Professor Plum's Relentless Rants on Eduquackery

Cat Scratch Fever

It's a cold and cloudy day in these here parts.  Nothing for it but to sit on the back deck, stoke the outdoor pot bellied fireplace (99 bucks from WalMart), see which I like more (Jack Daniels, Wild Turkey, or George Dickel--Captain Dan the Pirate Man prefers the latter), and occasionally turn the ribs. 

The calico feral cat (I call her Here, Kitty Kitty) now sleeps on the deck in a house I made.  Once the fire gets good and hot she hops on my lap and twists and turns  and rolls around until her head is under my hand. 

She's kinda finicky, though.  If, after a soothing  "ear bub," you proffer the usually enjoyable "tummy rub," she growls, bites, and sinks her claws in your thigh.  So far this has happened about 80 times.  I am covered with bleeding puncture wounds and the skin on my hands is nicely shredded--hence the reference to cat scratch fever.

You may recall several posts on the doings at Rockford, Il.--where the new direcrtor of instruction decided to remove reading programs that were doing good things for the kids and replace them with hooey.  As I always say, "Give an eduquack a choice and they invariably make the wrong one."  I believe it has something to do with a disability called Complete Lack of Moral Sense.

Well, the story continues, here.  Now, both the state and the feds (Reading First, under which Illinois gets its money) are investigating.  Unless the Rockford eduquacks lie like rugs, they just may get slapped.  My pref for the aforementioned slapping would be a solid wallop to the teeth with a segment of hard salami. This would made it easier for them to pronounce those difficult bi-labials.

More later.  But first I have to go to the emergency room.

Whole Language. A Necrotizing Infection

Lest Gorgon rising from the infernal lakes
With horrors armed, and curls of hissing snakes,    
Should fix me stiffened at the monstrous sight,
A stony image in eternal night. [Odyssey, book 11.]

 

Genesis and decay,
creation and destruction,
birth and death, joy and pain,
all are interwoven with equal effect and weight;
thus even the most isolated event always presents itself
as an image and metaphor for the most universal.
[Goethe. Maxims and Reflections.]

The lines from Goethe, above, suggest to Professor Plum that little things mean (or signify) a lot--a proposition also advanced with no little vim and zip in a tune warbled by the songster Kitty Kallen; words and music by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz.  But that’s a subject for another time and place--never and nowhere.

The proposition also applies very well to The Bible. For example, the Book of Genesis contains everything you need to know about the human condition and how to avoid making BIG mistakes. Specifically,

1. If the Lord says, “Hey, just what the heck are you two doing?!” don’t say, “Oh, nothing, really. Watching TV. Paying bills. That sort of thing.”

2. When planning the menu for a ritual offering, remember that the Lord is NOT a vegetarian, and will look askance at altars containing Brussels sprouts and tofu balls. Rely on roasts and hashes.

3. Send a bird first.

4. Don’t go “checking up” on your old man when he takes a nap in his tent.

5. Don’t let Sodomites in your house. However, the case is not closed on Gemorrans. It could be one thing or it could be another.

6. Don’t turn around to “see what’s going on down there on the plains.”

7. Ditch the fancy coat.

8. It’s going to take a loooong time to get to Canaan

Likewise, there’s a lot of meaning in the beef-witted actions of fawning, caluminous, boil brained,  rump fed eduquack hedge pigs.  As I’ve said many times (maybe twice), “Give a slattern-mouthed, wart-necked, scab-bottomed eduquack a simple choice, and they always make the wrong one.”

But first consider other professions.

Science. Amplifying light such that satellites can tell what you’re reading.

Medicine. Painful and crippling diseases stopped in their loathsome tracks with a pill. [Gout/allopurinal]

Music. Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro; Beethoven’s Sixth and Ninth; Duke Ellington; Django Reinhart, and Mark Knopfler  (Speedway at Nazareth is  unbelievable!).

Dentistry. White teeth in ten minutes (oral cancer next week)

In these fields, the most learned (musicians, scientists, physicians, legal scholars, jellied eel salesmen) teach students to surpass their teachers--yielding cumulative beauty, knowledge, and wisdom.  Quite the opposite in education. After 5000 years and billions of dollars, 50% of kids can’t read, 30% can't make change for a buck, and maybe ONE senior can tell you the logical argument in the Declaration of Independence.

Why? Because barely literate, ideology-driven, anti-rational, self-absorbed, arrogant, mentally negligible, maggot pie ed perfessers ensure that their students know even less than they do (which, if knowledge were gun powder, would be insufficient to blow their hats off).  Then their former students, as teachers, miseducate the next generation of school kids, some of whom in time become ed perfessers, “reading coordinators,” and classroom teachers--yielding cumulative stupidity.

Here’s a horrifying but common example. But please know that its signif is far beyond whole language.  The lies, deceptions, illogical arguments, and treacly sentimentality are all part of the general strategy used by "progressives" in reading, math, science, and other fields to sustain or retake control.  Control means position, influence, income, prestige, and the satisfaction of having everyone else dance to their ideological tune. 

Professor Plum knows these persons well.  He has seen them operate since 1967.  Yes, I make fun of them and reveal their assininity.  But I know them as small, crimped souls whose dogmatism stems more from limited intellect than from confidence.  They are truly evil.  They have sacrificed G-d knows how many children on the alter of their vanity and they will continue to do so--always claiming the best intentions.   

The following was written by one of the smartest and best persons I know. She's a nationally known expert (I mean, a REAL expert) in reading and direct (systematic, explicit) instruction. She assisted "low performing" schools to implement new reading programs. Probably Reading Mastery.

Now, these schools had done such a poor job teaching that they received a Reading First grant from the state, after the state received a Reading First grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Reading First grant proposals are not the usual eduslop. They are serious scientific proposals. In the proposal, the state or district writes a contract with the funding agency--to use certain reading curricula (that are field tested, effective, teach the five basic reading skills, using systematic and explicit instruction)

If the state or district does not do what it agreed to do, it's in trouble.

So, here is what my friend wrote…   [My droning, flap-mouthed comments in brackets.]

