Hi Elaine,
The term science of reading (SOR) represents a large, multidisciplinary body of research that explains how students learn to read and informs the most effective instructional strategies to support skilled literacy development. So, while there has been some research on the impact of illustrations on children’s reading comprehension, inference, story retell, and similar skills, I’m wondering if the root of your question is more regarding the role of pictures in students’ foundational reading skills.
When children are new to reading, we want to establish the skills and routines to encourage them to attune to every letter in a word, applying their knowledge of sound-letter correspondences, and blending those sounds together to form words. With repeated practice, application of these skills will become more effortless and automatic. Supplying pictures when reading individual words could be counterintuitive, as it may encourage the student to label the picture presented rather than sound out the printed word. Pictures may, however, be used in other phonics-based activities, such as worksheets eliciting words for students to encode.
Phonics patterns should be practiced in the context of connected text as well. To my knowledge, opinions on whether or not decodable texts should include pictures are based on extrapolation, rather than any direct experimental research. Meaning, I don’t believe we have any research to demonstrate that the inclusion or omission of illustrations in decodable texts will impact student learning of phonics patterns or word reading. One could claim that pictures may allow students to guess at words, rather than decode them, but I would argue that there remains a wide gap between the pictures in predictable texts (e.g., text that reads something like ‘Say hello to the lion. ‘Say hello to the elephant,’ with a new animal completing the sentence and pictured on each page) and any that I have witnessed accompanying decodable texts. While some decodable texts may provide pictures to help the simple story be more engaging, others may depend on these illustrations to add depth to the storyline when the text is limited by the number of phonics patterns (and thus words) that can be included.
For example, a decodable text limited to simple consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and a small number of high-frequency words might have a page of dialogue, “I am sad,” to accompany a picture of a broken window in an attempt to progress the plot in a way that the text would be unable to do. While still other decodable texts may avoid illustrations completely, with the expectation that students draw their own picture after reading, as a comprehension task. These differences illustrate (pun intended) that the choice to include or exclude pictures in decodable texts can serve various purposes, none of which are “right” or “wrong.”
While I do think the above portion of my response speaks most directly to the concern in your question, I’d be remiss not to explicitly also say that basing instruction on the science of reading in no way prevents you from also including authentic texts in your classroom! Children can absolutely still benefit from commercially published picture books in numerous ways, such as print awareness, establishing an enjoyment of books, language and vocabulary exposure, and more. The way they interact with these authentic books (passively listening at story time, reading independently, or somewhere in between) will likely vary greatly based on their grade and reading abilities, as well as the individual text in question, but illustrations, of course, play an important role in most commercial children’s books and should be valued in all early classrooms!
