What happened to reading? Part 5

In teaching children how to read, the educational collective has turned them into guinea pigs for spurious, pseudo-scientific alternatives.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

What happened to reading?

We’re exploring the declining skills and flagging enthusiasm for reading among American youth. One key cause can be traced back to how kids are taught to read in the earliest grades.

Classic reading instruction relies heavily on phonics, which teaches kids to correlate sounds with letters, enabling them to sound out unfamiliar words. Think of a student breaking the word “cat” into three distinct sounds—Kuh-Aah-Tuh.

This time-tested process isn’t just some worn-out tradition. Dozens of studies over decades of scientific research have proven it to be an effective way of teaching kids how to read. Hence, phonics plays a vital part in what’s known as the “science of reading.”

Sticking to a method that works is essential because reading, unlike speaking, is an unnatural skill: our brains aren’t pre-programmed to do it. If we botch reading acquisition when kids are young, they struggle to recover.

In recent years, however, the educational collective has turned kids into guinea pigs for spurious, pseudo-scientific alternatives. The problem’s gravity was recently underscored by a class-action lawsuit targeting popular reading programs that eschew research-based methods like phonics. The suit alleges these so-called “whole-language” or “balanced literacy” approaches have damaged children by failing to provide them with basic reading skills.

These methods emphasize making guesses to derive meaning from text. They utilize techniques like the three-cueing strategy, which instructs students to use pictures and context for word prediction, asking questions like, "What might come next?", "Does that word make sense in the sentence?", and "What hints do the pictures provide?"

In the whole-language approach, it’s the story’s meaning that matters more than the discrete words. APM Report’s Emily Hanford describes a typical process: When a child learning to read comes to an unknown word, the teacher might prompt him to look at the picture and guess. If the word is “horse,” and the child says “house,” the teacher says it’s wrong. But if the child says, “pony,” the answer is accepted because “pony” and “horse” are basically the same.

You can probably see right away serious flaws in this method, starting with the fact that “horse” and “pony” aren’t at all the same thing. Second, if there are no pictures or context clues, the student is weaponless. In my middle school classroom, when students taught with these techniques see a word they don’t know, they make no attempt to sound it out; they stop and wait for me to give it to them or skip over it entirely. Reading this way is like carrying a refrigerator by hand instead of using a dolly. Over time, you may resent it, just as many kids have come to dislike reading.

Disregarding or downplaying proven strategies like phonics can cause real harm, especially to the lowest readers. Hanford writes, “Experts say that in a whole-language classroom, some kids will learn to read despite the lack of effective instruction. But without explicit and systematic phonics instruction, many children won't ever learn to read very well.”

Whole-language advocates mean well. They want kids to experience the joy and confidence of reading as soon as possible. But to experience those things, the student must already be equipped with basic skills. You can’t enjoy a book if you’re fumbling through the act of reading it, and you can’t read it successfully if you can’t interpret the sentences. Acquiring the skills that allow you to read fluidly and accurately, however, is a rote, challenging process.

Here’s where whole-language advocates go astray. They want the reward of reading a good book to be present in the process of learning to read it, so they search for shortcuts that might slice through pitfalls the most vulnerable kids are likely to run into. Unfortunately, the shortcuts can lead students into deeper pits.

Innovation is usually good, but in the case of learning to read, educators must concentrate on the basics. We can’t use kids as lab rats for dangerous shortcuts in a skill so essential. The future of a literate society may depend on it.

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Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.