As many of you know, for the past four years I worked with Project READ in Ithaka [Not the real name.] After more than a decade of whole language [And the destruction of one generation.], we introduced a multi-tiered phonics approach using Direct Instruction for students who needed the third tier intervention program.  [Three-tiered means they had a core curriculum for all kids; supplementary materials; and intervention materials for kids who need even more fine-grained instruction.]

At the end of the three and a half years, teacher satisfaction grew to high levels and student attitudes (non DI and DI equally) towards recreational and academic reading were positive (even the most struggling readers) as measured by a reading attitude survey. Two out of the three schools carried the reading model out with high fidelity and in those schools the percentage of students who had met state standards in writing and reading increased. Initially, we had hoped for even larger increases, but the reality of dealing with the unions (periodic inferior teachers replacing newly trained untenured ones) and whole language mandates thrown down from Central office reading administrators the first two years introduced us to reality.

In these two schools the 2004 results for our first group of students in these high poverty inner city schools were a hair above the state average in reading and way above the state average in writing (interesting impact of phonics). In School One back in 2002 only 15.2 % of the third graders met standards in reading; this year 68.2% met them; in writing the percentage of students meeting standards went from 15.2 to 86.4% .  In School Two,which seemed to have an ever changing staff, in 2002 54.5% of the students met standards in reading with an increase to 67% in 2004; in writing the percentage of students in that school meeting standards went from 57.4% to 80.6%.   

By year three the resistant Ithaka balanced literacy reading coordinators [Balanced literacy is another name for whole language. Realizing that they'd been found out, as lying weasels, whole language hucksters merely changed the name. Same ineffective trash. This is really important reading.]   were on their way out and the administration had decided to turn two other failing schools into Direct Instruction schools.  [Good. Expand the use of what is obviously working!] Even though our project was finished, the schools made elaborate plans to continue using the same model.

BUT THEN.  Enter a new superintendent this year and the curriculum director he brought with him from Hashville. [Not the real name.] Throughout the fall I received heartbreaking emails from staff who were trying to work their way around mandatory "word walls" and mandatory time spent on leveled books from the new "book rooms."  [In other words, less direct teaching of reading skills and more kids “constructing” knowledge on their own. That’s why so many kids couldn’t read BEFORE DI was introduced. So, the district is basically saying, “We don’t give a good G-d damn what works! We don’t LIKE DI and we DO like whole language. Screw the kids!! And screw anyone else who doesn’t have the power to stop us!”  Sorry for the profanity.  I've seen this before.]

Tonight, just before Christmas the dam broke. The fledgling DI schools are no longer DI schools and our schools have been told to abandon the multi-tiered model. Balanced literacy is once again the order of the day. Forget history, forget upward results. It's the same old story again. Administrators within the district are fighting to hang on, but it's looking grimmer and grimmer.

I know that some of you are involved in Reading First. The Reading First school that made the most dramatic progress (going from a low of 11% of third grade students reading at grade level to the current 68.2%) is in many ways, "The Little School That Could."  The cultural change that took place in Kickmeagain School and transformed it from a place where no one ever expected that those students from poverty could read, to one where everyone followed DIBELS [an assessment system] results with magnifying glasses trying to get everyone up to standards, was amazing.
 
Over the course of the three years, parents who routinely never attended school functions, began attending in droves.
K - 3 in this school is what Reading First is all about. The fifth graders in Fish School  which had previously been self-described as the whole language school of the district still are scoring as low as ever. You would think that the dramatic difference would convince any new supt. to go with the winning team. 

But now I find out that it may all be over before it's begun. Rumors abound that the district will likely not renew its Read First contract. [In other words, to avoid being punished for violating the terms of the grant, the district will simply take no money. That way, they get to keep on using whole language with impunity.] And currently the newly mandated word walls, guided reading, DRA assessments [Strictly qualitative and unreliable] , running records [Useless and time consuming.], and literacy centers [Kids lay around and appear to read. No checks on accuracy or comprehension. Looks good but is pure pageantry.] are threatening to dismantle the excellence that had begun to bud in this school.

 
Oh, but there’s more! Here’s the email sent to all of the schools in that district by the new reading coordinator from Hashville. Note the artful bunk.

 

Sent: Fri 12/17/2004
To:  Elem School Principals; Reading Coaches; Reading 1st Literacy Coaches; Curriculum Coordinators
Subject: Reading Programs

I have tried to be sensitive this year [Oooo, sensitive.] to reading initiatives that schools already had in place.  [Is sensitivity the right disposition?  Shouldn't she be most interested in what is working and what is NOT?]   However, as time goes on, I realize that it is imperative that we all be on the same page. [Why? If some schools use DI and others whole language, you have a natural experiment. You’d think she’d want to learn which works better. But noooo.  She does not CARE which works better. She wants whole language, and to get it she makes up this bs about how it is imperative for everyone to teach the same way.]

It is just too difficult to have schools that espouse “different philosophies” that require different materials.   [Bunk. What’s hard?  Districts all over the country do exactly that. Wart-faced scut.] In addition, it is not a wise use of our very limited resources to finance independent training sessions that impact only one or two schools. [Banana oil.  The money comes from Reading First. The district does not spend a dime on those few schools. In fact, part of a Reading First grant is providing training even to nonReading First schools.  But she’s making it seem as if it’s immoral to let the two DI/Reading First schools do their thing. In fact, given their success, it is immoral to force them to stop.]

If you are a DI or Success for All school [Success for All is another reading program that is systematic and explicit, and is the opposite of whole language] and you have teachers who want to switch to a balanced literacy approach during the second semester, please allow them to do so.  [You KNOW that these teachers have been TOLD to ask.  It's a set up.]   In the fall of 2005 all elementary schools must be on board with balanced literacy.  [How do you spell coercion?] Please let your coaches and district reading coordinators work with teachers second semester to initiate this transition. [Such nice sounding talk. “Please let…” And if a principal says, "Screw you. We will continue using DI.”, What do you think will happen?]

We will also have many training opportunities in the balanced literacy approach this summer, so please encourage your teachers to sign up as these sessions are advertised. [That is, indoctrination and “re-education.” How do you spell “thought reform”?]

