I've written approvingly about phonics before, and a few days ago Nick Kristof did too. This started up a bit of chatter about how we teach our kids to read. The background for this is twofold:
- In the longer term, it's part of the Reading Wars, which began in its modern incarnation with the publication of Why Johnny Can't Read in 1955. I'll spare you the gruesome details, but suffice it to say that over the next few decades phonics (learning to sound out letters) became a conservative darling while "whole language" (learning entire words and their meanings) became a liberal darling.
- More recently, Kristof noted that in the latest NAEP test two-thirds of fourth graders were not proficient in reading. He suggested that the answer was to ditch whole language instruction and switch to phonics nationwide. I was nodding along when I read this.
But then Bob Somerby reminded me that, contrary to popular opinion, kids read better today than they ever have before:
If we restrict ourselves to white kids, the NAEP tells us two things:
- The reading performance of today's white 9-year-olds is an entire grade level higher than in 1975.
- Nonetheless, only 42% of today's white 9-year-olds are proficient in reading.
That . . . seems a little odd, no? As it happens, I think one problem is that NAEP's definition of "proficient" is more stringent than you'd think, though it's hard to decode what they really mean by it. Still, any reading goal that requires "complex inferences about the characters’ actions, motivations, or feelings" is expecting a fair amount out of 9-year-olds.
If, instead, you look at the NAEP's "basic" reading level—which I suspect matches the popular notion of ordinary literacy—suddenly 63% of all kids and 73% of white kids can read.
Combine this with the fact that America's school kids of all races have been getting steadily better at reading for the past four decades, and it makes you wonder if maybe we don't really have a big reading problem in the first place. And while I still think the evidence favors a strongly phonics-based approach for young readers, perhaps it matter less than we all think?
POSTSCRIPT: I'll add something that I've mentioned before. Our educational problems are, for the most part, not in primary grades. Academic performance in grades K-4 has made strong gains over the past few decades.
However, the gains mostly wash out by age 18. It's middle school and high school that we really ought to focus on, not primary grades. More about this tomorrow.
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I am a volunteer tutor in a program that targets 2nd graders who are reading below grade level. These are generally bright and eager kids who somehow have fallen behind.
We use a very structured, evidence based system. And guess what? It uses BOTH whole language and phonics approaches. The kids are absolutely taught to spell out words using letter sounds, but they are also expected to learn ca. 1000 common sight words that they can recognize immediately. This greatly improves fluency and reading speed, making reading a lot more fun.
But there's another dimension to reading well, and that is having an adequate vocabulary. I have been surprised at how often a child will correctly spell out a word, but have no clue what it means. This isn't esoteric stuff, but everyday language. I think many children live in a pretty narrow world outside school.
Kids who grow up in poverty have impoverished vocabularies. Many of them have parents who speak non-standard English, if they speak it at all. This is nothing new, and the challenges of reading grade-level material for these kids is nothing new either. It does underscore the phonics alone is not going to cut it for these kids. It also points to what will: Free early childhood education.
The combined version is what my kids (now teenagers) got in school: phonics and sight words. They were fluent reader entering kindergarten, which I ascribe to a combination of the classic parental book reading, and watching Word World on PBS Kids. Word World is excellent, once you get past its weird Platonism in the world building, and entirely based on phonics. Which is as it should be. Jumping straight to sight words was the mistake, back in the day.
Which leads to the observation that while whole word learning might once upon a time have been a lefty cause, the left abandoned this years, if not decades, ago. Because, you know, evidence.
I was generally pro-phonics when I had kids, but both of my children naturally gravitated toward a "whole word" approach when they learned to read. I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that different children learn differently. Go with whatever works. Languages are naturally messy, you just have to dive in.
This is to be expected. Whole word is how proficient adult readers read. The idea was to skip the phonics stage and go straight to how grown ups do it. This turned out to be a bad idea. Phonics are the on ramp. It need not be a long ramp, but it needs to be there.
I could never read phonically. Back in the sixties in England, when I was in primary school I went from being behind in first year to a couple of grades ahead in second year by stopping trying to sound out words and just recognize the words. I agree with an earlier comment that different kids learn differently and a really good education system is flexible enough to accommodate thse differences.
It's really weird that this is so often framed as some kind of either-or. I've been teaching my four-year-old to read and the most natural thing in the world is to just do both, all the time.
We make tribal markers out of weird stuff.
Exactly right. As the old joke goes, If "phonics" is so good why do they spell it like that?
My mother was a grammar school teacher and reading specialist who always mixed approaches to match the students. She said many of them just picked it up no matter what approach.
