carefully.

In short, consistent with the engagement perspective, engag-

ing classrooms were filled with positive motivational mecha-

nisms; less engaging classrooms showed many fewer of these

mechanisms.

That is not to say that the teachers in the less engaging

classrooms did not try to motivate their students. In fact, they

did. In less engaging classrooms, however, teachers were

much more likely than were those in the more engaging

classrooms to use negative approaches to motivations—

emphasizing competition between students; giving students

tasks that were very easy, boring, or both; providing negative

feedback; making students aware of their failures; scapegoat-

ing students; threatening students; and punishing students.

Such negative approaches to motivation were almost never

observed in the most engaged classrooms.

Summary

Many psychologists have been at the forefront of efforts to de-

velop effective beginning reading instruction. One reason is

that learning to read is a salient event in the life of the devel-

oping child—an event that is decidedly psychological in na-

ture. There are huge cognitive conceptions to acquire, such as

phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle, which de-

velop in the context of much associative learning (i.e., learn-

ing letter-sound associations and chunk-sound associations)

and development of subtle perceptual discriminations (e.g.,

the visual identity of each letter, both upper- and lowercase

versions). An important hypothesis among psychologists is

that beginning reading skills can be taught directly. In fact,

quite a bit of evidence has accumulated making clear that di-

rect teaching of synthetic phonics does in fact make develop-

ment of word-recognition skills more certain. In recent years,

there have also been validations of teaching involving empha-

sis on word chunks and blending of word parts in sounding out

of words; this approach is now part of the prominent remedial

approach to beginning reading known as Reading Recovery.

Although Reading Recovery teachers are highly trained for

their work, it is auspicious that even college students can tutor

beginning struggling readers with substantial gains (Elbaum

et al., 2000) because the need in the nation for tutoring

Comprehension

343

primary-level readers in beginning reading skills is very, very

great. This work on primary-level reading is an excellent

example of how psychological theory and research can inform

meaningful educational practice.

That said, the psychological theory related to beginning

word recognition seems simple relative to the complexity of

excellent first-grade instruction that can be observed in many

(although certainly not all) classrooms. Although instruction

to promote phonemic awareness, phonics, and word recogni-

tion in general is prominent in such classrooms, it occurs in a

context that attends to student motivation and excellent holis-

tic experiences, including the reading of much good literature

and extensive writing.

COMPREHENSION

Developing students who can understand what they read is

a primary goal of reading instruction. This goal should be

prominent beginning with the introduction to stories and

books in the preschool years. Even so, it definitely becomes a

more prominent purpose for literacy instruction during the

middle and upper elementary grades, with a number of aspects

of reading that can be stimulated to improve comprehension

(Pressley, 2000).

Fluent Word Recognition

When a reader cannot decode a word, it is impossible for the

reader to understand it (Adams, 1990; Metsala & Ehri, 1998;

Pressley, 1998, chap. 6). When young readers are first learning

to recognize words—either by blending individual sounds or

blending sounds and chunks—such decoding takes a lot of

effort, and hence it consumes much of the reader’s attention.

This situation is a problem because human beings can only at-

tend to a limited number of tasks at once (Miller, 1956). If that

attention is totally devoted to word recognition, nothing is left

over for comprehending the word, let alone the higher-order

ideas encoded in sentences, paragraphs, and whole texts

(LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). Thus, for comprehension to be

high, not only must young readers learn how to recognize

words, but they also must become fluent in word recognition

(National Reading Panel, 2000). Although not every analysis

has confirmed that comprehension improves as word re-

cognition fluency improves (Fleisher, Jenkins, & Pany, 1979;

Samuels, Dahl, & Archwamety, 1974; Yuill & Oakhill, 1988,

1991), some recent and especially well-done analyses have

produced data in which fluency and comprehension have

covaried (Breznitz, 1997a, 1997b; Tan & Nicholson, 1997).

Unfortunately, little is known about how to develop fluency

beyond the fact that fluency generally increases with addi-

tional practice in reading (National Reading Panel, 2000).

Vocabulary

People with more extensive vocabularies understand text bet-

ter than do individuals with less well-developed vocabularies

(Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Nagy, Anderson, & Herman,

1987). In fact, some experimental studies have even suggested

that the development of vocabulary knowledge resulted in im-

proved comprehension (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982;

McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Perfetti, 1983; McKeown,

Beck, Omanson, & Pople, 1985). Although vocabulary is

often taught extensively in school, for the most part, vocabu-

lary is acquired incidentally as a by-product of encountering

words in text and in real-world interactions (Sternberg, 1987).

There have been a number of demonstrations that vocabu-

lary knowledge increases with how much a reader reads

(Dickinson & Smith, 1994; Elley, 1989; Fleisher et al., 1979;

Pellegrini, Galda, Perlmutter, & Jones, 1994; Robbins &

Ehri, 1994; Rosenhouse, Feitelson, Kita, & Goldstein, 1997;

Valdez-Menchaca & Whitehurst, 1992; Whitehurst et al.,

1988).