Balanced literacy is an approach, not a scripted program.  [Here we go. Note the idiotic logic--as if so-called balanced literacy could not be scripted. ] It is based on the premise that children need a balance of phonics and authentic reading and writing experiences. [Now she’s trying to sound like a mentor. In fact, she's presenting a false dichotomy.  Reading First is based on that very premise and it requires the use of programs that provide just that sort of instruction. She implies that the DI programs don’t use “authentic literature.”  DI programs include the Odyssey, classical poetry, science, short stories, etc. This is plain “new speak.” She's making this up.] 

Earlier this year, we gave all of you recommendations for daily schedules that support this balance in reading instruction.  [In other words, the schedules precluded the DI lessons as kids were instead supposed to fart around making up words and reading “silently.] The balanced literacy approach advocates explicit and systematic phonics instruction [Oh, sure it does! But for a few minutes “as needed.” That’s why kids don’t learn “phonics” with “balanced literacy” and end up illiterate.] along with progressions from shared to guided to independent practice in reading and writing.  Students should interact with, read, and respond verbally and in writing, to both fiction and nonfiction materials from the moment they start to emerge as readers.  [Which they DO in DI programs!  She's creating a straw man.]   Instruction should be a balance of whole group and SMALL group work, with the small groups targeting students who have similar needs.   These small, guided reading groups are flexible in nature, fueled by student need [fueled by student need. Means what?  The mantra of the progressive deaducator.], and the heart of the reading program.  Student need is determined through the different system wide assessments, teacher observation, classroom performance, etc.  As soon as students become phonetically proficient, they move to word work like Making Big Words and Words Their Way.  [Neither of which has been tested and been shown to work. In whole language, verification has nothing to do with data on effectiveness; it has to do with being consistent with ideology.] As students become fluent, they should have the opportunity to enjoy literature circles and book clubs. [The point is, with whole language they WON'T become fluent.  This is mere flapdoodle.]

I will be the first to admit that this approach is not as easy as following a basal or other scripted program. [G-d forbid they should make it easier for teachers to teach something as routine as reading.  Oh, no!  Turn it into an ersatz "art" that leaves whole language teachers feeling like gurus, when it fact they are frauds who have once again made their students stupid.] It takes time and training for teachers to feel comfortable, [It takes maybe two days to teach someone to use effective commercial programs.]  but I have every confidence [Oh, that’s comforting. No data but every confidence.] that as we develop comprehensive, quality balanced literacy programs in our schools, [Bullhockey.  You have nothing but the words "comprehensive" and "quality" and a bunch of useless activities.]  our children will flourish academically.  [Yeah, flourish in your butt.] I wish each of you a joyful holiday season.  Muttonhead

If families only knew...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ken Goodman, Whole Language, and the Psychotic Guessing Game

 
Xaphan         Ukobach    Furies

...when a man's fancy gets astride on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with his senses, and common understanding as well as common sense, is kicked out of doors, the first proselyte he makes is himself... [Jonathan Swift. A tale of a tub. 1704]

21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. [The Revelation of St. John The Divine, 9: 20 and 21]

Revolutionaries generally promise heaven and deliver hell.

The bizarre fantasies of whole languagists have for two decades controlled how reading is defined and taught in schools, how reading failure is understood and handled, and how reading teachers are trained and certified. The product of their self-assuring efforts is millions of semi-illiterate students who after 12 years in school still struggle to read the written word, spell, write, and comprehend text.  They are therefore semi-illiterate in all subjects that require proficient reading.

Whole language promised a revolution and it delivered. Instead of teaching, teachers coached.  Instead of learning, children guessed.  Instead of mastering, children failed.  Instead of growing, children were stunted.  Instead of leaving school proudly, students dropped out early or left demoralized.  All under the banner of This is Good For You.

Of course, whole language did not do all this by itself.  It had support from its ideological brothers--fuzziest math, multi-culty social studies, trivialized "new speak" history, literature without Shakespeare, and portfolio assessment (scrapbooks). All these monstrosities grew in the infected womb of "progressivism" (child-centered, learning-should-be-fun, let students select the curriculum), fed by Romantic modernism, postmodernism, and the 60’s new-left critique of western social institutions and resistance to external authority (rules for right reasoning, bodies of knowledge, and the historic role of teacher)--all under the leadership of self-appointed gurus, fake savants, and secular edupriests, who mistake their flatulent eructations as the voice of God.

Even a cursory reading of some of the main tenets of whole language reveals them to be so stupid, so contrary to common observation, so easily seen as the product of mental derangement, that one wonders how whole language caught on--unless one assumes that followers are equally stupid and deranged.

Another explanation is that the founders of whole language disguised the essential egoism and insanity of their "project" behind appealing phrases embedded in logical fallacies not seen by the unwary.

                                  Goodman's Guessing Game
Whole language proponents cite Kenneth Goodman's 1967 paper ("Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game") as one of the first in their canon--the paper that fostered the whole language movement, or revolution (Goodman, 1976) and continues to guide and legitimize whole language activities (Pappas & Pettegrew, 1998). Goodman clearly saw the paper the same way--as offering "a more viable scientific alternative" to what he dubbed "pre-existing, naive, common sense notions" about reading that "interfere with the application of modern scientific concepts of language and thought to research on reading" (Goodman, 1967, p. 126). 

Let's take Goodman at his word.  Let's examine his "more viable scientific alternative" to see how he crafted a new foundation for reading research and instruction; to determine whether it satisfies the criteria for a viable or even scientific alternative; and to understand better how his ideas were so easily accepted and spawned the whole language movement.

8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. [The Revelation of St. John The Divine, 6:7 and 8]

In simplest terms, Goodman presents a conception of reading as a guessing game.  He provides no logical, empirical, or commonsensical support for this conception.  He then presents a highly selective set of passage misreadings by a child. These misreadings are not called errors; they are "miscues." These misreadings are interpreted in a way that fits Goodman's guessing-game formulation (although other interpretations--from the phonics approach that he disparages--are more obvious and more reasonable).  Goodman then uses the misreading examples to verify his conception of reading--although the only credible use of the examples would be a demonstration that it is possible to misinterpret misreadings that way.  The paper ends with the implication for instruction; namely, teach children to play the guessing game more skillfully.

                                         The Opening Gambit
Goodman's paper begins with a common rhetorical device--caricature of a self-created adversary. Specifically, he creates a false binary opposition of then current conceptions of reading and their associated methods of teaching:  "phonic centered" and "word centered."  He reduces these approaches to a few statements that would lead readers to agree with Goodman that these conceptions are simplistic and must be wrong.   For example,

"...the common sense notion I seek here to refute is this: Reading is a precise process.  It involves exact, detailed, sequential perception and identification of letters, words, spelling patterns and larger language units.'  In phonic centered approaches to reading, the preoccupation is with precise letter identification.  In word centered approaches, the focus is on word identification... (p. 126).

Goodman then writes, "In place of this misconception, I offer this..."--his allegedly "more viable scientific alternative" foreshadowed in the paper's abstract.  Note the artful way that Goodman sets up the reader.

1. He labels in a disparaging way the phonic and word centered approaches "common sense notions," despite the great deal of scientific research done in support of each one--especially the approach that advocated teaching phonics in a systematic way during beginning reading.  Yet, he does not cite this research or even hint that there was any.  These approaches are not presented as bodies of knowledge that may have some flaws.  Rather, in contrast to his self-valorized "scientific alternative," readers are simply to take Goodman's unsupported word and consider them mere common sense notions.

2. In contrast to standard practice in science, Goodman presents no data that the phonic and word centered approaches do not work.  He conducts no experiments--indeed, he cites no research at all--showing that whole language instruction (derived from his guessing game formulation of reading) is more effective than the phonic centered and word centered approaches he wishes to replace.  And, although he calls them "misconceptions," he does not analyze the intellectual apparatus behind the phonic centered and word centered approaches (e.g., their theories of reading) to show they are logically flawed.

In other words, Goodman does nothing to (in his own words) "refute" these common sense notions.  His only claim to readers' attention--and the only warrant for his "scientific" alternative--is an unsubstantiated opening pitch that there are two pre-existing alternatives; that these alternatives are merely common sense notions; and that they are misconceptions.

The New Model
        Goodman then presents his "scientific" alternative.

"...I offer this: Reading is a selective process.  It involves partial use of available minimal language cues [Notice that he does not call them "reading" cues.  This makes it possible to falsely conflate reading and language, so that he can argue for teaching reading the same--incidental, "natural"--way that language is ordinarily learned. PP] selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader's expectation.  As this partial information is processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected, or refined as reading progresses....More simply stated, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game.  It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all the elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time.  The ability to anticipate that which will be seen, of course, is vital in reading, just as the ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital in listening (pp. 127-8).

Notice that there are at least three logical errors in Goodman's opening presentation of his new and "scientific" approach to reading.  First, Goodman's new view of reading rests on the fallacy of reification.  He transforms what is merely a metaphor into a concrete reality.  Goodman does not say that reading can (metaphorically) be seen (for purposes of analysis) as if it were a psycholinguistic guessing game.  Rather, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game.  It is not as if readers are guessing at what words say.  Readers actually are guessing.  [The author asks readers of this document to consider whether they are in fact guessing at every word on this page.]  However, treating a metaphor as a concrete reality was a useful trick.  It means that whole language rests on a fantasy--a dreamy way of thinking--in which there is no boundary between how we think about things and how things actually are. Once new teachers are seduced into this dream world, almost any bizarre and baseless statements can be taken as sage wisdom.   

Second, Goodman commits the fallacy of hyperbole, or over-generalization.  He does not say that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game for certain aspects of reading, for some readers, at some point in their learning to read.  Rather, all of reading is a guessing game for all readers all the time.  This rhetorical device enables Goodman to lay claim to all of reading and reading instruction (word recognition, spelling, writing)--and to call it whole language.

Third, Goodman's definition of reading commits the fallacy of tautology.  After stating (above) that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game, Goodman states, "It involves an interaction between thought and language."  [It is interesting that Goodman's definition of reading does not even have the word print in it.] Apparently, the statement ("It involves an interaction between thought and language.") is supposed to support the idea that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game.  However, interaction between thought and language means exactly the same thing as psycholinguistic.  Therefore, all Goodman is saying is that reading is a guessing game that involves interaction between thought and language. [Again, nothing about print.]

However, all thinking uses language.  Thinking means talking to yourself--in a language.  So, what could an interaction between thinking (which means talking to yourself) and language mean?  In summary, Goodman's new definition of reading is empty.  It means nothing at all, and it certainly has nothing to do with interacting with the printed word--the ordinary conception of reading. Goodman's full conception consists of the following propositions--taken from his initial statement (above) and from the summary of his "model" at the end of the paper.

1. "Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all the elements."

2. Reading "involves an interaction between thought and language."

3. "Reading is a selective process."

4. This selecting process "involves partial use of available minimal language cues..."

5. Efficient reading results "from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues..."

6. These cues are at first graphic cues (p. 135).

7. These cues are "selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader's expectation."  They are "guided by constraints set up through prior choices, his language knowledge, his cognitive styles and strategies he has learned" (p. 135).

8. These cues provide "partial information."

9. The reader "forms a perceptual image using these cues and his anticipated cues"  (p. 135).

10. The reader "searches his memory for related syntactic, semantic, and phonological cues."

11. This memory search "may lead to selection of more graphic cues and to reforming the perceptual image" (p. 135).

12. These cues are "necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time."

13. The reader then "makes a guess or tentative choice consistent with graphic cues.  Semantic analysis leads to partial decoding as far as possible" (p. 135).

14. This partial information " processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected, or refined as reading progresses."

15. "If no guess is possible, he checks the recalled perceptual input and tries again" (p. 135).

16. "If a guess is still not possible, he takes another look at the text to gather more graphic cues" (p. 135).

17. "If the tentative choice is not acceptable semantically or syntactically, then he regresses, scanning from right to left along the line and up the page to locate a point of semantic or syntactic inconsistency" (p. 135).

18.  "When such a point is found, he starts over at that point" (p. 135).

