How Did You Learn to Read?

When you were in kindergarten or first grade, how did you learn to read?

Did you spend part of each day listening to your teacher reading to the class and to your parent reading a bedtime story? At some point, you were handed a book, and one day, you were reading independently. Just like learning to talk, reading came to you naturally…it just sort of happened!

Right?

Not likely. You were probably too young to be able to recall it clearly, but you and your classmates didn’t start to read independently after merely learning to sing the Alphabet Song and paying attention during Story Time. It’s far more likely that you learned to read by receiving multiple hours of instruction in letter sounds. After you learned the alphabet, you were taught that “every letter makes a sound.” Then a parent or teacher showed you how the sounds corresponded to the letters within written words, and demonstrated how to “sound out” each word on a page. That’s known as phonics instruction—teaching how letter sounds look in print.

If you’re reading this now without much effort, you probably fell into one of these categories:

  • You received explicit and systematic phonics instruction
  • You were fortunate enough to be able to “catch on” after minimal phonics instruction

As explained by the excellent literacy website Reading Rockets, “[t]he goal of phonics instruction is to help children learn the alphabetic principle—the idea that letters represent the sounds of spoken language—and that there is an organized, logical, and predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds.”

“What You Should See in Every School”

Phonics receives a strong endorsement from Emily Hanford’s important report for American Public Media, “Hard Words” (10 Sept. 2018). The report and an accompanying podcast argue that “virtually all kids can learn to read—if they are taught the right way. The problem is that many American elementary schools aren’t doing that.”

In the background of Hanford’s podcast, a sound sample invokes the children’s television program The Electric Company. For those of a certain generation, this educational show provides the classic example of clear and simple phonics instruction. The “Silhouettes” portion of that TV show diced up words into two parts, spoken and spelled by two silhouettes. When the two parts come together, you see and hear (and, eventually, read) a word. “Ch,” “eese,” “cheese.” That’s phonics.

Hanford starts her report with a reminder that a majority of the American children who took the “gold-standard” National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2017 did not meet the proficiency requirements in Reading. (Only 36% of U.S. eighth-graders who took the test scored at the proficiency level in 2017.)  She argues, “According to all the research, what you should see in every school is a heavy emphasis on explicit phonics instruction in the early grades. There is no evidence this turns kids off to reading or makes reading harder. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you do a good job teaching phonics in the early grades, kids get off to a quicker start.”

A paper published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (“Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert“) finds that even though much scientific evidence about effective methods of teaching literacy is no longer debatable, education policies aren’t drawing from it:

Much of this evidence is highly relevant to the question of how reading should be taught and, pleasingly, it has been examined in comprehensive government reviews of reading instruction, including those conducted in the United States (e.g., the National Reading Panel, 2000), the United Kingdom (e.g., the Rose Review; Rose, 2006), and Australia (e.g., the Department of Education, Science and Training, or DEST; Rowe, 2005). These reviews have revealed a strong scientific consensus around the importance of phonics instruction in the initial stages of learning to read. … Yet this research has been slow to make inroads into public policy.

Hanford also found that policies about literacy instruction are frequently not based on science. Her reporting uncovered plenty of disheartening evidence that “[t]he prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read.” She reports that very few schools of education in the U.S are teaching future educators anything about the cognitive science behind literacy. Hanford cites numerous examples of teachers whose graduate-level coursework did not include reading at all, and omitted phonics, instead favoring a “whole-language” or “balanced-literacy” approach that’s been popular since the 1970s. She interviewed several veteran teachers who had recently completed a research-based course in reading instruction in the early grades, with a heavy phonics component. Now that they had introduced phonics to their current students, some of these teachers were now feeling guilty about having short-changed students in previous years.

Does Whole Language Have Any Merit?

In an open letter to blogger Valerie Strauss of The Washington Post, psychologist Steven Dykstra of the Wisconsin Reading Coalition defends phonics instruction and contrasts it with the whole-language approach, which he describes as unscientific. He and the scholars who co-signed the letter ascribe to whole-language proponents the belief “that children should be taught to construct meaning from text based on their own meaning-based intuitions about what the words might be. That is, rather than reading the words of a text to expand their knowledge and understanding (as well as their reading prowess), [whole language] encourages children to use their own existing knowledge and understanding to guess at words.”

Deploying whole-language methods, the teacher encourages young learners to attempt to read picture books and, when they encounter an unfamiliar word, to use “context clues” on the page (such as surrounding text or pictures) to guess at its meaning. The belief behind whole language is that children will learn to read naturally, through exposure to print, just as they learn to speak by hearing others’ speech.

Whole-language proponents prefer “meaning” and “knowledge” over “skills,” and to them, phonics instruction represents a dreary attempt to inculcate skills. One educator whom Hanford interviewed for her report was a former department chair at a Mississippi school of education whose opposition to phonics instruction was grounded in her belief that students need to focus on the meaning of the words rather than their component parts. “‘One of the ideas behind whole language is that when [reading] is meaningful, it’s easy,'” she says to Hanford. “‘And when it’s broken down into little parts, it makes it harder.'”

The problem with this type of thinking is that for many children, learning to read is not  at all easy. Hanford stresses that unlike speech, reading and writing are not acquired naturally and must be explicitly taught, and much neuroscience research strongly supports this theory. When you consider the large number of students who fail to meet the proficiency standard in reading each year, the entire basis for a whole-language approach to literacy instruction—the belief that reading skills are acquired naturally—seems nonsensical. The Mississippi educator quoted above is not accounting for struggling readers, who badly need a systematic approach to “decoding” words, starting by breaking them down into short sounds. For these readers, the letters on the page do not convey meaning at all because they are not yet connected to the language they hear.