Comprehension Strategies

When mature readers are asked to think aloud as they read,

they report using many strategies before, during, and after

they read as part of processing the text. These processes in-

clude predicting what will be in the text based on prior knowl-

edge and ideas encountered in the text already, constructing

mental images of ideas expressed in the text, seeking clarifi-

cation when confused, summarizing the text, and thinking

about how ideas in the text might be used later (Pressley &

Afflerbach, 1995). Because good readers consciously use

such strategies, it was sensible to teach such strategies to

young readers, with the hypothesis that the reading compre-

hension of young readers would improve following such

instruction; that is exactly what happens.

There were many studies in the 1970s and 1980s in which

a particular strategic process was taught to students in the

elementary grades with comprehension and memory of texts

that were read and then tested. These studies included those in

which students were encouraged to activate prior knowledge

(Levin & Pressley, 1981), generate questions as they read

(Rosenshine & Trapman, 1992), construct mental images

(Gambrell & Bales, 1986; Gambrell & Jawitz, 1993; Pressley,

1976), summarize (Armbruster, Anderson, & Ostertag, 1987;

Bean & Steenwyk, 1984; Berkowitz, 1986; Brown & Day,

1983; Brown, Day, & Jones, 1983; Taylor, 1982; Taylor &

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Psychology of Literacy and Literacy Instruction

Beach, 1984), and analyze stories into component parts (Idol,

1987; Idol & Croll, 1987; Short & Ryan, 1984). In general,

all of these strategies proved to improve comprehension and

memory of texts when taught to elementary readers who did

not use such approaches on their own.

The problem with single-strategy instruction, however, is

that good readers do not use single strategies to understand

text; rather, they use a repertoire of strategies (Pressley &

Afflerbach, 1995). Thus, in the early to middle 1980s, re-

searchers began experimenting with teaching repertoires of

strategies to elementary-level readers. Perhaps the best

known of these efforts was reciprocal teaching, developed by

Palincsar and Brown (1984). Small groups of students met to-

gether to practice four strategies to read text: They predicted

what would be in the text, asked questions about the content

of the text, sought clarification when confused, and summa-

rized the text. Although at first the teacher modeled the strate-

gies and led the group in applying them to text, control of the

strategies was quickly transferred to the members of the

group; the members took turns leading the group as they read.

The leader made predictions, asked questions, and attempted

summaries; the leader also asked for clarification questions

from group members and for predictions about what might be

coming next in the text. The assumption was that by partici-

pating approximately 20 sessions of reciprocal teaching, stu-

dents would internalize the reciprocal teaching strategies and

come to use them when they read on their own.

Reciprocal teaching did increase use of the cognitive

processes that were taught (i.e., prediction, questioning,

seeking clarification, summarization). With respect to perfor-

mance on standardized tests, the approach produced more

modest benefits. In general, reciprocal teaching was more

successful when there was more up-front teaching of the four

component strategies by the teacher (Rosenshine & Meister,

1994).

In general, when researchers directly taught elementary

students to use repertoires of comprehension strategies, stu-

dents have shown increases in comprehension. Teachers who

teach comprehension strategies effectively begin by explain-

ing and modeling the strategies for their students (Roehler &

Duffy, 1984)—typically by introducing a repertoire of strate-

gies over the course of several months or a semester (e.g.,

introducing previewing, then connecting to prior knowledge,

generating mental images about text meaning, asking

questions, seeking clarification when confused, and summa-

rizing). Often, these strategies are practiced in small groups of

readers, and the students choose which strategies to carry out

and when to do so. Thus, as students read a story aloud, they

also think aloud about which strategies they are employing to

understand the text. Sometimes other students in the group

react—perhaps coming up with a different mental image from

that reported by the reader or perhaps using a different strategy

altogether. Such discussions result in readers’ getting a great

deal out of a reading; they learn the literal meaning of the story

but also have a chance to reflect on alternative interpretations

of the story (Brown, Pressley, Van Meter, & Schuder, 1996).

By practicing such strategies together, the individual members

of the reading group gradually internalize the comprehen-

sion processes that are modeled and discussed (Pressley,

El-Dinary, et al., 1992). In general, reading comprehension

improves as a function of such teaching (Anderson, 1992;

Brown et al., 1996; Collins, 1991). This form of teaching

has become known as transactional strategies instruction

(Pressley, El-Dinary, et al., 1992) because it encourages reader

transactions with text (Rosenblatt, 1978), interpretations

constructed by several readers interacting (transacting) to-

gether (Hutchins, 1991), and teachers and group members

reacting to each others’ perspectives (i.e., interactions were

transactional; Bell, 1968).