19. "If no inconsistency can be identified, he reads on seeking some cue which will make it possible to reconcile the anamolous (sic) situation" (p. 135).

20. "If the choice is acceptable, decoding extended, meaning is assimilated with prior meaning and prior meaning accommodated, if necessary" (p. 135).

21. "Then the cycle continues" (p. 135).

22. The above propositions enable one to see reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game."

Rhetorical Devices and More Logical Fallacies in Goodman's Guessing Game

Goodman's new conception of reading is  unsatisfactory in several ways.

It is speculation, not science.

A defining feature of science (in contrast to metaphysics, opinion, fantasy, and madness) is that propositions, arguments, theories, and conceptual schemes are judged viable and scientific not because proponents say so, but on the basic of empirical evidence and sound reasoning.  Science also requires that writers define terms--especially when terms are new or may be misunderstood.  However, Goodman's version of science--at least in his article--appears not to require any empirical evidence or effort at clear definition.  He offers no data whatever to support his assertions that, for example,

1. Reading does not result from "precise perception and identification of all the elements."

2. Readers "select" "productive cues," and then guess at what words say and mean.

3. "Readers utilize not one, but three kinds of information simultaneously" (p. 131).

Nor does he explicate the meaning of "cue," "guess," "thought," "language," or even "reading."

The absence of evidence and clear definition weakens Goodman's claim that he offers a viable scientific alternative conception of reading. Still, Goodman managed to help fashion a new definition of science--a science with neither data nor reasoning nor defined concepts, a science indistinguishable from speculation and wishful thinking.  However, this revisionist science well-served later whole language teachers, writers, researchers, and advocates who (guided by Goodman) no longer felt obliged to abide by--or even accept the legitimacy of--traditional scientific rules about external verification of claims via tests available to other persons (Moats, 2000).  In the absence of empirical evidence, we can only assess the adequacy of Goodman's new guessing game conception of reading by examining the logical adequacy of his propositions, as shown below.

        Goodman's conception of reading commits the fallacy of hasty generalization, or converse accident.  Goodman’s paper implies that his new conception embraces all of reading.  He does not say that only certain elements of reading, at some times, for some readers are part of a guessing game.  Rather, "(R)eading  a psycholinguistic guessing game." It is for all readers a process of selecting cues, and then guessing, confirming, rejecting, or refining tentative decisions about what sounds letters make, what a word says and means, what a period and comma imply, how words are spelled.  However, such guessing, cue-selecting, and decision-making arguably apply only to

(1) Beginning readers.

(2) Older readers who have not been taught to read and understand text based on solid knowledge (and the automatic application) of sound/symbol correspondence, punctuation, spelling, subject/predicate, cause/effect, and so forth.

(3) Skilled readers who have run into a new and difficult word. 

Consider propositions 13-21 above.  Is it reasonable to assert that these activities apply to all readers?  Is there any evidence that skilled readers guess at every word--as if reading (fluent reading) were a series of tentative choices?

Another example of hasty generalization is Goodman's use of reading errors--called "miscues"--as the only evidence that all reading is guessing.  Goodman’s paper does not provide samples of fluent reading to substantiate his propositions about selecting and guessing. This may be because fluent reading provides no evidence of guessing. In summary, it is likely that Goodman's guessing game conception of reading applies only to poor readers, beginning readers, or good readers who are decoding unfamiliar words.  In other words, all that is new in Goodman’s new conception is the unwarranted generalization that all readers guess all the time.

The massive irony, here, is that Goodman's followers created a method of reading instruction--whole language--that reversed the polarity of guessing.  Rather than something to be overcome because it signified lack of skill, guessing was now considered a natural and good thing, and therefore was to be encouraged.  Systematic instruction on phonemic awareness, sound/symbol relationships (m says mmm), word attack, and spelling was now unnatural--a bad thing to be discouraged. Whole language teachers therefore explicitly and systematically taught new readers the guessing strategy used by poor readers for making errors, and called it fine.

        Goodman's Conception of Reading as a Guessing Game Commits the Fallacy of Reification, or Hypostatization.  In other words, Goodman treats abstract terms ("reconcile the anamolous [sic] situation," assimilation, accommodation) and metaphoric fictions ("searches his memory for…cues," "he checks the recalled perceptual input") as if they were concrete objects or events (Thompson, 1995).

Recall that Goodman's new formulation hinges on rejection of the "common sense" notions that (1) reading involves an almost instantaneous recognition of whole words, or (2) reading involves an almost automatic "perception and identification of letters, words..."  Note that whole word and phonic processes are ordinary, readily observable, mundane actions.  The reader sees and properly or improperly identifies letters and words.  Most observable identification errors have straightforward, ordinary, mundane implications for instruction; e.g., at sounding out words. But Goodman will offer nothing attractive to potential followers unless he conjures a radical shift of reading from the mundane to the esoteric.  Something as commonsensical as mere skill instruction will not do.  Henceforth, reading processes and reading instruction will no longer be easily seeable and teachable.  Instead, reading processes will be located in the mind: reading will involve "an interaction between thought and language."  Goodman now invents a mental apparatus to account for reading skill and error--the psycholinguistic guessing game--and it consists of selecting, deciding, guessing, confirming, rejecting, and refining.

There are two logical problems with Goodman's reified mental guessing game apparatus.  First, in contrast to what we ordinarily expect of a viable scientific account, there is no way to test whether Goodman's hypothesized mental apparatus exists at all---i.e., whether readers in fact perform the elaborate guessing routine--or whether the hypothesized apparatus operates just as Goodman proposes.  After all, many models of thought processes can be generated to account for the same reading behavior--just as demonic possession once provided a coherent account of psychiatric symptoms.

Second, Goodman transforms similes and metaphors (as-if) into objects--thought processes. However, all anyone (with a scientific orientation) can reasonably say about a fluent reader's performance is, "Her eyes scan the words and she speaks them as written."  And all anyone can say about a struggling reader's halting, error-filled performance is, "It is as if she is guessing." 