Literacy research simply does not support a whole-language approach to early reading instruction. Learning the letter sounds and also the spelling rules that determine why “tap” becomes “tape,” for example, surely played a role in your own literacy foundation. The students in your class who were considered “slow” readers probably had difficulty parsing phonemes, or basic sound units; in scientific terms, they had “low phonemic awareness” when they entered school. For whatever reason, they weren’t easily able to hear that the word “dog” consists of three different sounds. The children in the class who caught on to this concept quickly were able, with little effort, to apply letter sounds to words. When shown a page of text, they would not try to guess that the word “tub” spelled “bath,” even if the page included a picture of a bathtub. They would instead “sound it out.”

With a whole-language approach, those struggling readers would be encouraged to continue down the page even if they read the word “bath” rather than “tub” because they had correctly deduced the basic meaning of the sentence. But such children were not actually learning to read. As the class moved on to more difficult texts or texts that lacked pictures, those struggling readers fell further behind—and probably developed various techniques to hid their difficulties. Considering how many students do not score at proficiency level on the NAEP year after year, it’s striking to read about Hanford’s encounters with teachers who firmly believe that their whole-language approach has been effective simply because their students seem to enjoy it.

The Disconnect

Phonics instruction alone will not turn a child into a skilled reader. In addition to reading practice, children need instruction and guidance in understanding the meaning of a text, including how word choice can alter the subtle connotations that shape a reader’s understanding. Hanford and other researchers believe that whole-language instruction thrives on the disconnect between early literacy development and the later cognitive strategies that are also required for reading proficiency, such as a sufficient vocabulary to be able to decipher context and process more complex information. How children move beyond basic reading skills into more complex processing of texts is extremely individualized and a bit of a mystery. The research study cited above hints at the idea that a whole-language approach is potentially useful once students can already read at a basic level:

[R]eading comprehension clearly entails more than the identification of individual words: Children are not literate if they cannot understand text. We believe that the relative absence of discussion of processes beyond phonics has contributed to ongoing resistance to the use of phonics in the initial stages of learning to read.

But without a strong skillset in “decoding” words, a skillset that is developed from explicit phonics instruction, many students will never attain proficiency by the eighth grade, and especially not if they start school with low phonemic awareness or even dyslexia. Phonemic awareness is a foundation for reading and is connected to spoken language. It develops as children begin to understand that words can be broken down into short sounds, sounds that compose the meaning of each word.

A lack of phonemic awareness could result from growing up in a household with relatively low socio-economic status (SES). Much research suggests that lower SES often means fewer books in the home and less exposure to language in general. As just one example, the National Institutes of Health website includes a research study (“Language learning, socioeconomic status, and child-directed speech“) that states, “children at the lower end of the SES spectrum tend to receive significantly less high-quantity and high-quality language experience, which affects their development of vocabulary, grammar, and language processing.” Such children are already behind many of their peers when they enter kindergarten. By contrast, a child who happens to have highly developed phonemic awareness is ready to learn to read.

When combined with a lack of phonics instruction in many public schools, low phonemic awareness could explain the achievement gap between wealthier schools and those with a high concentration of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch. In other words, students with low phonemic awareness need more, and more explicit and systematic, phonics instruction than students who enter school with high phonemic awareness.

 

Implications for North Carolina

The science is crystal clear: every child must have explicit and systematic phonics instruction in the early grades in order to learn to read because reading skills are not acquired naturally. Those who do not need additional interventions can then progress rapidly to more complex texts, while those with low phonemic awareness or actual learning disabilities must be provided with another, more individualized course of phonics, textual decoding instruction, and practice. In many cases, these students struggle initially but then catch up to their peers. Peg Tyre, an education journalist, claims that “Researchers estimate that somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of children, most of whom have developmental disorders or profound neurological problems, will never learn to read” while all the rest can learn to read quite fluently if they are taught using effective methods. If Tyre is correct, at least 90% of students can learn to be decent readers. But literacy rates for US children are nowhere near that level.

Science-based, results-based literacy instruction is absolutely critical in the early grades. We already know that students who are not reading at grade level in the third grade frequently do not catch up to their peers in later grades. Required texts and the skills that are tested are far more complicated after Grade Three. A study commissioned by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that “[s]tudents who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma than proficient readers.”

These achievement statistics underlie North Carolina’s Read to Achieve Program, which was started in 2013 in response to new legislation requiring third-graders who did not test at grade level in Reading to repeat third grade or attend a special literacy camp. But unfortunately, the law did not require phonics instruction in these literacy camps. And perhaps as a result, the camps have not been effective at improving literacy for North Carolina’s elementary students. When a team of researchers from NC State analyzed achievement-related data from North Carolina students who did not meet proficiency standards on third-grade Reading tests, they concluded that “participation in a reading camp does not appear to make a difference in subsequent test scores.”

A Pennsylvania school district that Hanford profiled for her report had increased the passing rate of kindergartners on an annual early literacy benchmark from 47% to 85% in 3 years after providing a high-quality phonics curriculum and training in literacy instruction to all of its principals and kindergarten teachers. The gains were quite dramatic at some schools: from 35% passing to 100% in one instance. They were seen at all schools, regardless of the socio-economic status of their students.

It’s unconscionable that a 47% passing rate on a literacy test could ever been considered acceptable, yet poverty is just one of the easy excuses that are used to explain why some kids can’t read. But what if poverty isn’t the reason why some third-graders can’t read at grade level? What if the reason is that they haven’t been taught how to read?