Elementary reading textbooks are big business.Publishers will spend tens of millions of dollarsto produce a reading program—and for good

reason. The nation’s school districts invest over abillion dollars in reading textbooks every year.

As they compete for sales, these programs havetaken on many similar characteristics. They display alot of artwork to help children engage visually as theylearn to draw meaning from spoken and writtenwords, and they offer multiple teachers’ guides withdetailed lesson plans, classroom and homework activ-ities, and related readings for faster and slower chil-dren. Though some programs take different ap-proaches to teaching decoding, with regard to theirpedagogy of comprehension, they are almost indistin-guishable. Some use more stories or poems than oth-ers; some call for teacher read-alouds more often—but they all have the same basic components.

Unfortunately, a review of the five most widelyused basal reading programs reveals that none evenattempts the kind of sustained building of word and

domain knowledge that is essential for increased read-ing comprehension—and for averting the fourth-grade slump. In order to make the transition from“learning to read” to “reading to learn” described byJeanne Chall, children must have a foundation ofbroad vocabulary and world knowledge that includesimportant domains and is built up over time. With-out this knowledge, children may be able to soundout the words in their textbooks, but will not be ableto extract adequate meaning from the text. Childrenfrom mid- to high-income homes pick up much ofthis word and world knowledge at home. But chil-dren from low-income homes depend on theirschools—and, ultimately, on the reading series thattheir schools decide to use. Beginning to emphasizeword and world knowledge in upper elementaryschool is simply too late for these children.

In the photos and discussion over the next threepages, three specific examples are provided to explainhow these programs miss opportunities to build wordand world knowledge: (1) they don’t focus on system-atically building essential knowledge and vocabularyduring teacher read-alouds and discussions aimed atbuilding background knowledge; (2) they waste timeby including many more lessons on formal readingcomprehension skills than researchers have found areneeded; and (3) by offering mostly incoherent, banalthemes, they miss opportunities to develop word andworld knowledge by offering and exploiting content-rich themes.

24AMERICAN EDUCATOR SPRING 2003

BASAL READERS:

The Lost Opportunity To Build the Knowledge that Propels Comprehension

By Kate Walsh

Kate Walsh is the former director of Language Arts for the CoreKnowledge Foundation. She has spent the past few years review-ing and critiquing reading textbook series. For this article, Walshexamined reading programs from five of the most widely usedbasal series: Harcourt Trophies, Houghton Mifflin Reading,Macmillan McGraw-Hill Reading, Open Court Reading, andScott Foresman Reading. Her review was limited to the K-3 por-tions of these programs and focused on those components relatedto increasing language and reading comprehension.

Basals Acknowledge the Need for Background Knowledge, But Do Little To Build It

In the early grades, the heart of a reading basal is acollection of simple stories with which children can prac-tice their emerging decoding skills. In general, these stories

don’t impart much word or domain knowledge—partly becauseit is important not to interfere with practicing decoding skills. There are a few fabulous examples of how such simple storiescan introduce tremendous world knowledge (for example, OpenCourt’s story titled Homes Across the World introduces children tothe world’s diverse geography and cultures with houses on stilts,houses with thatch roofs, and much more)—but such stories arerare.

Therefore, a critical way to build vocabularyand world knowledge is through stories thatteachers read aloud and through the discus-sions that follow. Most of the basals seem torecognize this and suggest devoting time toread-alouds. But the provided read-aloudsrarely introduce interesting vocabulary orcontent; and, by second grade, they are typi-cally not part of the daily (or even weekly)schedule. (Harcourt Trophies is a notableexception, providing almost daily teacher -read-alouds with interesting vocabulary.) Inaddition, teacher editions instruct teachersto “build background knowledge” aboutstory content before reading the stories(whether basal or read-aloud stories). Butmost of the stories’ content deals withslight topics grounded in the domesticworld of the modern American child, mak-ing it unlikely that students’ horizons will bebroadened.

To increase students’ word and worldknowledge, students must be exposed to morerigorous content: Teacher read-alouds shouldbe roughly two grade levels above the stu-dents, and students’ basal stories should ideallydevelop the same bodies of knowledge thathave been introduced in the teacher read-alouds. Moreover, significant chunks of time—say 20 minutes daily—should be devoted todiscussion after each read-aloud. This allowstime to ensure that all students comprehend thehigh-level read-alouds, explain new vocabulary,and start using the new vocabulary and new ideasand concepts.

In one typical five-week unit from a 2nd-grade basal, the teacherread-alouds were all short poems or several-paragraph stories like thoseabove, containing very ordinary vocabulary. Only one story departedfrom the simple world of family and friends and themes of sharing,playing, and family celebrations. Across several 1st- and 2nd-gradebasals, some topics on which teachers were asked to build backgroundknowledge were: what teddy bears look like; what makes grandmothers special;and what could happen if everyone brought their pets to school.