Yet, Goodman's "scientific" formulation would have us believe that readers (skilled and unskilled) actually see words, select cues, make a guess, check the guess, reject the guess, make another guess, confirm the guess, and then say the word correctly or incorrectly.  If the guessing game is not a convenient fiction enabling Goodman to make sense of reading, but is considered a reality--something really happening--then a reader enacting the psycholinguistic guessing algorithm (propositions 5-20 above) would be carrying on an elaborate internal dialogue, as follows.

"James said...Hmmm, that t h looks like it might be there.  Okay, I'll say there....There lion...Wait... That doesn't work.  Okay, I'll try them...Them lion.... Nope...Maybe its this...This lion...Yeah, that sounds right.  This lion..."

But we rarely see anything like this guessing process.  Even when readers make a high rate of errors, reading is so fast it is hard to imagine that somewhere in their subvocal thinking they perform the mental guess work.  The only thing available to the observer of the above reading sample is the reader saying, "James said, (three-second pause) This lion." 

Which is the more reasonable account of the three-second gap between "said" and "This" (and every other error or pause in a passage)?  (1) The reader naturally (with no instruction) repeatedly enacts multi-step guessing routines in milli-seconds, or (2) The reader simply needs someone to tell her, "That word is this...Spell this.... t h i s...What word?.... this.. Good.  Start the line again...James said, This lion is big."

In other words, Goodman's psycholinguistic apparatus (which, for science, would be considered reified fictions, or hypothetical constructs) is either: (1) incapable of any sort of test; and/or (2) simply impossible as an actual activity in real time.  At best, his psycholinguistic guessing game can only be treated as a metaphor—in which case one asks if a metaphor is the right foundation for nationwide reading assessment and instruction.

Whole Language and Upward Mobility
        Goodman's hypothetical multi-step mental guessing apparatus continues to have strong appeal.  As mentioned, Goodman helped to move reading and reading instruction out of the mundane world of common, observable skills and into the world of esoterica.  Even simple decoding of text was now a complex mental activity involving higher order thought processes such as selecting, testing, confirming, and revising.  Reading instruction would now require special skills giving teachers access to the realm of thought where the hypothesized higher order guessing game was played.  Special courses, textbooks, conferences, and education professors would be needed.

In other words, Goodman was not merely offering an alternative to the phonic centered and word centered approaches.  He was creating an invidious status distinction.  He was offering prestige. This may have been appealing to education professors long known to occupy positions of low status and prestige in the university community, and to school teachers whose long hours, lack of appreciation, and low salary also connoted low status and prestige.  By making reading and reading instruction esoteric processes, Goodman's paper helped foster the idea that traditional reading instruction was only for commonsense-minded technicians interested in observable skill. Whole language teachers and professors would be much more than this; they would be theoreticians--certainly a higher class of people.  This clarifies the facile denigration of systematic instruction, planned practice, teaching formats, field tested materials, scripted lesson plans, mastery tests, and in general accountability by whole language teachers and education professors.  Reading instruction was to be an art; and the reading teacher an artiste.

The "contemplatives" are a hundred times worse: I know of nothing that excites such disgust as this kind of "objective" arm-chair scholar, this kind of scented voluptuary of history, half person, half satyr, perfume by Renan, who betrays immediately with the high falsetto of his applause what he lacks, where he lacks it, where in this case the Fates have applied their cruel shears with, alas, such surgical skill! [Nietzsche. The genealogy of morals. Third essay, section 26]

Miscue Analysis and the Quasi-therapeutic
        As noted earlier, the only empirical evidence that Goodman presents in support of (as examples of) his guessing-game model are reading errors made by children.  Goodman calls these errors "miscues in order to avoid value implications" (p. 127).  For example, the story text reads,

"So, education was good!  I opened the dictionary and picked out a word that sounded good.  'Philosophical'.  I yelled.  Might as well study word meanings first.  'Philosophical: showing calmness and courage in the face of ill fortune. "

What the child read was,

"So, education was good!  I hoped a dictionary and picked out a word that sounds good.  PH  He yelled.  Might as well study what it means.  Phizo  Phiso/soophical : showing calmness and courage in his face of ill fort  future  futshion."

Goodman states, "His expected (i.e., correct. PP) responses mask the process of their attainment (That is, how he read correctly.  PP), but his unexpected responses (i.e., errors, or miscues  PP) have been achieved through the same process, albeit less successfully applied" (p. 127). 

This is a very interesting statement.  Goodman is saying that when readers are fluent, we do not see how they do it; i.e., we do not see any guessing game.  It is only when they err that we can make a case for guessing.  And then, with no rationale at all, Goodman states that reading well and making errors are done via the same process.  How could he possibly know that?

But as to incorrect reading itself, Goodman still has no direct, empirical evidence of guessing or any other activity in the elaborate guessing game apparatus.  He does not ask readers to, for example, say outloud what they are doing as they try to read.  All he has are interpretations of alleged covert guessing processes.  Goodman's interpretations (miscue analysis) reveal that he is willing to avoid the most obvious interpretation of errors in favor of the guessing hypothesis.  For example, Goodman says, "The substitution of hoped for opened could again be regarded as careless or imprecise identification of letters.  But if we dig beyond this common sense explanation, we find (a) both are verbs (b) the words have key graphic similarities.  Further, there may be evidence of the reader's bilingual French-Canadian background here, as there is in subsequent miscues (harms for arms; shuckled for chuckled, shoose for choose, shair for chair)" (p. 128).

[Mere delerium.]

Despite Goodman's efforts to make these errors fodder for armchair psychoanalysis, these errors are nothing more than examples of the "imprecise identification of letters"--and this imprecision rests very much on the child's lack of sufficient instruction on how to sound out familiar and unfamiliar words based on knowledge of sound/symbol correspondence. Goodman goes out of his way to avoid the obvious account of reading errors--the child has not been taught word attack skills--so that Goodman can "dig beyond" the obvious and provide a more interesting guessing game interpretation for which there is not a shred of direct evidence--not when persons read well and not even when they make errors.

In summary, Goodman uses miscues as a resource for making interpretations about thought processes in a way that suits his guessing game model. There is nothing in the miscues themselves that suggests anything about thought processes.  But there is everything in the miscues that points directly at poor instruction.  Ironically, if Goodman's approach were in fact scientific, he would provide a panel of impartial observers with a set of miscue examples and ask the panel to make sense of each error or miscue, and then compare his interpretation with theirs.  In this way he could determine the reliability of his interpretations.

