Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
The story of how "Whole Language" methods of teaching reading almost crushed "Phonics" is an interesting case study of how "junk science" almost overwhelmed what everybody used to know.
Phonics is the art of using the sounds associated with various letters and letter combinations to convert a string of letters into an audible string of sounds which the brain uses to create the "word" which is assembled into a story. The reading teachers call this "decoding". Create the sound of the word and then pick the meaning that best fits the trajectory created by the previous words.
Phonics is like Exlax. Just give it time. It is going to work. Even if you are not the most gifted teacher, you can teach almost all students to read using phonics.
The allure of the exotic
A researcher in New Zealand (exotic country that speaks English. Just head toward California from the mid-West and keep going after you hit water) assumed that the best readers in 3rd grade read by recognizing the entire word at-a-glance. Her reasoning was "if that is how the best readers decode, then we should teach the poor readers to do the same".
The idea was garnished with the verbiage that "this is the natural way that kids learn to read".
Well, isn't that grand. Mrs Grundy no longer has to endure the drudgery of teaching "C sounds like Cat" for the remaining decades of her career. She can just throw picture books at the kids and say "Wing it."
Kids were told to look at the pictures and then to guess what the new word was based on the trajectory of the story. If they really got stuck, they were allowed to use phonics.
Except schools and book publishers wholeheartedly embraced this new concept. It made all the old books obsolete. It was new and glittery. They dumped phonics. So how is a student supposed to access phonics when they really got stuck? They had never been taught "the rules". The "Whole-Language" method of teaching reading was Orwellian in its name...it was "Whole" except it completely omitted phonics.
Why do you need "science" that is data-driven? That kind of science is hard and requires statistics and large amounts of data. It is expensive and nobody really understands it. That kind of science is for uncool people...and we have this FABULOUS narrative...and it is "natural"...
Reading scores sagged. Mavens diagnosed the problem as "not enough whole language" instruction. More reading teachers were hired. Kids were pulled out of other classes (teaching skills they would need later) and received one-on-one instruction using "the natural way kids learn to read" and they still couldn't read.
There was some data that showed that phonics reliably taught kids to read (a paint roller, if you will) and "whole language" worked for some kids but failed many others (spatter painting with a toothbrush) but it was universally ignored by the decision-makers. It was uncool to support and fund phonics.
Universities avoided the question. They attracted funding by touting new, bleeding-edge methodologies. Book publishers didn't want to fund it. They were making too much money replacing "old, obsolete" phonics programs with "new" Whole-Language programs. Government (the 800 pound gorilla in funding) relied on Blue-Ribbon Experts from Universities and Industry for guidance in what to fund.
And when the first-gen Whole-Language programs failed, publishers and experts-for-hire marketed "new-and-improved" whole-language programs that relied on even shakier science than the first generation.
In the end, advances in brain-scanning technology (an unrelated field) revealed that the very-best 3rd grade readers were not accessing the memory-recall portions of their brains when reading but were exercising the bejabbers out of the parts of the brain that applied phonics rules. The original premise was wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.
Two generations of the education industry (publishers, universities, politicians, administrators) had been caught with their pants down. Admitting they were wrong would entail a career-ending loss of face. They looked the other way.
The reason home-schoolers with 90 minutes of formal education, five days a week were shellacking public-school kids was because of
- Disruptive students, perhaps frustrated because they were being force-fed really stupid, counterproductive, impossible pedantic hocus-pokus. Don't get me wrong, most kids learn to read, but if 20% don't, that is five very disruptive kids per classroom of twenty-five.
- Once you tell a student that a "good guess" is as valid as what the author had originally written, then you opened Pandora's Box. Does that apply to the hard-sciences? How about math? Does it matter if people die when a bridge collapses in Florida as long as you made a really good-guess that were based the logical trajectory of a life-time of academic achievement underpinned by "You got an A because that was a really entertaining guess."
---NOTE to readers---
This is my opinion. Your opinion may differ. That is fine.
In God We Trust. Everybody else must show their data.
If "Whole Language" is so great, let's compare the bottom 20% of the kids taught reading using Whole-Language to the bottom 20% taught to read using Phonics.
Why the bottom 20%? Because they are the ones most likely to mug you or break into your house or go to prison or to have 8 kids out-of-wedlock and raise your taxes.
---End Note---
I’m expecting a discussion about mathematics, in similar vein, tomorrow. Teaching of both subjects went down, down under, from the late sixties.
ReplyDeleteHave just taught a six year old to read with Dick & Jane books. Back about 800 AD, monks were trying to figure out how to write Old English, using Roman letters. The word ‘hwaet’ clearly had an aspirated sound and a flat ‘a’, but conventions changed the spelling later to ‘what’. Roman letters had no guttural, so ‘gh’ was used. The sounds later disappeared but the spellings remain. Consider the silent letters in ‘knight’, all of which are pronounced in the German cognate ‘knecht’. Consider the use of the same word to mean different things: “Time flies like an arrow”, “Fruit flies like a banana”. And homonyms - why can’t you get undressed in the mountains? The mountain peaks/peeks/piques. And spellings that are pronounced differently according to the word ‘see, sugar’? Or tense: to read, read, have read. Very complex, English, it is.
