How reading is taught in America
I went to college in the late 90’s at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I was a secondary education major, Chemistry to be specific, and at the time you were either primary (grades k-8) or secondary (grades 6-12). Secondary ed majors had a lot more specific content related course work, and less philosophy of education type coursework, which makes sense because I had almost every class of a full Chemistry major on top of my education work. Elementary teachers just had more room in their schedule for general education theory and method classes. That being said, I was not taught reading theory, but I was highly aware of how it was being taught at my school. We had a prominent professor named Dr Ken Goodman who was a big name in whole language instruction at the time. I had personally been taught to read using phonics and had a deep belief that phonics was the most effective way to learn reading. I was appalled and fascinated by whole language methods.
As part of my education I had to spend a lot of time volunteering in classrooms, observing teachers, and basically writing papers about what I saw. Research like any other major would do, but in the real world. I was in a second grade classroom one semester and I saw kids being asked to write paragraphs about this or that. The kids didn’t know any spelling or structure, they would hand in papers with less than half of the letters in each word, letters written backward, words missing. I wish I had a camera in my pocket at the time, but here is an example I found online. This is written with much more skill than I was seeing in that classroom.
On this image, you can see a teacher has written the proper word above the student’s writing. When I was in school we were taught not to do that. Kids would turn in a writing like this, and teachers would tell them it was awesome, and that would be that. I was so confused—how are they supposed to learn spelling? If you don’t correct them, how will they improve? The answer always was: we’re teaching fluency. The details will sort themselves out later.
This experience has been floating around in the back of my head for 25 years, and I was so glad when we moved to Texas, which at the time was a phonics state. We did decide to homeschool our own kids and taught them using phonics. Of my four kids, two did phonics until about the end of first grade and then took off reading on their own. One needed support until the end of second grade, and the last one until the end of third. All of them are fluent and comfortable readers, and none of them sound out words anymore.
I haven’t really thought about this issue for years and years. My kids know how to read and my clients are usually past learning to read age. The news lately has been more about the new math (love the scene from the Incredibles 2!) and I work in math more than ELA anyway. A few weeks ago a New York Times article popped up in my social feed and I found an incredibly compelling podcast about what has happened in the in-between. What have the last 25 years brought to reading research and what is the generally accepted method now?
I was so captivated, you have no idea. Also horrified. Basically what I was observing in college was just a precursor to modern whole language reading and writing instruction. It is so much worse now. According to the podcast students are taught to guess the word based on context, using 3 cueing questions:
- Does it make sense?
- Does it sound right?
- Does it look right?
Using this method the word is actually covered up with a post it note during the first two questions. The student is meant to read the word without looking at it at all. Only in the third question does the student look at the word and then only the first letter to see if it is consistent with the word they guessed.
This theory is based on verbal language acquisition. Babies learn to speak and understand the language that is happening around them solely with context clues and practice. I know this, you know this. It’s amazing and fascinating, but undoubtedly true. Whole language advocates are trying to apply the same language acquisition process to reading. The problem with that is, reading isn’t a natural human skill the way speech is. Humans haven’t been reading since time eternal, and the process doesn’t work like that. I guess there could be some debate about that—maybe babies grow up knowing words that often appear on signs such as “stop” and “exit.” But if that extended to general reading knowledge it seems to me that there would commonly be kids entering kindergarten fully reading fluent, and kids that don’t get taught reading overtly (unschoolers and Waldorf kids) would know how to read. But they don’t. Why would we have illiterate adults if learning to read was imbedded in our brain like learning to speak is?
Current reading research suggests that kids need to link a written word to the meaning in their brain, when you see an out of context word such as “confetti” you don’t sound it out or decode it do you? You automatically think of tiny circles of paper. But when you were first learning to read you had to sound out that word, or someone told you what it said, or you gathered it from pictures. Now the word is almost a symbol in your brain conveying the meaning. The question is, how did you go from not knowing the word to knowing it? People that have an easy time learning to read can convert a word from a bunch of letters to a meaningful symbol pretty easily. Naturally strong readers can learn to read with whole language, flashcards, phonics, or probably a bunch of other methods. Where the system breaks down is with students who have a harder time making the letters into a symbol. They are the ones most harmed by whole language methods because the 3 cues reinforce bad reading habits. They (the cues) make the process much more mysterious and less straightforward, and kids who are struggling have a harder time making the leap from letters to meaning. According to research the method that works best for the lower end readers is phonics. The decoding process is slow, but effective. And as kids practice decoding, words gradually get learned and added to their “catalogue” of words in their brain.
The good news is that reading instruction has suddenly become much more public (mainly because Covid lockdowns let parents see what was happening in classrooms) whole language is falling out of favor. I’m just so sad about the generations of kids who were harmed by this method. Literacy opens so many doors and robbing children (future adults!) of it is just criminal.
Here is the podcast the opened up this can of worms for me. It’s a compelling listen and well produced: