As elementary school teachers, one of our BIGGEST jobs is to ensure that all students can read proficiently. For students that struggle with learning to read, they need us to do absolutely everything in our power to help them learn this essential skill. Proficient reading is NOT an option.
Unfortunately for teachers like you and me, our education system has been in the middle of a war. A war over effective reading instruction. So I went on a journey to discover where it all started. Along that journey, I met some very interesting people like Horace Mann - The Father of Public Education, Dick and Jane, Johnny Who Couldn’t Read, and Kenneth Goodman - The Father of Whole Language.
Take a trip with me...
In a time machine...
The year is 1690...
We’re learning how to read!
Fun Fact: Rhyming is an essential skill for reading 🙂
I will boldly begin this chapter by saying that hands down, teaching students to read is the most important job we have as teachers. Reading allows all other learning to happen. Some may disagree and there is certainly a lot of learning that can take place without knowing how to read, but it is very difficult to get through life as a non-proficient reader. Based on the quote above, backed by numerous research studies, if a student attends the same elementary school from kindergarten to grade 5 and leaves not reading grade level text proficiently, we have not done our job.
Where did the 95% claim come from? About a dozen different experimental studies have been done (summarized in a linked blog post by Pedagogy Non Grata) with final results ranging from 94% - 98% proficiency rates in reading.
Research studies have shown that up to 30% of students will learn to read proficiently using ANY instructional method. Another 50% of students will learn to read proficiently with explicit and direct instruction in foundational reading skills — structured literacy. This means that with quality Tier 1 reading instruction beginning in kindergarten, 80% of students can attain reading proficiency. While we are working to achieve that goal, the other 20% of students need to be addressed.
15% of students on average may have struggles learning to read. With evidence-based reading instruction provided in skill-specific small groups as Tier 2 intervention and/or Tier 3 remediation (up to 80 hours of intervention instruction prior to 3rd grade), struggling readers can attain reading proficiency.
Who are the students in the final 5%? The National Institute of Health (NIH) estimates that up to 5% of young readers have “severe cognitive impairments that would make acquiring reading skills extremely difficult.”
READING PROFICIENCY: MAKING CONNECTIONS TO THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
If you think about it, the percentages for acquiring reading skills are no different than mastering any other “skill”. 95% of the population has the ability to learn pretty much ANYTHING—how to play a musical instrument, play an athletic sport, or become proficient in the use of technology.
In ALL things, there are some people that seem to learn a skill with no effort at all; they are “naturals” or “prodigies”. Tiger Woods – Golf. Michael Phelps – Swimming. Yo-Yo Ma – Musician. Bill Gates – Tech. These are your gifted students who are reading chapter books in kindergarten.
Then there are those who can do well through hard work, determination, motivation, and practice. You can achieve anything you put your mind to. This is the majority of students who learn through systematic instruction and lots of practice.
In all things, there are some that can only achieve success with 1,000’s of hours of deliberate practice. Not everyone has a great singing voice. Can they LEARN to sing? Sure. But will they go on to become a professional singer? Probably not. Can all people learn to play golf? Yes, but the uncoordinated person will need to spend additional hours practicing just to be proficient enough to play in the company golf tournament.
The difference between READING and all of the other skills mentioned previously is that we can get through life not knowing how to play a musical instrument, hitting the golf course, or singing karaoke. But we CANNOT get through life without knowing how to read. For many of the things we attempt to learn, if it’s difficult and will require lots of practice that we aren’t particularly interested in, we can move on to learning something else. This cannot be done with learning to READ.
Learning to read is an essential skill for life. It is not something we can simply choose not to learn and go find something else to put our time and energy towards.
In addition, reading is not something children can learn on their own. They must be taught to read through direct, explicit instruction. This is where the reading debate begins.
THE READING WARS
A FEW QUICK NOTES BEFORE WE GO TO WAR
*Studies have shown that up to 10% of children figure out how to decode words on their own without instruction. They see patterns in books and print and apply these patterns – Education Week 2019.
But don’t be fooled. Children who begin kindergarten already reading likely still need direct instruction in spelling strategies, speaking and listening skills, critical thinking skills, etc.
*Reading Proficiency is the ability to read text along with developed comprehension skills to make meaning of text. If a student can read words on a page but cannot tell you anything about the content of what they just read, they are not a proficient reader. On the flip side, if a student can tell you details from a text but is not reading the words accurately, they are not a proficient reader.
A HISTORY OF READING INSTRUCTION
Scientists and philosophers have been arguing for centuries about how children learn. There are two schools of thought on how foundational reading skills should be taught.
WHOLE LANGUAGE – The whole-language approach to teaching is based on student discovery and emphasizes that reading comes naturally to children. It is believed that students learn best when they’re immersed in rich language through literature. Children should be immersed in books and allowed to select their own reading materials. Students are taught to learn whole words through repeated exposure and memorization. They are provided with cues to help them recognize words not yet memorized. Students rely on context and pictures when deciding whether a word makes sense. As a last resort, children can use the first sounds of a word and use that as a clue to reading it. It is believed that focusing on individual sounds diverts children from the task of creating meaning.
PHONICS: ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE – The phonics approach to reading instruction is based on the philosophy that students need direct instruction and deliberate practice to learn new skills. Phonics lessons have students learning the relationship of letters in the alphabet to the sounds they produce. Once students have learned the letters and their sounds, they use this knowledge to begin blending sounds to read words (decoding). After mastering the decoding of words using the 44 sounds, children become knowledgeable about other meaningful parts of words, and how we use prefixes, roots, and suffixes to make word meanings more precise and powerful. This step by step method gives students a strategy to use when they attempt to read unknown words.
It is important to note that BOTH of these instructional philosophies have been around for centuries. At any point in recent history (250 years), we can find evidence of both Phonics and Whole Language being implemented in classrooms. The “Reading Wars” is not a new topic, but the ongoing debate does include NEW information. Modern technology allowing neuroscientists to look inside the reading brain has provided enlightening new information to a hotly contested argument.
To fully understand how we got to where we are today, a history lesson is needed. I will begin this history lesson by saying I have included the BIG IDEAS only. To give a detailed, thorough historical narrative would fill an entire book. So, let’s jump into our time machine and head back a few hundred years to see how children were taught to read.
1690 - THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER
ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE - PHONICS
The alphabet was invented over 3,500 years ago. For the majority of those years, parents had the primary responsibility of teaching their children to read. Learning letters and their corresponding sounds seemed a long and laborious process before a child actually started reading words, but it worked, so it was the common instructional practice for 1,000’s of years.
Considered the first school text in America, The New England Primer, was published in response to laws in the colonies requiring literacy instruction for children, servants, and apprentices. The primer started with the alphabet, simple letter combinations, syllables, then increasing to words and complex sentences. The New England Primer was in publication for over 150 years.
1791 GERMANY – PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH GEDIKE
WHOLE WORD – WHOLE LANGUAGE
Friedrich Gedike, a professor in Germany, proposed a new idea for reading instruction.
Professor Gedike believed that learning to read should begin with the WHOLE (word) and then
proceed to its PARTS (letters). Children learn to read a word as a whole part, a picture, then later (if needed) pull it apart to learn its letters and sounds. In 1791, Gedike published the first primer that could be used in schools and at home titled “Children’s Book for the First Practice in Reading without the ABC'S and Spelling”. Needless to say, while his daughter did learn to read simple sentences very quickly, the method was not successful with most other children. Still, while the majority of German students continued to receive reading instruction using the tried and true method of the alphabetic principle, there were holdouts believing that Professor Gedike’s method was the best option.
1836 – MCGUFFEY’S ECLECTIC READERS
ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE - PHONICS
The McGuffey Readers were a series of elementary school reading books widely used in American schools beginning in the 1830s. Written by educator William McGuffey and his brother, Alexander, similar in many ways to other readers of the time, the primer began with the alphabet and phonetically taught single-syllable words. The content of the first reader moved on to more difficult words and introduced simple sentences. The second reader progressed to multisyllabic words, and the stories grew more complex. What set the McGuffey readers apart from other publications is that it was a complete language arts curriculum with reading, spelling, comprehension, and writing.
1837 to 1848 - HORACE MANN – THE FATHER OF AMERICAN EDUCATION
WHOLE WORD – WHOLE LANGUAGE
Horace Mann, the first Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, believed in the idea of “common schools” where everyone could attend regardless of their ability to pay tuition. He believed that universal education and a basic level of literacy were essential. In 1843, Mann traveled to Germany to visit schools and observe instruction. He saw students learning to read using books with pictures of common objects and words underneath. He was intrigued. The traditional method of reading instruction by schoolmasters in Boston was through the alphabetic principle to learn letters and sounds, then syllables, then words. Mann returned to Massachusetts and used his influence as the Secretary of Education to propose education reform. He believed that "children would find it far more interesting and pleasurable to memorize words and read short sentences and stories without having to bother to learn the names of the letters." If the system worked in Germany, then it must work in America. Right?
1930 - JOHN DEWEY – THE FATHER OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION – DICK AND JANE
WHOLE WORD – WHOLE LANGUAGE
John Dewey, of the Teachers College at Columbia University, was an advocate of school as a place for children to learn and problem solve together as a community. This thinking was very progressive and unlike traditional classrooms during that time with students in rows, silently learning by lecture. In progressive learning classrooms, children were viewed as “unique individuals; students can be found busy at work constructing their own knowledge through personal meaning, rather than teacher-imposed knowledge and teacher-directed activities.”
Dewey believed that teaching children to read with phonics was drudgery that would turn them off from genuine learning. Dewey’s progressive ideas led to the "whole word" or "look and say" theory of reading instruction that became the Dick and Jane books. In 1930, Scott-Foresman published a set of basic readers that encouraged teachers to adopt the whole word (look and say) method which emphasized the meaning of words rather than using rote phonics drills.
1935 - ORTON AND GILLINGHAM
ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE – PHONICS
Samuel T. Orton was an American physician in the early 1900s who pioneered the
study of learning disabilities and is best known for his work examining the causes and
methods of treating students with dyslexia. He introduced the concept of multisensory instruction. Anna Gillingham, an educator, designed and published instructional materials for teaching the 44 sounds, or phonemes, of the English alphabet. These materials taught morphemes, such as prefixes and suffixes and created common spelling rules to apply to certain patterns and syllable types. Thanks to her system, students no longer had to memorize all the words (whole word method) but could apply skills such as decoding and only have to memorize words which did not follow common spelling rules. Her system, combined with Orton’s ideas of multi-sensory instruction, is where we get the well known Orton-Gillingham method of reading instruction. The book Remedial Training for Children with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling and Penmanship was first published in 1935 and became known as the Orton-Gillingham manual.
1955- WHY JOHNNY CAN’T READ
ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE - PHONICS
Author Rudolph Flesch wrote the book Why Johnny Can’t Read - And What You Can Do About It in 1955.
From a Time Magazine article written March 14, 1955 – “When Bestselling Author Rudolf Flesch (The Art of Plain Talk) offered to give a friend's twelve-year-old son some 'remedial reading,' Flesch discovered that the boy was not slow or maladjusted; he had merely been "exposed to an ordinary American school. Author Flesch decided to investigate how reading is taught in the U.S. Last week, he published his findings in a 222-page book, Why Johnny Can't Read—and What You Can Do About It (Harper; $3), that will shock many a U.S. parent and educator.”
In his book, Flesch determined that the whole-word method was ineffective because it lacked phonics. In addition, Flesch was critical of the simple stories and limited text and vocabulary in books of the time like Dick and Jane that taught students to read through word memorization. Flesch also believed that the look-say method did not properly prepare students to read more complex materials in the upper grade levels.