ReplyDeleteThree out of my four kids needed tutors. We had the priorities and resources to make that happen.
DeleteOne of the things that I learned is that the vowels are "A", "E", "I", "O", "U" and sometimes "Y" and "W".
"W"????
Consider the word "Willow". The second "w" makes the "o" say its own name. That is what vowels do.
You can only imagine the unholy joy in the eyes of my kid who whacked me with that nugget of information. HE knew something daddy didn't!
The rules are codified. We know how often they are activated. They can be taught in the order of the frequency in which they are used.
In the late 80s I was working at Rocketdyne and the call went out for engineers to sign up to be reading tutors. We were taught to use use Phonics. Whole Language was known to be a failure 40 years ago.
ReplyDeleteWe homeschool our 4 children. All learned to read before age 4. Phonics method. Dr Seuss books worked for the boys. Repetition and rhyme. Those books were less effective with the girls so we went with a dedicated phonics book to build mastery. Then to Dr Seuss. We now read Scripture daily. Maintain reading proficiency and build familiarity with principles for managing life on planet earth and in the hereafter.
ReplyDeleteEd majors get their PhDs by proposing some hare-brained solution where the only problem is the publishing companies can't make a profit selling a new set of books, teacher's guides, supplements, etc. New Math, Social Studies (instead of History and Geography), Whole Language. Basically, every 'new' pedological method in the last 80 years has been a step in the wrong direction.
ReplyDeleteWe need to force our schools to go back to a 1950s era curriculum and teaching methods, just update the Geography and History books to current.
Phonics has ALWAYS worked....
ReplyDeleteIt is not just English. The principle of phonics helps one learn any language.
ReplyDeleteDept of Education starts in 1980, the junk science begins in all areas. Rallying cry-"We're the EXPERTS, trust us". People forget one of the three biggest lies- We're from the government and we're here to help.
ReplyDeleteJunk Ed techniques started in the 60s. Listen to Tom Lehrer's song New Math and look at when he published it...
DeleteThe day we started requiring college degrees in Education for elementary school teachers was the beginning of the destruction of American education.
My sister in law was for a time in the mid 1970s an English teacher in a private school in Manchester (UK). She had many horror stories to tell of the damage inflicted on the primary school kids coming into her classes from the "new" teaching methods - she had to take the kids virtually back to 1st grade and start again to get them up to speed as to where they should have been at 11/12.
DeleteNew Zealand Education is in the process of returning to Phonics. Pushback is expected from the fans of Whole Language.
ReplyDeleteThis could be a metaphor for so much that is wrong today. Facts are discounted/discarded in favour of opinions and feelings. Follow the science now means parroting the opinion of someone claiming to know it all, rather than actually looking at and analysing the real data - and in some cases, making up the data to fit the opinion.
ReplyDelete“Homeschooled” during one summer to teach my kids reading. The “real” school was teaching the new dangled way. I thought that was absurd. I bought what we needed and I taught phonics. My two girls were both reading that summer.
ReplyDeleteWhen my oldest got to high school the science teacher required a science calculator. I was in science in college at the same time. My college teacher wouldn’t let us use a science calculator. He wanted us to understand and use the equations. I told my daughter’s teacher what the college teacher said and that I wouldn’t be buying her a calculator. He gave her one. She was failing science but the middle of the year. More tutoring by mom and she had her grade up to a B. That was in the 90’s. So much worse now.
Brenda
Excuse the typos. Typing with arthritis on a small phone! Brenda
ReplyDeleteIf a parent takes the ten or fifteen minutes necessary to read a book to their children every night before bed, by the time they are ready for kindergarten, they will be reading above grade level. They will also have gotten into the habit of reading.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, most parents don't or won't make the time to read to their kids. It's so much easier to plop them down in front of the TV.
My personal experiences proves true your first paragraph. My parents regularly read to me starting at age three. By the following year I had hundreds of books in 'my' library. I had taken ownership of my own education.
DeleteAt age eight I tested as reading to the 11th grade level. I continue to be a voracious reader. The advent of the Internet has somewhat curtailed my reading from books. Not changed is the immense passion I have for reading.
And when words are adopted from other languages, like the word "phonics" pronounced fonicks the source should be explained.
ReplyDeleteMy wife would have loved to read this post. She taught elementary for 37 years starting in 1969. She earned a masters in reading about eight years into her career. She started out teaching phonics. She was exposed to the 'whole word' method and basically said, 'Uh nope". She kept her 'whole word' material on hand and used it when she was being 'evaluated' by school administrators for reading. She knew children needed to be able to sound out words for reading to make sense. Really do wish she could have seen affirmation for her beliefs.
ReplyDeleteMy wife spent 35 years as an elementary school teacher and principal. She had nothing good to say about whole word. They taught phonics and her students had the highest reading scores in the district for years until she retired.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the phonic prompt. I'm late accumulating resources to homeschool the GrandThings, and that one is now handled-ish.
ReplyDelete