Introduction
Reading is one of the first skills children learn, immediately after gaining awareness and familiarizing themselves with their environment. However, teaching elementary students how to read falls to their teachers, who rely on various methods of delivering instructional learning. Learning to read is a gradual yet critical process, as it enables learners to self-educate and advance independently without external guidance.
Therefore, the methods adopted to teach reading are critical as they contribute to learners’ understanding of what they are expected to do and how to ensure positive outcomes. The following paragraphs suggest that balanced literacy is detrimental to emergent readers. The essay proposes adopting learning instruction that leverages structured literacy, utilizing phonics and decoding, as these techniques promise improved mastery of reading skills.
Problem Statement
Balanced literacy is widely adopted in K-12 institutions all over the US due to its strengths, which promise progressive learning. The ultimate aim of delivering learning instruction to students is to enhance their comprehension. As a result, most educators perceive balanced literacy as a practical solution because it teaches students to recognize words and associate them with specific meanings. However, the issue with balanced literacy is that it suffers from limitations because it rushes children into experiencing enlightenment without creating phonological awareness.
Balanced literacy adopts a strategy that guides children into reading in context (Gray et al., 2022). Hence, they may develop a habit of guessing how words should sound instead of understanding the placement of letters, due to their inability to predict letter-sound associations accurately. Nevertheless, educators want children to develop oral reading fluency, writing, and spelling without necessarily memorizing (Clements, 2020). Therefore, structured approaches to learning instructions are recommended since they teach children to identify sounds and phonics in written words.
Existing Data on the Topic
The data used for the analysis reflect students’ performance in reading comprehension at the institution from 2021 to 2022. The learners include a group of twelve emergent readers followed through kindergarten to their first and second grades. The students in the data set were taught to read using balanced literacy approaches that include predictions, patterns, guessing, and memorizing in their kindergarten year from 2020 to 2021.
However, in the first grade, educators adopted a phonics approach based on reading science. Subsequently, the project collected data on their reading examination test scores, levels of accuracy, self-correct rates, fluency, WPM, and comprehension. The data obtained were recorded in Excel spreadsheets and structured for better analysis. This data is relevant to the aforementioned problem, as it highlights students’ performance after exposure to balanced approaches to learning instructions and structured techniques that incorporate phonics and decoding.
Data Analysis
The results obtained from the collected data suggest that most students performed as expected during their kindergarten period. Only two students approached expectations and required short-term interventions. On the other hand, two learners in the group exceeded expectations. In the first grade, three students met expectations, while two surpassed expectations. However, a significant drop in performance is noted as five students did not meet expectations, and one student required intervention.
Nevertheless, the self-correct rates increased compared to the kindergarten period. In the third year, there was a notable increase in performance outcomes, with more than half of the students surpassing expectations. The other half of the students were within expectations and performed well. Similarly, there was an increase in self-correct rates and comprehension, suggesting that learners gradually benefited from the altered learning instruction techniques.
Table 1: Reading comprehension performance according to expectations
Conclusions
During kindergarten and the first grade, most learners did not excel in reading and comprehension, as shown by the results. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the learners had a poor understanding of words, vowels, and sounds due to the use of balanced literacy techniques in learning instruction. Balanced approaches teach students to familiarize themselves with particular words in specific contexts. As a result, they may have issues interpreting learned words and vowel sounds in case of alterations. Hence, the learning instruction approach adopted proved insufficient to produce high-quality learning outcomes since it only teaches students to master, guess, and memorize.
The results also show no significant improvements during the first grade. However, all students notably improved in the second-grade tests. Thus, this demonstrates that the students took the time to internalize the learning instructions and apply them to develop their reading comprehension.
Students benefit from explicit instructions that cover a wide range of reading skills. Hence, learning to match sounds with letters puts them in a better position to decipher words and associate meanings, rather than relying on memorization and guessing. Adopting structured learning instruction that incorporates decoding and phonics skills can help teachers achieve better reading comprehension and commendable educational outcomes in emerging learners.
Recommendations
Teachers are tasked with designing and applying learning instructions that resonate with their learners’ needs. However, most lack the skills to deliver to their students in a sufficiently effective manner. According to Fisher et al. (2021), educators often fail to adopt structured learning solutions because they lack an understanding of what they entail.
Therefore, it is advisable to train kindergarten teachers through programs that address evidence-based learning instruction to achieve the best outcomes. Teachers require a solid understanding of the alphabet system to effectively teach letter-sound relationships. Hence, training can help them familiarize themselves with what is required and how to deliver on their duties.
Additionally, educational researchers recommend applying mixed-methods learning instruction to help students diversify their understanding. Balanced techniques for delivering educational content have their benefits, as they ensure that teachers use similar approaches to educate students (Clements, 2020). However, they also have limitations as they do not satisfy all the requirements for learners to achieve the best outcomes. Thus, altering balanced and structured learning instruction techniques can allow educators to reap more benefits. In other words, learners will familiarize themselves with words in their contexts and gain the skills to evaluate vowels and sounds in other learning materials.
Recap
Teachers teach their students reading and writing to enable them to express themselves and read different texts easily. As a result, educators’ instructional learning should be aligned with students’ needs and designed to help them acquire new skills. According to the collected data and analysis, balanced learning is ineffective in developing children’s cognition and understanding of vowels. However, phonics and decoding techniques put them in a better position to gradually advance. Therefore, teachers should familiarize themselves with the tenets of structured delivery and apply both techniques to ensure effective learning and reading comprehension.
References
Clements, J. B. (2020). The Impact of the Balanced Literacy Approach in Reading Instruction on Student Reading Motivation and Reading Competence. The College of William and Mary.
Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2021). Veteran teachers’ understanding of “Balanced Literacy”. Journal of Education, 00220574211025980.
Gray, A. M., Sirinides, P. M., Fink, R. E., & Bowden, A. B. (2022). Integrating literacy and science instruction in kindergarten: Results from the efficacy Study of Zoology One. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 15(1), 1-27.