Scott Foresman,Grade 2, 2000

SPRING 2003 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 25

Harcourt Trophies, Grade 2, 2003

Excessive Time Is Devoted to Acquiring Formal Comprehension Skills Such as “Sequencing”

Current reading programs, without excep-tion, view the teaching of reading com-prehension largely as a set of formal skills

to be taught and practiced. None of the pro-grams acknowledge the importance of buildingbroad, general student knowledge as the pri-mary means by which to improve reading com-prehension. Instead, beginning in kindergarten,students are asked to rehearse skills such as se-quencing, classifying, inferring, or finding themain idea. Here are three typical Scope andSequence charts from basal teaching guides (right).You can easily see that the same skills are practicedyear in and year out. For example, students in theseprograms, and most others as well, practice the skill ofsequencing from kindergarten through grade 6 (oreven 8).

Although this illustration doesn’t show how othertopics are addressed, it is critical to note that these andother reading programs allocate as much or more actualtime to rehearsing comprehension skills than theyallocate to teaching any other element in theirlanguage-arts program. It’s not that time isn’t spent inan effort to strengthen comprehension, but that thetime is spent strictly on formal comprehension skills.

In reality, when children experi-ence problems comprehendingtext, it is more likely due to thechild’s lack of knowledge of thesubject matter. For example, a childcan make inferences about dinosaursbecause he happens to know a lotabout dinosaurs. The same child willexhibit almost no such reasoningabout the Big Bang theory because helacks knowledge about it. The notionthat we can teach students a set ofskills that they will be able to apply tonew and unfamiliar texts or situationsis a process that cognitive psychologistscall “skills transference.” This isregarded as an inordinately difficult taskfor our brains to pull off and, therefore,is not a practical educational goal. But itis a goal set forward by every major read-ing program on the market.

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Harcourt Trophies, Grade 2, 2003

Scott Foresman, Grade 2, 2004

Macmillan McGraw-Hill

Grade 1, 2003

Open Court, 2002Boxes with a tint and/ormark indicate grades in

which the skill is taught.

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26AMERICAN EDUCATOR SPRING 2003

The Themes Around which BasalsAre Organized Are TypicallyContrived and Trite—and Do Little To Build Knowledge

Developing knowledge in a particular domain and be-coming comfortable using its specialized vocabularydepend on devoting time to selected topics—time in

which new ideas and concepts can be built and contemplated;time to progress from introductory to more detailed texts; timeto discuss new information and concepts; and time to repeat-edly hear and practice using the vocabulary of the domain in avariety of contexts. Teachers, who have long organized academiccontent into units of study, knew this even before cognitive sci-entists began their studies of learning, memory, and expertise.

All the popular basal series are organized around themes, but unfor-tunately, problems abound. Many of the themes are little more thancatch-all labels for stories that hardly relate. Many themes address onlyutterly ordinary day-to-day knowledge and thus introduce only a min-imal amount of academic content and vocabulary that is new to stu-dents. Here are some actual themes for grades one and two pulled from threewidely used basal series: “Together Is Better,” “Being Me,” “Express Yourself,”“Imagine That!” and “Keep Trying.” Themes like these will do little to enhance students’ domain knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension.

It is a rare theme that offers carefully selected and sequenced readings that build from basic information to detailed discus-sion while systematically adding new vocabulary and repeating recently introduced vocabulary. In fact, none of the basals havesuch a well-constructed theme in their kindergarten or first-grade programs.

SPRING 2003 AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 27

A Better Way To Build a ThemeOne of the best examples of a well-constructed theme is Open Court’s “Fossils” (Grade 2, Unit 4). Based on the theme overviewin this photo, you can see that students are going to learn a good bit about fossils, dinosaurs, and dinosaur fossils. By beingfocused, the theme allows students to explore the two main, interrelated topics in-depth and builds manyopportunities to repeat related vocabulary in class. In addition to fossil anddinosaur, words such as scientist, paleontologist,imprint, extinct, bones,and skeleton appearfrequently in theselected readings. Theconcept of prehistory isalso well introduced, asthe readings state thatdinosaurs lived millionsand millions of year agoseveral times before theword prehistoric is used.But, unfortunately, onlyone of the selections is ateacher read-aloud, mean-ing that the language is notas advanced as it could be ifthe readings did not have tobe at the second grade level. Open Court, Grade 2, 2002

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Scott ForesmanGrade 2, 2004

Macmillan McGraw-Hill Reading, 2003