Why American Kids Aren't Being Taught to Read
September 15, 2018 11:24 AM   Subscribe

Many educators don't know the science of reading and, in some cases, actively resist it. Research shows that children who don't learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they're likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we've come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well.
posted by MovableBookLady (68 comments total) 54 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've always been grateful that my grade school (Catholic) taught us to read using phonics, which means that I learned how to sound out words and all sorts of Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes and their meanings so that I often could make a good guess at a word's meaning. The "whole word" method strikes me as so hit or miss: yes, you may memorize that word (eventually) but not recognize its relation to other words, and you won't be able to sound out words if you haven't seen them before.
posted by MovableBookLady at 11:32 AM on September 15, 2018 [22 favorites]


Grade school for me was 1949-1956. I remember hearing about the whole-word method but never had to try it.
posted by MovableBookLady at 11:35 AM on September 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


All throughout school I was put into 'streaming'/'tracking' classes, which means being placed in lower, middle, or high level groups. Anyway, I was always a pretty good reader, but when I was 13, I was placed in the lowest reading class. I think this was partially so they could fit in higher level classes in my timetable.

Our teacher gave us a book to read and personally apologized to me before handing it out. It was a book I'd read when I was 8 years old. All around me, my classmates struggled to read and comprehend a book that'd sped through some five years earlier. It was such an odd feeling.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 11:40 AM on September 15, 2018 [12 favorites]


Could it be that it takes patience and effort on behalf of the teacher and also that mobile devices allow the kids to watch films and talk to each other rather than read and write.
posted by Burn_IT at 11:41 AM on September 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


Did you read the article? It's a lot more complicated than that Burn_IT. Essentially the methods teachers are using in American schools are wholly unscientific. God this country fails its kids on so many levels.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 11:43 AM on September 15, 2018 [29 favorites]


Ugh. This is never about methods. It's about public (US)/state (UK) schools being environments it's impossible to teach children well in, regardless of approach. I'm in the education field and this is long.
posted by lokta at 11:49 AM on September 15, 2018 [28 favorites]


Scientism is a Conservative ruse.
posted by lokta at 11:52 AM on September 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


As an educator I take issue with the broad sweeping generalizations in the article. To state that "most" teachers are not trained in the science and of learning to read, the article effectively negates the very nature of teaching. Teachers are by nature researchers and learners. The article fails to recognize that when it comes to teaching those students in front of us we are often tied to district or state provided curriculum with little room for our own autonomy, therefore students suffer regardless of a teachers knowledge of scientific evidence, or current research. Until we place education firmly back in the hands of educators, studies, such as those evidenced in the article will continue to prevail, and students will continue to suffer the consequences.
posted by Sequined Ballet Flats at 11:55 AM on September 15, 2018 [28 favorites]


My only gripe with the article (and it's a totally silly gripe!) is that it suggests that research into reading only starts in the mid-20th century. I'd quibble about that; the earliest work on it that I have ready to hand is from the 1870s, but I only know about it because I'm interested in the history of research methods, and the early reading researchers really wanted a way to see where people were looking when they were reading. Turns out, they gave us much of the core language (and the early methods!) for studying eye movements in general.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 12:01 PM on September 15, 2018 [12 favorites]


Mod note: A few comments deleted; if you want to make a point about the research or the article, just make your point, let's not instantly escalate to sarcastic put-downs of other members.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 12:02 PM on September 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


Ugh. This is never about methods. It's about public (US)/state (UK) schools being environments it's impossible to teach children well in, regardless of approach. I'm in the education field and this is long.

Perhaps public school environments aren't always great to teach in, but this seems a defeatist attitude. If you read the article you'd see that the children that were failing to read were in all the schools in the district even the richer ones, and this really was a failure of method not money. Once the proper methods were taught to the teachers, readings scores went up across the board.

We should change the way public schools are for sure, but until we do burn the system down and rebuild, a lot of kids are going to be failed in the meantime- its not a ruse to want to help those kids now instead of waiting til everything is perfect.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:10 PM on September 15, 2018 [17 favorites]


It seems pretty clear to me that reading pedagogy got politicized in ways that are kind of unfortunate. Conservatives touted phonics not because it works, although it does, but because it appeals to their belief that children should sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and do their fucking worksheets or else they will be punished. To them, school is about teaching children to be obedient and submissive to authority, and phonics, because it is boring and rote, is seen to serve that goal. And whole language, because it is not boring and not rote, was adopted by progressive educators, who thought school should be about teaching kids to embrace their creativity and experience learning on their own terms. And the whole debate has been poisoned by this political framing. Some learning is boring, but phonics doesn't have to be about Sister Mary Frances rapping your knuckles with a ruler if your handwriting isn't perfect. I guess I would like to think that it's possible to save some of the positive things from traditional learning techniques without indulging in some of the teacher-and-child-unfriendly baggage that often comes with it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:14 PM on September 15, 2018 [91 favorites]


That's so true, ArbitraryandCapricious. It's also the benefit of studies in that if there are a lot of preconceived notions attached to methods, just find a lot of people teaching one, find a lot of people teaching the other and in the case of something like reading skills, any disparities will be fairly obvious in test scores. I'm not the hugest fan of standardized testing, at least at the crazy level we do it in schools, but for something as crucial to life as reading it's important that some sort of basic testing be done to catch kids falling through the cracks.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 12:24 PM on September 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


Conservatives touted phonics not because it works, although it does, but because it appeals to their belief that children should sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and do their fucking worksheets or else they will be punished.

And this bizarrely coexists with the idea that the sit-down-shut-up approach to teaching is a feminist plot to stifle the brilliance and creativity of boys.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 12:32 PM on September 15, 2018 [45 favorites]


After listening to the audio version of the article, the science of learning to read seems so obvious and makes sense. I tutored my boys in reading through 3rd grade and made them read as much as possible over the summer. I just naturally used phonics (not all 44 used in English) and taught them to sound out words they didn't know. They were not the kids who unlocked the code for reading quickly but they ended up reading quickly from the extra training.