It's so much fun to watch the kid squirm. He will do just about anything to avoid having to sound words out. He grabs on to any clue he can. He easily memorizes huge chunks of all our usual books. (A favorite game is I read to him and swap in 'pickle' for the occasional printed word. He catches me every time and almost always remembers what the word was supposed to be.) When we do the flash cards, he knows which words remain in the set and picks from those. If I'm using the flash cards to make a sentence, he uses context to guess what the next word will be.
My favorite is that he often confuses words that were added to the flash cards in the same batch. "nest" and "egg" were added on the same day, for instance, and about one time in four he still confuses the two.
If I was the kind of person who wore a stupid trucker hat to phonics rallies, that might annoy me. But what he's doing is working so I'm fine with it. I mean, when I read, I don't sound out the words either. I get why he doesn't want to do it. It sucks. I recognize whole words too, and I know my brain uses context to guess at words and skip right past them because every now and then I find myself doubling back to more carefully re-read a sentence and it says something very different than it did the first time.
I don't see how you could avoid doing both, honestly, if you care about kids and want them to learn. Last week I caught an NPR show that focused on whole language and it was pretty horrifying (which shows how detached I've been from this issue). It made pure whole language sound like a perfect recipe for frustration and failure with very young or poorer/immigrant kids because of the vast amount of cultural knowledge it assumes of the kids.
Using context to figure out what a word might be can be super-useful for deeper reading skills, and I'd have loved for my college-level students to be able to do that, but how are kids supposed to get words they've never come across before, in any context, unless they can first try to puzzle them out on the page? They need a tool for doing that too, and it'll serve them well later on because they're going to have to absorb new words all their lives.
As a life-long educator (well, adult-life-long!), I’m always amused (and frustrated) by how everyone seems to think that they can comment intelligently on questions about which pedagogical techniques are effective and which are not. If “do your own research” is nonsensical for deciding whether a vaccine is safe, it is equally ridiculous with respect to how students learn. Going to school oneself and having children who go to school absolutely make no one an expert on how kids learn!
This has been said by a couple of commenters already, but different people learn differently. There simply is no “one size fits all” method for teaching reading (or anything else!). “Do what works for the individual child” is the ONLY effective method!
There is a fundamental difference. Only a few people have gone through the training of learning how vaccines work. But everyone has gone through the process of learning to read. So everyone has some level of understanding of what worked and what didn't work for them. Furthermore, if you have kids, you have first-hand experience of what's worked/not worked for them.
Almost everyone in America thinks they are experts in education without training in the field of pedagogy. Free market ideology has turned education into a market, allowing sophists and grifters to entice citizens and parents to exercise their 'rights' to determine how students consume education. Another train wreck resulting from cronyism.
A few months ago I was at a gathering where there was an elementary school teacher in her 30's. I asked the question about reading, noting that I was taught phonics (I'm old) and then heard about all this "whole language" stuff. I asked what is happening in schools now.
She told me "phonics is king."
I guess I was surprised, not having followed this topic for decades. And I was pleased, because I (a die-hard liberal) always thought the deep-sixing of phonics was stupid. I feel it explains why I encounter many adults who are befuddled by unfamiliar words, particularly how to pronounce them.
I also have observed one huge and seemingly obvious reason that the "whole word" method is flawed. Adults who have no phonics skill often confuse new words with other words that "look similar." I once had a co-worker who commented on diseases being caused by "microorgasms."
I'd say the pitfalls of making mistakes like these are substantial.
How do you know the co-worker was not taught phonics?
Not sure what the best approach is in school, but I know having books at home and reading to children from the moment they are born makes a world of difference. It gives me the creeps to visit homes without lots of books around, especially if children live there. If you can't buy books go to the library or pick them up for nothing at yard sales. Reading problems begin with parents.
Can you tell the difference between Chinese characters? Not easily (unless you actually know Chinese) - it takes practice. Yet anybody who is literate in Chinese must learn all the characters.
The different parts of the characters do have some meaning so there can be some deduction, but it's still basically a matter of memorization and recognition,
Most kids learn new words at a very fast rate, either by ear or on paper. Using phonetics can be very helpful for many kids and to ignore it completely makes no sense for several reasons (has anybody ever done this?). But the basic process of reading has to be recognition of whole words. Anybody who is spelling out every word letter by letter is obviously not "proficient" in reading.
The main reason that the reading wars are kept alive is that Republicans are always trying to privatize schools and this is something that can be used to show that public schools are doing the wrong things (aside from not teaching religion).