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This study examined an unaddressed aspect of the National Reading Panel’s (2000) conclusions on fluency: text features. While both intervention groups read texts repeatedly, one read a literature anthology and the other read social studies and science texts with core high-frequency and phonetically regular words. Both groups had higher gains in fluency rates than is typical for second graders but the growth of those who read specially written texts exceeded that of the literature group. This additional growth enabled a larger percentage of students in the latter group to move from the 25th to 50th percentiles on national fluency norms than in the literature intervention.

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This study examined the effectiveness of a little book curriculum in facilitating the independent reading skills of first-grade readers. The curriculum was based on a theoretical model that identified two critical dimensions of text-based support for beginning readers: linguistic content and cognitive load.

The 15-week little book intervention was conducted in four first-grade classrooms of an inner-city school that was part of a large-city school district. Two of the classes were assigned to the intervention group and the other two classes were assigned to the comparison group. Children in the intervention group read from little books leveled according to features of linguistic content and cognitive load. Children in the comparison group read from basal literature texts. Word lists and graded passages from the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI) served as the pre- and post-test measures. ANCOVA and chi-square analyses revealed that children in the intervention classrooms performed at significantly higher levels on the post-tests than their counterparts in the comparison classrooms. These results applied equally to the word-lists and the passage reading tasks. The intervention was effective with children at all reading levels—high, average and low.

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Amidst the advocacy and mandates regarding beginning reading instruction, an examination of textbook programs that are presented as offering different philosophical orientations seemed in order. Three philosophically different programs were selected for study—a mainstream, basal program, a combined phonics and literature program, and a phonics emphasis program. Texts from each of these programs were compared on features of cognitive load (e.g., number of different words) and linguistic content (e.g., number of monosyllabic, simple vowel words). All three programs offer different components as a part of their comprehensive offerings—literature, decodable texts, and leveled texts. Three levels of each component (representing different points in the text-based curriculum) were compared.

Analyses of text features showed that each program presents a different set of tasks for beginning readers. In the mainstream, basal program, texts across levels differ primarily in length, but do not differ substantially in either cognitive load or linguistic content. In the early levels of the combined phonics and literature program, decodable texts are plentiful and emphasize particular linguistic content. By the middle of grade one, however, these texts become few, while the literature and leveled texts are similar to those of the mainstream, basal program. The phonics program has differentiated cognitive load and linguistic content in some, but not all, components of its program. Its decodable texts have a low number of unique words and few multisyllabic words. Its literature, however, has no clear connections to tasks of the decodable component. These analyses bring to the fore questions about what constitutes an instructional program for beginning readers.