Mary Ariail (former chair of the Department of Curriculum in Mississippi)was very difficult to listen to when she was challenged to give her belief on how children learn to read. She never gave a good answer and the first thing she said was that every child learns in a different way. Her assumption was that households were more responsible for producing good readers, which turns out to be a very bad, uneducated, unscientifically backed belief.
posted by Increase at 12:33 PM on September 15, 2018 [9 favorites]


I'm really curious about how all this intersects with the learning experiences of a student who is blind, or deaf, or otherwise disabled. I remember learning Braille in the early grades, but I don't remember as much about what my piers were learning, which would presumably have been reading-related along with everything else. I wonder if the experience of learning to read is a little different for someone who doesn't learn visually. I find this kind of thing fascinating but don't know nearly enough about the "mainstreaming,' process in public education I went through to be sure. I wish my memory were better in general as far as this goes.
posted by Alensin at 12:45 PM on September 15, 2018 [13 favorites]


I've always been grateful that my grade school (Catholic) taught us to read using phonics...

Yes! I was in public grade school in the 60s, and was taught phonics throughout. It’s really been one of the better things I ever got out of school.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:47 PM on September 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


I don't think I got exposed to phonics in school in the 90's and early 2000's. It probably would have helped many of my classmates. I know I wasn't taught grammar until high school foreign language courses, because we were meant to naturally absorb it for English.

If any educators are still secure enough in their jobs and their opinions to torment neurodiverse kids, we haven't disempowered educators enough.
posted by bagel at 12:54 PM on September 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


The family mythology is I taught myself to read at 2. By 4 my grandfather my grandfather would take me to the barbershop, "forget his glasses" and have me read him the paper. I use phonetics as a pronunciation and spelling guide. I also suffer from "reader's syndrome" where I use words correctly, but I don't pronounce them so well.
posted by Samizdata at 12:56 PM on September 15, 2018 [31 favorites]


One thing the article didn't mention, that bears mentioning, is that part of the reason for reading education "fads" is that large textbook publishers in the United States make big money whenever schools switch from phonics to whole language/balanced reading or back, and big publishers have big lobbyists, especially in statehouses, and the type of reading curriculum those lobbyists are backing switches about every 20 years. Like magic!

One thing statehouses can do to combat this is simply to pass a law that certain subjects' curricula be scientifically validated. Illinois has long been a "comprehensive sex ed" state, but there were a loooooooot of bullshit abstinence-first full of nonsense "facts" being peddled and taught even so. The state passed a law requiring sex ed curricula to be medically accurate and scientifically validated (which means "interventions effective in changing behavior associated with the risk factors for unintended pregnancy and HIV/STD infection. These behaviors may include delaying sexual activity, reducing the frequency of sex, reducing the number of sexual partners, and/or increasing the use of contraceptives or barriers.") This dropped the number of curricula legally available in Illinois from literally hundreds to around 25, with another dozen or so that are not fully-validated but are "promising" (meaning they're still in the process of validating them but early data looks good).

A "scientifically-validated" literature curriculum would be silly, but a scientifically-validated early childhood reading curriculum would be quite sensible and attainable, and would make it very difficult for publishers to market nonsense curricula as "the latest thing" unless they had excellent data to back that up.

It's also frequently worth pointing out to parents that there are actually TWO parts of any reading curriculum -- phonics and literature. Just like there's spelling and there's storytelling in writing. They are distinct but complimentary skills, and kids should absolutely be having wonderful books available to read and read to them by their teachers (and decodable readers are miserable! Important tools, but so boring!). But that's the LITERATURE portion of reading, the learning to love stories and understanding what reading can teach and so on. Kids ALSO need the phonics portion of reading, which teaches them the HOW of it. When we teach writing, we want our kids to be hilarious storytellers or charming thank-you note writers or clear memo writers, which is one set of skills, but they ALSO need the building blocks of spelling. Which can be a little boring and rote! But nobody will take your work seriously as the next F. Scott Fitzgerald if it's all spelled wrong. And you're not going to be reading The Great Gatsby if you never get the building blocks to learn to read in the first place.

(This bifurcation of literature and phonics is relatively popular (though not universal) in elementary schools around where I am; they often have two reading periods for the K-2 kids, one of which is focused on phonics and related skills, the other of which is focused on teachers reading aloud, or reading with older-grade "reading buddies," or silent reading of good books, or whatever.)

Also one thing I actually do think educational technology is really good for is phonics drills. Because phonics drills can be really boring after a while, but if after some teacher instruction, you hand a kid an iPad with a good phonics program, they can drill away to their hearts' content in a more "game" way where they can go at their own speed and get a happy jumping frog or whatever when they're right, and they tend to really enjoy that, whereas traditional phonics drills are not as popular. Although if you go into a kindergarten classroom you're likely to find noisy and exciting phonics drills that involve jumping all over the room and shouting answers and singing songs -- you don't find much "sit and recite."

Those are pretty astonishing increases in DIBELS scores, though. I'd like to see how that bears out over another few years, and see the results from some other districts.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:05 PM on September 15, 2018 [55 favorites]


This is mostly really, really surprising to me. I thought that it was just known that alphabetical based writing systems are based on sound and sounding out the letters. Certainly, that's how reading is taught in Canada, and when I volunteered c.2009 in the US at an after-school program, we played phonics video games that taught reading explicitly by sounding out sounds. The two-headed monster from Sesame Street was always my favourite, with all of the sounding out.

I trust the article that this isn't happening in schools - I'm just really shocked.
posted by jb at 1:15 PM on September 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


But that's the LITERATURE portion of reading, the learning to love stories and understanding what reading can teach and so on. Kids ALSO need the phonics portion of reading, which teaches them the HOW of it.

