Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons-Part 1 The Content

Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons (100EZ) by Siegfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox, and Elaine Bruner is one of the most popular choices for home reading instruction.  Its low cost, scripted lessons, unassuming presentation have reassured parents for 30 years that they can teach their child to read.  Let's look a little closer at what 100EZ actually teaches and what makes the program effective (or not).

I'll start with a little background information.  Over the course of 1 year I analyzed over 17,000 words from two children's dictionaries for their sound-spelling correspondences.  Every word was meticulously broken down in order to construct a usable database of the correspondences which make up English.  I identified over 440 unique correspondences for the 40+ sounds of English.  I then analyzed several books from Project Gutenberg to understand how many correspondences are necessary to read adult level materials.  The books ranged from 300-350 correspondences.  These numbers are somewhat muddied by how one parses words (is it w al k or w a lk?) and the composition of  the correspondences being measured, that is, two book which each have 300 correspondences may have a different composition of correspondences. However, these numbers give us some ballpark figures:  300-350 correspondences needed to read adult level text, a minimum of 440 total correspondences.  

So, how many correspondences does 100EZ teach?  It turns out the best possible case scenario puts the number at 80.  I say best possible case scenario (BPCS) because over half of the correspondences (n=45) are introduced in the context of a word or two, without any exposition on their use in the word or their relevancy to other words.   For example, in Lesson  48 the word 'to' is introduced (expanded to 'do' in Lesson 54), without any discussion of the letter o's correspondence with the sound /OO/.  Neither is it discussed that this correspondence, o-/OO/, could be useful in other words, such as prove, approve, movie, move, tomb, womb, zoology, doing, who, whom, whose etc.  So the BPCS assumes (we'll discuss the validity of the assumption later) that children will infer from the instruction that these correspondences can be used in other words.  If we take 300 as our target and using the BPCS number 80, 100EZ teaches 27% of needed correspondences.  

What Makes A Good Reading Program

Welcome to Reading Program Junkie, the place where I can discuss the minutiae of reading instruction to my hearts content, and still keep my marriage.  My journey to RP Junkie started simply enough:  I tried to teach my oldest daughter to read.  I had assumed she would learn to read on her own or with minimal help just as her parents had (because, of course, reading is a genetic trait).  

I started with an inexpensive, off the shelf, all-in-one-book program.  Everything went beautifully until a few word families were introduced.  She was a bit confused by this but trusted her mother to know what was best.  Then the temple to Easy Reading Instruction came crashing down around me when the "silent-e" (aka "magic-e") rule was introduced.  I read the word 'live' as /l-i-v/ and then I started thinking-and saying-all the words that didn't follow the "silent-e" rule.  My daughter then refused to continue with a rule as erratic as this one.  I started on  a search to find a program that didn't teach word families and didn't teach the silent-e rule and would teach my daughter to read.  Twelve programs later, I found Diane McGuinness' Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It.  The pedagogy fit exactly what I needed, but after trying two more programs, I knew I just had to make it up myself.  

Perhaps my habit started to justify my large outlay of cash.  Perhaps I just can't believe that there isn't a program written that would do all the things I wanted in the way I wanted. Whatever the reason, and though my daughter now reads well, I still LOVE to analyze reading programs.  Necessity has become obsession.

A good reading program is one that effectively teaches someone to read anything they want or need.  Four main areas interest me in the structure of reading programs:  

1.  Content of Instruction - All the skills and knowledge necessary to read words in context.  I do not include here all the knowledge necessary to understand words in context.  That is an issue of vocabulary and background knowledge, not reading.  

    

2.  Presentation of Instruction - The layout of the content and the activities used to teach the content.  This encompasses add on components as well as page design.  

3.  Sequence of Instruction - The logic used to progress through the content.  

4.  Instructor interface  - The ability of the instructor to use the program effectively, flexibly, and happily.