Unpacking automaticity: Scaffolded texts and comprehension

Abstract

Automaticity in recognizing the words in a text is fundamental to comprehension. If the number of words readers need to stop and decode exceeds their ability to retain their understanding of a narrative's plot or an expository text's description, their comprehension suffers. The conventional intervention for students who lack the automaticity to adequately comprehend text has been to repeatedly read texts orally. The current review first addresses evidence for this conventional treatment, concluding that students have not shown substantial increases in silent reading comprehension. Next, this review presents evidence underlying an alternative perspective for automaticity support where texts are selected to support students in increasing their automaticity with the words they will encounter consistently—the 2500 morphological families that have been shown to account for at least 90% of most school texts. Finally, guidelines for teachers are provided that address the talk, tasks, and time of instruction, as well as texts, for automaticity.