I think the distinction is much less clear than this. I agree that phonics teaches much of the how (and is a vital part of any decent curriculum), but not all of it. Phonics is a decoding strategy, not a complete reading strategy. It is part of the how of reading, but competent reading requires development of complex lexical, grammatical and syntactical knowledge; verbal working memory; immediate word recognition; reading stamina etc etc. You can learn to decode words all day long, but if you can't actually apply that to reading a wide variety of writing in significant bulk, you won't have learned to read in any meaningfully empowering sense. These more sophisticated reading skills are those that can only be learned through real engagement with texts, the "English lit" portion of the curriculum.
posted by howfar at 1:24 PM on September 15, 2018 [11 favorites]


This doesn't detract that much from your point Eyebrows, but F Scott Fitzgerald was a terrible speller:
F. Scott Fitzberald, author of The Great Gatsby, was a notoriously bad at spelling.

Although he was an avid reader and showed an early talent for writing, Fitzgerald was a poor student who struggled to achieve passing marks in both grade school and in college. He was kicked out of school at the age of twelve because he had difficulty focusing and finishing his work. He briefly attended Princeton University, but failed most of his courses and was on academic probation when he chose to drop out and enlist in the military.

After reading a typo-filled version of This Side of Paradise, literary critic Edmund Wilson—a former classmate —declared it “one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.”

Fitzgerald wasn’t even able to spell the name of one of his closest friends, Ernest Hemingway, often misaddressing him in correspondence and papers as “Earnest Hemminway.” The editor of his collected letters called him a “lamentable speller” who struggled with words like “definite” and “criticism.”
posted by jamjam at 1:33 PM on September 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


Two quick comments from an educator who focuses on college students and faculty:

1. I read and thoroughly enjoyed The Textbook and the Lecture: Education in the Age of New Media a few months ago. It's a nice overview of some of the history of formal education with a focus on (surprise!) the development and use of lectures and textbooks. The point that the authors of this news report matches one of the primary points of the author of this book: reading, unlike speaking, is a relatively recent (by evolutionary scales) development. The book presents several fascinating examples of ancient reading and writing instruction - Sumerian schooling for priests, Jewish schooling to read the Torah, etc. - and the examples are all shockingly similar in their approach with common tools like simplified introductory texts, oversized writing surfaces for novice learners, etc.

2. I am becoming jaded about "academic freedom" as some college faculty in the U.S. understand and practice the idea. The conception of this as a purely personal freedom ("I can do whatever the hell I want in my classroom and no one can tell me otherwise!") with few or no responsibilities to others - students, colleagues in the same discipline, colleagues in your department/college/university, the broader public - is extremely frustrating. I know that I'm only dealing with a vocal minority but it's a very loud and frustrating minority who too frequently only seem to be able to cite academic freedom as the reason for their actions (or lack thereof).
posted by ElKevbo at 1:33 PM on September 15, 2018 [15 favorites]


You know, science is great. I believe in it. And I know that there are problems with turning good education science into good practice; I've seen it. But there are many layers between scientific research and practice. And blaming educators, who often don't have a lot of choice in what to teach and how to teach it, doesn't seem entirely fair to me. Does it seem too easy to just say "fucking politics?" Not sure, not sure.

What I do know, as a happily-ex-educator, is that most kids will learn anything, as long as you make it seem worth their while. So since reading, trivially, is worthwhile:

A) how are we making it seem otherwise?

B) how are we identifying and helping the kids who really do have problems?

The rest is bullshit.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 1:38 PM on September 15, 2018 [9 favorites]


Huh. I think my mom (who has been a reading teacher since the turn of the milennium) would say phonics has been back for some time? I was pretty sure the original peak of "whole language" was receding by the time I was in school in the early 90s. I guess these fads - and exactly what the "balanced approach" means - vary by district though.

I think part of the issue is that when people say things like this:

The belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by books is a problem not just because there's no science to back it up.

it's easy to respond with "what the hell are you talking about, I've seen it?" Some kids are naturals. But assuming every kid is going to be able to do that doesn't serve some of them well - as the article points out regarding kids with dyslexia. And the kids who can are gonna be fine. Just give 'em some books to keep 'em busy.
posted by atoxyl at 1:51 PM on September 15, 2018 [8 favorites]


Her assumption was that households were more responsible for producing good readers, which turns out to be a very bad, uneducated, unscientifically backed belief.

I mean, it's not always a bad assumption. I think it was another thread here recently where people were discussing the evidence that many big-picture educational outcomes seem to be predicted more strongly by factors like kids' socioeconomic status and quality of home life than by anything schools do. But as an educator or school administrator that's mostly out of your hands, so you have to do the best, most informed work you can do.
posted by atoxyl at 2:06 PM on September 15, 2018 [4 favorites]


I know it's only a single data point, but anyone who thinks reading isn't something we do naturally really needs to explain The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. (Which was the work held over my head by my mom as how I was a slacker, even if I did teach myself to read at age two, like Samizdata.)
posted by aurelian at 2:17 PM on September 15, 2018 [1 favorite]


"I think the distinction is much less clear than this. I agree that phonics teaches much of the how (and is a vital part of any decent curriculum), but not all of it. Phonics is a decoding strategy, not a complete reading strategy. It is part of the how of reading, but competent reading requires development of complex lexical, grammatical and syntactical knowledge; verbal working memory; immediate word recognition; reading stamina etc etc."

Yes, but if you're trying to convince kindergarten parents that phonics is worth their kids' while and not setting them up to loathe literature for life, it's a helpful distinction to draw for them -- Phonics:Reading::Spelling:Writing ... a necessary foundational tool, but not the whole of the thing, and we're going to be doing both parts! And once you get them believing their kids' teachers actually know what they're doing, you can start bringing them on board with more complex curriculum ideas.

Because when you have a complete breakdown where parents are shouting at the principal and going to school board meetings because you're teaching their children "wrong," it's never because of development of verbal working memory or grammatical knowledge; it's always because they have STRONG FEELINGS (but very little knowledge) about phonics and/or whole language, and you are about to hear about it. It's a helpful opening metaphor to get parents actually listening and engaging, rather than just angrily shouting because something is different from how it was 30 years ago. (Which is, I gotta tell you, approximately 50% of being on school board: "BUT WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL, PLUTO WAS A PLANET, WHY ARE YOU TEACHING MY CHILD LIES?" "BUT WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL WE ALL PRAYED EVERY DAY, WHY DO YOU HATE JESUS?" "BUT WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL WE DIDN'T LEARN PHONICS BECAUSE IT MAKES YOU HATE READING, WHY ARE YOU MAKING MY CHILD HATE READING?" etc etc etc and don't even get me started on math.)