Goodman's Entire Guessing Game Model Commits the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent.
        Goodman began his paper with the claim that his model would be an example of science--not mere common sense.  However, his argument commits perhaps the most fundamental error that the scientific method is devised to avoid; namely, the fallacy of affirming the consequent.  This fallacy can be depicted as follows.

          If P, then  Q
          Q  (Affirming the consequent)
          _____________________________
          Therefore P

 

For example,

          If there is frustration, then there will be aggression.
          There is aggression.
          ____________________________
          Therefore, there was frustration.

The logical problem is that aggression may be the result of many things besides frustration.  That is why scientific researchers try to identify alternative explanations (e.g., models of aggressive behavior, reinforcement for aggressive behavior, a history of physical abuse) and see if these alternatives can be disproved--leaving the original proposition (If frustration, then aggression) intact for the time being.

Goodman's argument can be summarized as follows.

           If reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game, then readers will make certain kinds of errors--miscues.
           Readers do make these kinds of errors--miscues.
          _____________________________________________
          Therefore, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game.

Seductive, isn't it?  But is there NO other reason (besides reading being a guessing game) why readers make guessing errors?  Let's see.

I have pointed out that miscues themselves are not direct evidence of any mental guessing game activity.  Goodman has simply interpreted them that way.  And there is  no way to "dig" into anyone's thought processes to determine whether Goodman is right or wrong.  Even so, there are other explanations for these miscues besides an hypothesized mental guessing game. 

The strongest candidate alternative is poor instruction.  At least that is a plausible rival explanation (Hempenstall, 1999).  A student makes half a dozen errors trying to sound out "philosophical" because he was not taught exactly how to sound it out.  He is not firm on each letter/sound combination; he is not firm on sounding out a letter or blend, holding the sound and scanning the word for the next letter or blend.  He says hoped" instead of "opened" because, again, he is not firm on the sounding out strategy, and because he has not had a teacher who systematically juxtaposed similar looking words--hoped/opened--and demonstrated again and again that they are sounded out differently.

In summary, it may be that many reading errors are not the result of guessing--as some sort of natural process--but are taught.  A student reads a passage and says "fort" rather than "fortune."  The teacher simply (and improperly) tells the student, "fortune."  The student repeats "fortune" and goes on with the passage--never really learning to sound out the difficult word.  Predictably, when the student sees "fortune" again, she says "fort"--because that is what she has "practiced" so many times before.  Or, when the student says "fort" rather than "fortune," the whole language teacher tells the student to think of a word that might go there--in other words, the teacher encourages guessing. The student casts about and tries "future" and "futshion."  Predictably, when the student runs into "philosophical," the student will not sound out the word, but will do as she was taught--she will cast about for likely possibilities--"phizzo," "physical," "physicacol."  In other words, the student's errors do not reflect a natural guessing game apparatus.  They are direct effects of explicit (mal)instruction on guessing and failure to receive proper instruction on how to sound out words.

The scientific test of the above rival hypothesis--Errors represent how students are mistaught; they do not represent an innate guessing game--is relatively easy to perform.  Identify the sorts of errors made by students taught with whole language vs. the sorts of errors made by students taught with more focused instruction in each reading skill, in which errors are not corrected by having students guess but by firming up the sound-it-out strategy.  The prediction is that students who are taught to guess (and who do not know when a guess is correct), will make many more errors.

                                      Summary

Kenneth Goodman's 1967 article helped to foster the whole language movement, which for several decades has been the predominant approach to reading instruction in many schools of education, school districts, and states.  However, recent experimental research has shown that many of the defining (and allegedly revolutionary) design features of whole language (e.g., attempting to teach elemental reading skills--such as phonemic awareness, sound/symbol correspondence, word identification, and spelling--in the context of complex reading and writing activities that require these very skills) are at odds with what is known about effective instruction.  In addition, evaluation research shows that whole language is often less effective than its advocates claim, and is specifically less effective than field-tested curricula that provide systematic, explicit, comprehensive, precisely planned and logically progressive instruction on all of the elemental and complex skills in reading.

We have examined the "viable" and "scientific" model of reading proposed by Kenneth Goodman--a model that has guided both the methods used in whole language (e.g., implicit, as-needed instruction; miscue analysis) and the ways whole language advocates legitimize and valorize their actions.  The examination of Goodman's "psycholinguistic guessing game" model revealed that Goodman:

1. Provides no data that support his presumption that there is any such guessing game apparatus.  This may be because the guessing game is nothing but a metaphor.

2. Uses a small and selective sample of reading behavior (errors, or "miscues") as evidence that readers use the psycholinguistic guessing game.

3. Interprets these errors in a way that supports the guessing game model, but fails to consider plausible alternative interpretations and offers no evidence of inter-observer reliability of his interpretations.  [See Hempenstall (1999) for a reasoned and extensive critique of miscue analysis.]

4. Commits the fallacy of hasty generalization by asserting that his interpretations of some readers' guessing errors imply that all readers use the guessing apparatus.

5. Commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent when he reasons that errors signify the existence of a psycholinguistic guessing apparatus, when (and more reasonably) errors signify poor instruction.

In summary, the whole language cult movement--with all of its publications, assessment instruments and devices, conferences and organizations, college courses, classroom methods, and disastrous consequences for many students--rests on a mere metaphor (the psycholinguistic guessing game) supported by assorted logical fallacies. 

An interesting sociological question is, What cultural circumstances disposed so many education students, administrators, college professors, boards of education, and veteran teachers to so easily and so thoroughly accept Goodman's psycholinguistic guess game as a premise for their reading curricula?

                              References

Daniels, H., Zemelman, S., & Bizar, M. (2000). Whole language works: Sixty years of research.  Educational Leadership, 57, 2, 32-37.

