Decodable books are ONE important piece of helping students to become good readers. Decodable books and text contain words made up mostly of sound-letter connections that have been taught and practiced ahead of time. To make the text more readable, a small number of high-frequency words that are not yet decodable (may contain more difficult or unexpected spellings that have yet to be taught, such as ‘the’, ‘is’, ‘was’) are also used. As a student learns new sound-letter connections, the words used in the books expand to include the more words that contain new and perviously learned sound-letter connections.
Using decodable text in the early stages of reading development helps to ensure that a student can read the words printed on the page without guessing. This teaches them to trust the print, and use decoding as the first and best way to figure out new words. Decodable books are essential because they provide reading practice that uses the knowledge of sound-letter connections that have been taught. Reading decodable text builds automaticity and confidence as children become proficient word-level readers, which leads to fluent sentence level readers. Once much of the "basic code" has been taught, students will read a variety of books independently. Decodable texts are only required until the student consistently decodes new words with some of the more complex sound/letter combination connections. They are used as ONE PIECE of a literacy program, along with access to and sharing of all types of books during this time.
Decodable readers are considerably different from levelled readers (A books, B books, C books, etc.), which many reading programs in the past have used.
Decodable readers focus on the sound/letter connection that makes up the "alphabetic code" used in languages. Decodable books use words that can be sounded out once a student has learned the sound/letter knowledge that connects to the words in the book. (Please see the "Home Page" for examples of decodable words.) When the task is identify a word, the focus needs to be the letters in the words. This will build the ability to to automatically recognize MANY words over time. The intentional work decoding of words leads to automatically remembering the letter sound connection, and later, the automatic knowledge of words. This instant recognition of the letters and sounds, and then words, is called orthographic mapping.
'Levelled' readers focus almost exclusively on 'meaning' and simple memorization of whole words and sentence patterns. Levelled readers teach children to rely on multiple cues in the text or pictures to guess unknown words and/or memorize a list of the most common words in print. Predictive and repetitive sentences help students predict the correct words and read them as a whole unit (e.g., "I get my lunch. I get my books. I get my shoes. I get my sweater. I go to school."). This type of whole word reading can interrupt the orthographic mapping process, leading to developing inefficient reading strategies for emergent readers.