(A lot of schools these days do try to educate the parents about this kind of curricular stuff, specifically to create parent partners in learning and head off this kind of time-wasting battle. We just had curriculum night for my second grader where they laid out in broad strokes what the curriculum looks like for this year, and now we get a monthly letter from the teacher talking about specific curricular goals ... like this month specifically talked about building reading stamina and its role in growing good readers!)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:54 PM on September 15, 2018 [16 favorites]


A huge part of this that isn't addressed is how much the kid is getting exposed to the written word, in story form (or really any form), outside of school.

I learned to read English, I guess by the "whole language" method, because I was obsessed with storybooks as a child. And when I ran out of library books, I read everything from street signs to the "How's my driving?" stickers on trucks. As a podcast on Braille literacy pointed out, sighted kids can practice reading 24/7.

Then when I was 9, my grandfather decided to teach me and my brother our ancestral language. We learned phonics-style, how the letters of the alphabet match the sounds and words we already knew. But there's not much writing around in the language, at least in the US, so to this day, although I am reasonably fluent in the spoken language and can haltingly sound out words, I cannot read.
posted by basalganglia at 3:03 PM on September 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


My mother taught me to read when I was four and we were snowed in on our ranch. Amused her to do so and then, after a while, I could amuse myself with books. Phonics works. I taught my kids, and their teachers disapproved, but what could they do?
posted by Ideefixe at 3:12 PM on September 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


I wonder if this debate even exists where the language is more phonetically regular than English.

English has so many special cases of pronunciation. I can see how one might think it's easier to treat words as atomic symbols instead of composites.

With a more self-consistent language, it seems insane not to teach students to break down words into letter groups with simple sounds. It would be like teaching math without allowing reduction to a previously solved problem as a proof technique.

(I know nothing about linguistics or teaching.)
posted by scose at 3:36 PM on September 15, 2018 [4 favorites]


The family mythology is I taught myself to read at 2.

I "taught myself" to read at 2 as well. Having had kids of my own, I realize now that I didn't actually teach myself to read, though. My mother, bless her, read to me nearly constantly, as method of keeping me (mostly) still and quiet; and she read whatever adult-level literature she was reading herself, not some kid books. So, in retrospect, I've come to understand that in actuality, I developed language in print contemporaneously with spoken language. To this day, print language is filled with nuance that I know others don't intend to convey.

They taught me phonics in grade school, and I remember absolutely hating it, every moment of it. But, my wife never learned phonics, and she struggles with pronunciation of strange words, as well as spelling unfamiliar aural words. Phonics really works, modulo whatever edge I might have gotten from learning written language as "just language".
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 3:41 PM on September 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


Yes, but if you're trying to convince kindergarten parents that phonics is worth their kids' while and not setting them up to loathe literature for life, it's a helpful distinction to draw for them -- Phonics:Reading::Spelling:Writing

Absolutely. The problems have come when people who ought to know better, such as the Coalition and Conservative governments of the UK, take that useful simplification and make it the core of a national reading strategy in an entirely arbitrary manner, complete with pass/fail tests for tiny children, in order to make them feel like failures forever. Michael Rosen's views on the recent history of exclusive, intensive synthetic phonics in the UK are summed up here, and chime fairly closely (although not exactly) with my own.

It's not just pedantry, from my perspective, because I've seen the dangers of conflating "teaching phonics" with "teaching how to read" playing out in our education system in recent years.
posted by howfar at 3:49 PM on September 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


Phonics dominates as a method of teaching students to read these days. (I teach in the education school of a large university and I spend my working days in the public schools supervising teacher education majors). It is very much how students are generally taught to read. The article over-generalizes (as they so often do) and mischaracterizes "balanced literacy" which is actually a combination of phonics and attention to the whole.

There are problems teaching students to read, that said. Among them are (1) we base federal money (a small proportion of the whole funding picture, but a driving one) on test results, and therefore "teach to the test," (2) adults don't read around their children and therefore don't model reading as a desirable activity, (3) children have few reasons or opportunities to read, since we have in many public schools put a huge emphasis on "teaching to read" and "teaching math" and have not only closed school libraries and taken away recess in order to do so but also gotten rid of science, social studies, and "specials" in order to do it, and rarely ask students to read.

We DO teach children to read. That happens in the first couple grades. But then they don't practice it any more in any sustained way, and since the human brain isn't naturally designed for reading, we forget how to do it.
posted by Peach at 3:53 PM on September 15, 2018 [12 favorites]


Also I gotta say the ratio of strong assertions about the state of the scientific literature to actual citations in this article seems a little on the high side.
posted by atoxyl at 3:55 PM on September 15, 2018 [8 favorites]


I think this article simplifies the problem? From what I recall, the issue with phonics is more that if you are learning to read via phonics you may read more slowly, and have trouble reading much faster than spoken language, whereas if you learn via the whole word method (which does, in fact, include prefixes and Latin/Greek roots), you can read much faster and get through more material.
posted by corb at 3:57 PM on September 15, 2018


I did adult tutoring for a couple years with a local literacy center. It seems to me that the teaching method becomes less of a factor when you're going to pretty much just give up on a kid after 3rd grade and pass them up through high school anyway.
posted by klarck at 3:58 PM on September 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


What?! This shit again?! We did this. Every teacher capable of finding their ass with both hands knows that kids who are having trouble need phonics. Every teacher capable of pouring piss out of a boot knows that if a kid is winging it on context but actually reading, you don't back them up and make them sound out. God damn it, this was all argued out twenty years ago
posted by ckridge at 4:05 PM on September 15, 2018 [12 favorites]


Canadian educated in Canadian schools decades ago, studying at first in French and then, later, English.

French was taught in a “whole language” mode and English based in phonetics. In the former memorization was the focus (“you’ve seen this word before”), in the latter the focus was process (“letters make sounds, sound them out”).

