On porcupines and predictable text: What are predictable texts and why are they a problem?

The problem with predictable text: How many beginning readers can read these words without the aid of repetition and picture clues?

The draft revision of the Australian Curriculum was released for consultation in April and two aspects of the English: F-6 curriculum have attracted particularly strong criticism. One is the inclusion of a variation of the three cueing strategy for reading. There are multiple references in the draft curriculum to students using ‘contextual, semantic, grammatical, and phonic knowledge’ (or some variation of this) to read words, and to ‘text processing strategies’, which is another term for the same idea. As explained here, three-cueing with phonics as the strategy of last resort is not an effective, evidence-based reading strategy. It instills the habits of weak readers and therefore should not be enshrined in the Australian Curriculum.

A second and related problem in the draft curriculum is the requirement that children read both decodable texts and predictable texts. These different types of texts are designed to encourage different reading strategies and therefore they contradict each other at a time when consistency is important.

Predictable texts are based on the same flawed premise as the three-cueing strategy – the idea that skilled reading involves prediction and guessing – whereas multiple scientific studies have shown that skilled readers process all of the letters in a word and that this becomes automatised through phonic decoding. Decodable books are designed to establish this skill.

While picture books with repetitive text structures are enjoyable and valuable for very young children before they begin formal reading instruction, and later as a shared text, they are not appropriate as classroom or home ‘readers’ for students to practise their own reading once they begin school.

One of the reasons that predictable texts keep rearing their ugly heads in curricula and syllabi comes from an apparent misunderstanding of what predictable texts are, and why they are detrimental to early reading development when used incorrectly. This misunderstanding extends from official documents like the curriculum through to teachers in schools.

A recently published study conducted in Western Australia found that more than half of the teachers surveyed gave both decodable and predictable texts to beginning readers, even though almost all teachers reported teaching systematic synthetic phonics in their literacy lessons. If students are taught to decode words using phonics in their lessons and when reading decodable texts, and are then asked to either guess words or attempt to sound out words with letter-sound patterns that they have not yet learned when reading predictable texts, this will cause confusion and frustration. It also demonstrates that many teachers are themselves unaware of the problems associated with using both types of texts together for instruction. Including both text types in the curriculum exacerbates this problem

What are predictable texts?

Predictable texts are a specific type of book used in the earliest stages of reading instruction. Predictable texts are constructed to encourage beginning readers to memorise whole words and sentences and to use picture cues to ‘read’ unknown words. The texts have a repeated sentence or phrase on each page, typically with one variable word. A picture accompanies each sentence that allows the student to guess the variable word using the picture.

Predictable books do not follow a scope and sequence of any kind – phonic or otherwise. While the syntax and sentence structures in predictable books are simple, there is no systematic approach to the vocabulary included. Since predictable books are deliberately designed to preclude decoding using phonics, they contain words that students are unlikely to be able to decode in the first few terms of school even if they were receiving high quality phonics instruction – words like porcupine and forest. They include words that are only be able to be read by beginning readers either as memorised whole words or guessed by using picture cues.

Examples of predictable texts (click on the arrows to scroll through the gallery)*