The science of reading has brought welcome clarity to phonics instruction. Decodable texts give students essential practice applying sound-spelling patterns and building decoding confidence. This foundation matters enormously.

But here's what research also tells us: reading skill grows exponentially when students engage with authentic, natural-language texts.

Think of reading development like a snowball rolling downhill. Every encounter with rich vocabulary, complex sentence structures, and engaging ideas adds momentum. Students who only practice controlled decodable patterns miss the very language experiences that accelerate growth.

This is why guided reading with high-quality varied texts remains essential. Books like those in Literacy Footprints expose students to:

• Vocabulary they'll encounter in real-world reading
• Sentence structures that mirror authentic speech and writing
• Comprehension challenges that build critical thinking
• Content knowledge that expands their understanding of the world

The goal isn't either/or — it's both/and. Students need systematic phonics practice and meaningful experiences with authentic text. Together, these approaches create readers who don't just decode — they think, infer, connect, and grow.

Research strongly supports this balanced approach. Shanahan (2018) emphasizes that while decodables have a place in phonics instruction, “such practice should be limited, and even beginning readers should be reading (not just listening to) more than decodable texts.” Similarly, Pugh and Hiebert (2023) found “convincing evidence … that interventions including both decodable text reading and nondecodable text reading had larger effects than studies without both types of text reading.”

As Dr. Mark Seidenberg (2017) explains, “readers become orthographic experts by absorbing a lot of data, which is one reason why the sheer amount and variety of texts that children read is important” (p. 92). The more students read language as it’s actually used, the faster that snowball of learning will grow.