I think this worked for French because it uses a set of systems and rules that are (for a language) relatively coherent. Once you had memorized enough specific instances of a word it was possible to generalize that knowledge to similar words.

English is too irregular to support this approach. When I first switched to English schooling, and tried applying the memorization-plus-rules strategies I’d been taught, I did very poorly. But I baulked at “sounding words out” because I felt the rules of pronunciation were too arbitrary and inconsistent. Also the approach was unfamiliar and therefore upsetting.

English school had no solution for me except shame (sitting at the back of the room with a personal helper, who struggled to help me). Because I was ashamed I decided to try to convince my peers that I was doing very well at English reading — by taking out from the library English books WAY above my reading level and being seen reading them...

...Which led to me having my nose constantly buried in a challenging book, determined to figure out what the heck was going on if for no other reason than because it was boring staring at a book you didn’t understand.

For me that worked. Today I am proficient in English reading, writing, spelling, and can make myself understood on a wide variety of websites and non-racist sub-Reddits.

I can even tell jokes.
posted by Construction Concern at 4:53 PM on September 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


What's really confusing for me is that reading this thread I have no idea whether I was taught whole language or phonics, or some weird mixture across the 9 different schools I can remember attending.

Sounding out words? Sounds familiar. Suffixes and prefixes? Familiar. Memorisation and flash cards? Familiar. Reading everything I could get my hands on, including ingredients lists on food while bored? Familiar.

Whatever was done, it worked, and if I have any single ability, it's the ability to read and comprehend rapidly.
I went to IB schools in Germany and Portugal and Steiner, systemic Catholic and public schools in Australia. I guess a bit of everything did the job.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 5:10 PM on September 15, 2018 [4 favorites]


I always have mixed feelings about this because I was an outlier. Phonics is the reason I was convinced I was stupid and would never learn to read when I was in first grade. Over that summer, I jumped a couple of grade levels and suddenly was ahead of my peers, not behind them. I do not remember what method I was taught with that summer. But I do remember how confusing and weird phonics was to me as a child. It may have been because my vocabulary was always large, but I think I remember knowing counterexamples to the rules we were learning and not knowing when to use them. Of course, this was me in first grade, so my memory is of course very fuzzy at best.

I firmly believe that there are some students out there who learn best as learning words as atomic structures. The majority may learn best through phonics. But educators should learn at least a little whole languages to help those who would fall through the phonics gaps. Just as no method of medicine works for every single person (why we go for herd immunity, as not all vaccines, our most successful medical treatment, take) Also, I wonder how this research squares with non-phonetic written languages, especially Chinese. You have deconstruction of characters into the various radicals, but does that equate to the way phonics works in English?

I instinctively distrust anyone who preaches any single method as working for all children. It may work for the vast majority of children, but, like everything else, it will not work for all of them, and that needs to be acknowledged.
posted by Hactar at 5:34 PM on September 15, 2018 [5 favorites]


Parts of English are phonetic and regular. Parts aren't. The fact is, most skilled readers, after they first "learn to read" phonetically, become sight-word readers, and often recognize whole chunks of text at a time.

Further, you cannot trust your memory of learning to read to provide you with any information, because of when and how it happens; you re-remember the process, overlaying it with your present understanding of reading. My students and student teachers are learning to teach phonics but for the life of them they don't remember learning to read that way, even though they did.

The "apprenticeship of learning" (Lortie's term) means that anyone who has gone through a conventional education has spent a lot of time watching education happen and therefore thinks they understand how it works. That folk-understanding is not what is going on from the vantage point of the teacher.

I do, as it happens, know for sure I learned to read with phonics, because in the 1950s Rudolf Flesch produced Teaching Johnny to Read and my mother taught me with the book. I don't read phonetically now, though.
posted by Peach at 5:44 PM on September 15, 2018 [10 favorites]


Wow, I managed to avoid all this by learning to read around age 3, no idea how I did so other than wanting to and figuring it out. I remember startling my mom by figuring out which color was which by reading the labels on the crayons (I'm red/green colorblind) and annoying my 2-years-older brother by following the reading portions of the 1970s The Electric Company, with him running up to the screen to block the words to keep me from reading them. By the time I hit elementary school, I was already reading books-without-pictures, and was somewhat annoyed and quite bored with the basic reading instruction, so was allowed to read whatever I liked during those classes. I had no idea what I was missing. I wonder if instead of focusing on how to force kids to read via any particular system, instead they should be focusing on making kids want to read, and giving them the tools they need to get there as they need them.
posted by Blackanvil at 5:54 PM on September 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


I wonder if instead of focusing on how to force kids to read via any particular system, instead they should be focusing on making kids want to read, and giving them the tools they need to get there as they need them.

That would be great. And I'm not being sarcastic. It would work. It really would. Just get rid of federal funding, accountability-driven teacher assessment, grades, large class sizes, medium class sizes, an anti-reading culture, poverty, and all forms of visual media and we'll have it made.
posted by Peach at 6:02 PM on September 15, 2018 [7 favorites]


I question the idea that people who don't read by the age of 9 are going to be poor readers forever, given that Sweden considers its late start a good thing - children aren't expect to start school before 7.

Just more evidence that it's the US school system, not the particular ages or even methods, that are failing our kids.

Kids don't read books because parents don't read books - it really doesn't matter what method a school uses (although some are definitely worse than others); what matters is whether a kid thinks that reading is a useful or fun activity, with "fun" being more important as a motivator. Kids who've never seen anyone read just because they liked it, are only learning what they get punished for not learning, and they'll drop that knowledge as soon as they think they won't be tested on it.

One in three Americans didn't read a single paper book in the last year. And while the average is 12 a year - we all know that that's a skewed number: those who love reading, read a lot; everyone else reads 1-2 a year. Except, of course, for the third who don't read any.