1967 – JEANNE CHALL – LEARNING TO READ: THE GREAT DEBATE
ALPHABETIC PRINCIPLE – PHONICS
Jeanne Chall, a Harvard University professor, completed extensive research in response to a national crisis in children’s literacy in the 1950s and '60s, She published Learning to Read: The Great Debate in 1967. Her findings supported phonics instruction over the whole language approach which was popular at the time. She described learning to read as a “developmental process,” advocating for using phonics and challenging, complex literature as the best ways to teach children to read.
1967 – KENNETH S. GOODMAN AND FRANK SMITH – THE FOUNDERS OF WHOLE LANGUAGE
WHOLE WORD – WHOLE LANGUAGE
Psycholinguistic scholars Goodman and Smith pushed back on the findings of Jeanne Chall in multiple publications in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their collective message communicated that the primary goal of reading was to acquire meaning from print and dismissed the importance of teaching the relationship between letters and sounds. Phonics programs, Smith claimed, undermined teacher autonomy. In Reading Without Nonsense, Smith argued that phonics instruction was unnecessary for efficient decoding of words and actually interfered with the process of learning to read. When assisting a struggling reader, Smith advised teachers, “The first alternative and preference is to skip over the unknown word. The second alternative is to guess what the unknown word might be. And the final and least preferred alternative is to sound the word out. Phonics, in other words, comes last.” For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.
1986 – WHOLE LANGUAGE TAKES HOLD – CALIFORNIA LEADS THE WAY
Despite multiple research studies and scholarly articles advocating for a phonics approach to reading, whole language theorists had communicated their ideas to decision makers in state government in order to change curriculum and instruction. Advocates of whole language determined that the path to changing classroom instruction was to work through state legislatures that had control over textbook adoption policies and the authority to dictate the content of the basal texts used in all public school classrooms. In 1986, whole language advocates were able to persuade the commissioner of education in California, Bill Honig, to adopt new textbooks that de-emphasized skill instruction and phonics skills. California was the first, but this strategy continued in other states, spreading the whole language philosophy nationwide over the next decade.
Between 1990 and 1994, the NAEP (Nation’s Report Card) started reporting state specific results in student proficiency. California students scored 45th out of 50 states. California administered a new statewide reading test in 1993 and 1994. The test results from these first two assessment years showed that 77% of 4th graders were reading below grade level. By 1995, the California legislature passed two bills, unanimously, that mandated the use of instructional materials that taught reading through phonics.
1996 - BALANCED LITERACY IS BORN – CALIFORNIA LEADS THE WAY, AGAIN
The term "balanced literacy instruction" first appeared in California in 1996. The low scores on the national reading assessment were blamed on the use of whole language instruction. A new curriculum, called balanced reading instruction, was mandated.
The new expectations for reading instruction were:
1. Phonics is foundational to comprehension and higher order thinking and needs to be taught systematically and explicitly.
2. Instruction is composed of regular but separate periods of explicit skills instruction and literature-based experiences.
These mandates turned reading instruction back towards phonics, but allowed the literature-based experiences of whole-language to remain.
Once again, California was on the forefront of a new era of literacy instruction.
2000 – NATIONAL READING PANEL
Based on the contradictory methods of reading instruction being implemented in each state, and the increasingly dismal reading proficiency scores nationwide, Congress asked the NICHD (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) to test the effectiveness of different approaches in teaching children to read. The panel was made up of 14 people, including leading scientists in reading research, college representatives, teachers, educational
administrators, and parents. The results of their findings were published in 2000. They concluded that there were five essential components to reading, known as “The Big Five”.
THE WAR IS OVER?
The National Reading Panel’s report should have been the end of the Reading Wars. But NO. Twenty-four years later, we are still in the midst of a struggle to shift from whole language and balanced literacy instruction, proven to be ineffective methods, to Structured Literacy. Great progress has been made, primarily because of the mass publication of the findings of brain science, dubbed the “Science of Reading”. Modern technology has allowed neuroscientists to look inside the reading brain providing enlightening new information to a hotly contested argument.
Next Blog Post: The Science of Reading
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