Kids aren't lousy readers because of how they're taught; they're lousy readers because a substantial portion of the country doesn't value reading.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 6:26 PM on September 15, 2018 [10 favorites]


Paper book reading rates are a really inaccurate barometer for reading levels given that the web is overwhelmingly text-driven. If you can't read, you can't use the web.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:25 PM on September 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


In my limited experience with this (two young kids in elementary school) the idea that what we traditionally think of as teachers are even teaching kids how to read is not really correct anymore. To the extent they do, they use 'sight words' that kids are expected to memorize and phonics just like the olden days when I was in school.

However, the 'sight words' are expected to be memorized by the middle to 2/3s year in Kindergarten. Then by first grade they are doing phonics plus have the listing of sight words (~50 memorized) fully memorized and doing 'stretch words' like 'extraordinary' and other multi-syllable words. Sure they call them 'stretch words' but that means the same thing as it does in the corporate world. So they aren't really teaching kids to read - they are reinforcing techniques the kids already learned earlier and not really spending that much total time on it.

So basically the people here saying they learned to read by age 3 are only slight outliers - they are all expected to be able to read before they even really enter school at 5, so it's pre-K teachers, daycare teachers, and moms teaching this stuff. The implication of phonics is that the ABCs and the sound each letter makes is already known.

So I'm not surprised that the ones who aren't getting that early education don't learn to read well. They are way behind before they even started.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:49 PM on September 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


I also “taught myself to read at 2”, but the thing is, I remember doing it. My parents read to me a little, but not nearly as frequently as I wanted books to be read, so I spent a lot of time looking at the pages and sounding out words and asking what they meant. I have a clear memory of seeing a garage sale sign while in the back seat of the car, and mispronouncing “Garage!” to rhyme with “carriage”, at which point my mother exasperatedly corrected me, “Guh-RAZH!” and I privately thought something along the lines of, “I’m only two!” It’s one of my earliest memories.

I don’t know what there is about the age of two that so many people learn to read at that point. I definitely remember being bored to tears in kindergarten as everyone around me learned to read and write and I already knew how to do it.
posted by Autumnheart at 8:00 PM on September 15, 2018 [3 favorites]


Kids don't read books because parents don't read books - it really doesn't matter what method a school uses (although some are definitely worse than others); what matters is whether a kid thinks that reading is a useful or fun activity, with "fun" being more important as a motivator. Kids who've never seen anyone read just because they liked it, are only learning what they get punished for not learning, and they'll drop that knowledge as soon as they think they won't be tested on it.

This x 1000. There was a statistic I read years ago that the biggest indicator of a child's success in reading is being read to and watching their parent read for pleasure. And there isn't one sure-fire method - there are many methods and techniques, but the trick is matching the learner with the right method (says me, the Reading Specialist).
Combine the lack of parents not reading books with:

Because when you have a complete breakdown where parents are shouting at the principal and going to school board meetings because you're teaching their children "wrong," it's never because of development of verbal working memory or grammatical knowledge; it's always because they have STRONG FEELINGS (but very little knowledge) about phonics and/or whole language, and you are about to hear about it.

and you'll quickly see why the US Educational system will always struggle. As long as parents don't have respect for teachers in the USA, that they have knowledge and know what they're doing, the system will fail. Teachers are the eternal scapegoats always under the microscope. Heaven forbid someone mentions it might be the parents' fault that their children aren't doing well, and well, forget that - how dare you tell someone their parenting skills are not in their child's best interests! It is completely forbidden to make such a statement. And so it goes back to bashing these professional educators and not allowing them do their jobs because parents and government feel like they know better. Parents don't go around telling the doctor how to do surgery on their kids -- teachers are educated professionals too, they should be respected for their knowledge and allowed to put that knowledge to good use and do what they do best and parents should trust that we love your kids and want them to do well. Give us a chance huh?

Just about every teacher I know is out there busting their ass to help these kids, yeah, there's some dead weight, but the majority of us are doing all that we can to help these children to succeed and it is so damn hard when the parents are screwing them up and everyone ignores the elephant in the room and finds another reason to blame teachers. Teaching can be an exhausting and thankless job (and rewarding and I love it) but our numbers are dwindling as more and more people see how difficult a job it can be. Until education is truly respected in the USA, I don't see how its going to get turned around and that makes me sad. Let teachers teach.
posted by NoraCharles at 9:05 PM on September 15, 2018 [8 favorites]


I can only speak about California, where I've been a 1st-grade or 2nd-grade teacher for about 20 years, but we've been using explicit phonics and research-based language arts the whole time I've been a teacher. Whole language went out sometime shortly before I started.
posted by Huck500 at 9:17 PM on September 15, 2018 [4 favorites]


So, speaking as a learning disabled tutor of learning disabled students, from my perspective people are missing one major thing: no one method works on every student.

I learned this when undergoing teacher training 25 years ago. There's a cycle where we rotate between three different systems of teaching reading, and each of these systms works perfectly for one third of the students, adequately for another third, and fails for the last third. And about every seven years, some education expert points out how the current system is failing students, and we swittch to the next system.

This is because we keep failing to learn the lesson that students learn differently, and keep trying a one-size fits all method. And im guessing this article is an early salvo in th3 latest "we need to change the system" go round.
posted by happyroach at 10:29 PM on September 15, 2018 [9 favorites]


It’s interesting that the headline is that some educators may “actively resist it.” Districts nationwide are spending more and more time on scripted programs that give teachers zero freedom in how or what to teach. The program described in the article is one of them- sounds like it is based on science, which, okay, great, but it is still scripted and inflexible. Teachers don’t have much freedom to “resist” in these circumstance.

If your board chooses a non-science based program sold by garbage snake oil specialists- we have had a lot of that going around my district lately, our board and district leadership are the worst suckers, and they are suspicious of anything that is not an expensive, explicit, right out of the box solution- you’re still obligated to teach it in the same terrible scripted whole group way, no matter if it is working for individual kids or not. My district now forces the same scripted math/reading programs on its elementary teachers in 90 minute sacred, uninterrupted blocks daily. For first graders. With no ability for teachers to adapt it for their very diverse groups of kids- it’s everybody in the district on the same page on the same day no matter what. They have 30-60 minutes a WEEK for science and social studies.

Educators want to do the best thing for the most kids. The curriculum is, unfortunately, no longer something they have any voice in, and it often prevents them from doing the best thing for individual kids. It’s one of the many reasons I have a hard time pasting a smile on my face when I bump into an enthusiastic former middle school student excited to tell me they are in school to become a teacher like me.
posted by charmedimsure at 10:50 PM on September 15, 2018 [6 favorites]


I was crazy about books since before I could read, and I figured out some spelling before school when I asked my mom for advice on the captions for my drawings in the kitchen while she prepared dinner. I was lucky enough to get some rote phonics & grammar drilled in primary grades, but it was boring shit and I would never have put up with it without being forced to. I also had some teachers who were decent about storytelling and the awesome power of narrative. I learned some subtler things about the nature of English grammar from taking French class in High School.

Since then I've met people who have done remarkable things which were not in the medium of written language, and I've spent many phases of my career on visual and conceptual tasks that I could easily do if I was functionally illiterate. Still crazy about books & things.

(Regarding the nature of pedagogy, one of the first times I glanced at metafilter many years ago I read a comment which said that a good education was a combination of different styles: with tough drill adherence to form teachers who were balanced with exploration imagination oriented teachers.)
posted by ovvl at 11:25 PM on September 15, 2018


I have no conscious memory of learning to read; my father says my godmother was shocked that I could point out the exit sign at 2.
posted by brujita at 11:48 PM on September 15, 2018 [2 favorites]


Several people in the thread have mentioned learning to read spontaneously at age two or so. I am also one of them, and had some rather interesting school experiences because of it. (The Seattle School System and my elementary school really wanted to take credit for the reading ability I already had when I got there, and I got shown off to visiting bigwigs... they also didn't know what to do with me and tried some "enrichment" activities that just set me up for a lot of social issues, frankly.)

You might want to learn about hyperlexia if you were an early reader. I suspect more than a few of us here are hyperlexic. If so, you may have had trouble in other areas of learning, and spent a lot of time being told "why are your grades so bad if you're so smart?"

When I was in elementary school in the 70s we were taught reading using the SRA system. I kind of hated it because I was already reading beyond it (I got Mark Twain's Complete Short Stories for my 7th birthday, and yes, I read it) and I found the reading exercises to be pretty boring. But eventually all my teachers just let me read stuff I picked out at the library instead.

So I didn't learn to read by any of the systems mentioned, really. It just happened. My brain made sense of the symbols around me in an intensely focused way. It's a weird thing -- part superpower, part learning disability, at least, in my case.
posted by litlnemo at 12:15 AM on September 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


Well, here's one thing this thread did for me--led me to find out that the I See Sam books are now online. That plus SRA leads me to believe my school (early 80s) must've been teaching phonics, although I was one of those read-at-two types so reading class was mostly about getting the system out of the way so I could read something I enjoyed more.
posted by praemunire at 12:29 AM on September 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


When I was little we lived in France. I went to an American kindergarten, but was technically too young for first grade. My mother tried to sneak me in anyway, but they found out. Rather than have me repeat the same kindergarten, my parents then sent me to kindergarten in a NATO school where kindergarten was all day, and taught completely in French (which I knew none of except a few words ... I just had to make do - the other kids would fill me in on bits I missed). They taught us cursive writing, and were teaching us to read via a version of phonics. I should dig out my workbooks (our teachers would glue our finished work into bluebooks/notebooks and I still have them). The cool thing was that they were reinforcing the reading via various methods, so if we were learning the word for mushroom, it was broken into syllables, and we would have a version of it as dotted lines we would go over to make the words, and then there would be short sentences with blanks to fill in, but there would also be a little drawing of a mushroom in dotted lines which we would draw over and color. We also were taken outside, not just for recess, but to find things to draw from nature, and to bring things back to the classroom to make stuff out of, such as taking a walnut shell and turning it into a boat, and the same time we were learning the word for boat. The teachers also read us stories, a lot (footnote, my parents were great readers and read to me a lot even outside school).

Anyway, we came back to the U.S. and I started first grade. We were expected to print only, no cursive, and they were teaching us to read with the Dick and Jane books, in a kind of whole language method, and the teacher didn't like me (she was "encouraged" to retire not long after I had her, as she bullied some kids). I checked out so completely, that they put me in a kind of remedial reading special class in second grade. The book they were using was at least a bit more interesting that Dick and Jane, which I remember as excruciatingly dull.

I didn't really learn to read well until third grade. That teacher had a variety of books in the classroom, including one that was probably more like 5th grade level that I was really interested in. I took it home and asked my mother to read it to me. She told me that she would read a page aloud, and then I would read a page (she helped me sound out words I didn't know). By the time we were through the book, I was reading well. (My struggles with "new math" are another story).

So, I agree that no one method fits all, in terms of reading instruction, and parents should do their part, but based on my experiences, I think phonics provides a better grounding, especially if it is done with reinforcement the way my French school did it, and is not just taught by rote repetition.
posted by gudrun at 8:32 AM on September 16, 2018


We have to stop thinking that our elites see this as anything other than a win. An illiterate working class is easier for the justification of low wages, and they won't be reading anything troublesome either. That being said literacy is not really a requirement for a successful popular movement!
posted by Sheydem-tants at 9:42 AM on September 16, 2018 [3 favorites]


This thread seems like a fitting place to mention that the self-published Bob Books creator, Bobby Lynn Maslen died this month at age 87 (link). Her husband illustrated her books.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:23 AM on September 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


I like the Bob Books! More saliently, my kids liked the Bob Books.

I have 2 hyperlexic kids who 'taught themselves to read' before age 3. However, on reflection, they did not really teach themselves. My oldest loved the phonics-based Leapfrog alphabet videos and learned from those, then he taught his younger brother.

As god is my witness I came in the room once when the baby was six months old and his older brother, 2 and 1/2, was drawing him letters on the magna-doodle and saying 'This is a J. J makes the 'je' sound.'
posted by bq at 12:05 PM on September 16, 2018 [4 favorites]


We have to stop thinking that our elites see this as anything other than a win. An illiterate working class is easier for the justification of low wages, and they won't be reading anything troublesome either.

This, and it means less competition for their own spawn. This is the same reason that the ruling class wants to push trade schools for the poor: it means that the children of the professional and managerial class will have less competition from poors who couldn't get literature degrees. Meanwhile, the ownership class invariably educates their spawn in expensive, "useless" liberal arts schools.

Educate the underclass enough that they can work a cash register or sheet metal press if you need them to, educate the managerial class enough that they can keep the offices and factories humming, and educate your own children as well as you possibly can so that they can take the reigns and manipulate the others for another generation. That's the plan.
posted by LiteOpera at 12:08 PM on September 16, 2018 [6 favorites]


"It seems pretty clear to me that reading pedagogy got politicized in ways that are kind of unfortunate. Conservatives touted phonics not because it works, although it does, but because it appeals to their belief that children should sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and do their fucking worksheets or else they will be punished. To them, school is about teaching children to be obedient and submissive to authority, and phonics, because it is boring and rote, is seen to serve that goal. And whole language, because it is not boring and not rote, was adopted by progressive educators, who thought school should be about teaching kids to embrace their creativity and experience learning on their own terms."

Ironically, when I was growing up, my parents — my father in particular — were frustrated that we were being taught to sound things out instead of having to memorize whole words and their spelling. Whole words was very much the sit-down-shut -up rote system, and phonics was the loosey-goosey hippy shit.
posted by klangklangston at 5:34 PM on September 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


all sorts of Latin and Greek prefixes and suffixes and their meanings

I didn't get that lesson until sixth grade, but it amplified my hunger for learning enough to launch me into college focus classes.
posted by filtergik at 4:24 AM on September 17, 2018


This, and it means less competition for their own spawn. This is the same reason that the ruling class wants to push trade schools for the poor: it means that the children of the professional and managerial class will have less competition from poors who couldn't get literature degrees. Meanwhile, the ownership class invariably educates their spawn in expensive, "useless" liberal arts schools.

Educate the underclass enough that they can work a cash register or sheet metal press if you need them to, educate the managerial class enough that they can keep the offices and factories humming, and educate your own children as well as you possibly can so that they can take the reigns and manipulate the others for another generation. That's the plan.


Seems harsh to me. Accepting trade schools as being down the class ladder is following the wealthy's implicit class judgement. And its fine to admit that plenty of people have no interest in talking through things and then pressing some buttons on a keyboard, which is what many upper class jobs amount to. Especially when the talk is often so cheap.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:58 AM on September 17, 2018


each of these systms works perfectly for one third of the students, adequately for another third, and fails for the last third. And about every seven years, some education expert points out how the current system is failing students, and we swittch to the next system.

This is because we keep failing to learn the lesson that students learn differently, and keep trying a one-size fits all method. And im guessing this article is an early salvo in th3 latest "we need to change the system" go round.


I mean, based on the case study in the article this more like going from an approach that was failing half of students to an approach that was failing ~15%, so I'll take that as a win. Caveat that of course test results aren't a perfect picture of what's going on on the ground of course.

It's frustrating to see so many people here in the thread talking about "different styles of learning" which is of course true and valid but the article points out is in practice a cover for ignoring the research and giving students the bare minimum of phonics instruction.

From some of the other anecdotes in this thread it seems like maybe for early reading it's less that we need alternatives to phonics but more that we can have a variety of strategies to engage students with the material that is phonics.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 8:01 AM on September 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


Well this is interesting. I was in elementary school in the 80's, it was Catholic, and we learned phonics. I was also a voracious reader from an early age, and my parents read me books before bed every night, so I also got plenty of exposure to the idea that print contained stuff I wanted to understand. I had no idea that there were schools that didn't teach phonics, and the whole idea of that is bizarre to me. It just seems like common sense that learning to systematically sound-out words helps you increase your reading vocabulary quickly, even with English's poor adherence to it's own rules.

And, this idea that learning to sound out words will make kids not pay attention to the meaning of the words? What? No! We read to get the message in the writing. Being able to sound out words empowers us by making more words in the message (words we may not have seen in print before) accessible. After seeing the same word a few times, the brain naturally switches to whole-word recognition. <-- I don't sound out that word when I read it, I see it's whole shape and have instant recognition of meaning, even though I learned with phonics.

I did JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) after college. I was an assistant English teacher in four junior high schools in northern Japan. At some point I realised the students were learning each new vocabulary word like they learn kanji: just memorise the pronunciation. I sat down with one of the Japanese English teachers one day and taught her a bunch of phonics principles (vc = short vowel, cvccv = short vowel, cvvc = long vowel, vce = long vowel, etc), and she was blown away by it. If I could go back I would make phonics lessons for the students.

Some years after that I volunteered with an adult literacy organisation in Washington, DC that worked with a lot of people who had spent time in prison. The director taught us that a lot of these people simply never caught on, or had trouble understanding, the idea that words could be sounded out. And that when they were kids, rather than addressing their issue with extra attention, it was assumed they just weren't interested in reading, and that coloured the rest of their school experiences. The literacy program strictly taught based on a phonics system, starting with sounding out individual letters, and it was amazing to spend time with students who had gone through the whole program as they practiced reading novels, sounding out unfamiliar words when they got to them, and then recognizing the word they had just sounded out.

It reminds me of reading katakana (the Japanese phonetic alphabet they use to write foreign words). When I see a new word I'll sound out the "letters", and only then recognise what word it is. Ho-teh-ru...?.. hotel!
posted by antinomia at 8:53 AM on September 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


> litlnemo:
"You might want to learn about hyperlexia if you were an early reader. I suspect more than a few of us here are hyperlexic. If so, you may have had trouble in other areas of learning, and spent a lot of time being told "why are your grades so bad if you're so smart?"

Cheers for the heads up on this. I hadn't read about it yet. *grins* It's especially intriguing as I am currently in the process of currently being evaluated for being on the spectrum.
posted by Samizdata at 2:37 AM on September 22, 2018 [2 favorites]


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