Chapman, J.W., Tunmer, W.E., & Prochnow, J.E. (1999).  Success in Reading Recovery depends on the development of phonological processing skills.  The Plains, VA:  The National Right to Read Foundation. Online at http://www.nrrf.org/rr_study_chapman.htm

Fletcher, J.M., & Lyon, G.R. (1998).  Reading: A research-based approach.  In W.M. Evers (Ed.), What's gone wrong in America's classrooms (p. 40-90). Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

Foorman, B.R., Francis, D.J., Fletcher, J.M., Schatschneider, C., and Mehta, P.  (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing reading failure in at-risk children.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 37-55.

Goodman, K. (1967).  Reading: A psycholinguistic guess game. Journal of the Reading Specialist, May, 126-135.

Goodman, K. (1976).  Manifesto for a reading revolution. In F.V. Gollasch.  Language and literacy: The selected writings of Kenneth S. Goodman (1986, pp. 231-241).  London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Goodman, K. (1986).  What's whole in whole language. Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann Educational Books.

Gough, P. (1993). The beginning of decoding.  Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 181-192.

Hempenstall, K. (1999). Miscue analysis: A critique. Effective School Practices, 17(3), 85-93.

Hiebert, E.H. (1995).  Reading Recovery in the United States: What differences does it make to an age cohort?  Educational Researcher, 23, 9, 15-25.

Liberman, A.M. (1999).   The reading researcher and the reading teacher need the right theory of speech.  Scientific Studies of Reading, 3, 95-111.

Moats, L.C. (2000).  Whole language lives on:  The illusion of "balanced" reading instruction.  Washington, DC:  Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.  Online at http://www.edexcellence.net/library/wholelang/moats.html#foreword

National Reading Panel. (2000).  Teaching children to read. National Institute of Child Health and Development.  Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services.

Pappas, C.C., & Pettegrew, B.S. (1998).  The role of genre in the psycholinguistic guessing game of reading.  Language Arts, 75, 1, 36-44.

Powell, D., & Hornsby, D. (1993). Learning phonics and spelling in a whole language classroom. New York:  Scholastic Professional Books.

San Diego Unified School District (1999).  Reading Recovery Research Project. Office of the Board of Education:  San Diego, CA.  Online at http://ww.nrrf.org_sd/rrrp.htm

Smith, F. (1985).  Reading without nonsense. New York: Teachers College Press.

Stahl, S., McKenna, M.C., Pagnucco, J.R. (1994).  The effects of whole instruction: An update and reappraisal.  Educational Psychologist, 29, 4, 175-185.

Thompson, L.J. (1995).  Habits of the mind.  New York: University Press of America.

 

A Whole Language Catalogue of the Grotesque

   
Jacques Martel's series on the immortal Greek hoplite, here
http://lahorde.deviantart.com/store/

The red cloak (left) suggests Spartan.  The hoplite emerges from the tomb to fight again (right).

Yielding to requests from his Dear Readers to deliver another helping of flapdoodle on "The elegant simplicity of effective instruction," Professor Plum says, Okie dokie.  Howsomever, he can't just fling pie across the table.  He has to design instruction on instruction with the same care as he would design instruction on reading, math, history, or shoe lace maintenance.

In other words, gimme a few days.

In the meantime (in between time, ain't we got fun?), Readers may simultaneously amuse and edify themselves with this post--which organizes an assortment of whole language drivel into sets.

After we do Part II. (in a day or so) on effective instruction, we will return to hole drainage and examine Kenneth Goodman's seminal paper, "Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game,"  which (had he been the least bit concerned with truth in advertising) would have been called "It Just Doesn't Get Any Stupider ThanThis."

A Whole Language Catalogue of the Grotesque

 The founders of whole language (e.g., Kenneth Goodman, Frank Smith) asserted in the late 1960's that their so-called revolutionary approach to reading was a "scientific" alternative to then existing approaches; e.g., instruction stressing essential skills such as decoding words using knowledge of sound-symbol correspondence.  However, early papers that laid the groundwork for the whole language cult movement reveal that whole language does not at all rest on a scientific way of thinking.

 In fact, the revolutionary whole language conception of reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game" is a bizarre fantasy--a fantasy that managed to catch on (and make many thousands of children illiterate) because students in schools of education naively trusted their "literacy" professors--who were more interested in getting tenure, making a reputation, and selling themselves as innovators and self-inflating champions of social justice than they were at making sure new teachers (1) are guided by scientific research (which does not support whole language) and (2) know exactly how to teach reading effectively. 

In some fields (medicine, law, engineering) this combination of self-aggrandizement, immorality, and ineptitude is called malpractice, fraud, and criminal negligence.  In education, it is called "philosophical differences" and "academic freedom." Apparently, school children and new teachers are supposed to pay for the academic freedom of education professors.

Following are quotations from leaders in whole language--along with commentary [in brackets].  Many quotations have been supplied by Dr. Kerry Hempenstall, whose excellent publications can be found at http://www.rmit.edu.au/departments/ps/staffpgs/hempens.htm.

 Without exception, the quotations assert ideas that are false, contrary to scientific research, and pernicious in their destructive effects on children. The quotations show a relentless (and a near hysterical) rejection of the commonsense (and research-supported) ideas that

1. Children generally need a lot of help learning hard skills.

2. The job of teachers is to teach.

3. Most children need to be taught systematically and directly which sounds go with which letters, so that children can accurately and easily "decode" words rather than simply guess at them. 

Yet, the consistency with which whole languagists reject common sense and decades of experimental research about the importance of explicit and systematic (rather than occasional and poorly designed) "phonics" instruction" is instructive.  It reveals the duplicity in recent claims that whole language is "balanced" instruction. In fact, the word "balance" is a rhetorical device used to make it appear as if whole language were consistent with the preponderance of scientific research, is not harmful to children, and is not an insular cult.   [See Louisa Cook Moats on "The illusion of balanced reading instruction," at http://www.edexcellence.net/library/wholelang/moats.html.]

I. Learning to Read is as Easy as Learning a Language.  There is No Need for Systematic Instruction.

1.  "Literacy learning proceeds naturally if the environment supports young children's experimentation with print.'' Schickendanz, J. A. (1986). More than the ABC's: The early stages of reading and writing. Washington, DC: NAEYC.

[This is one of many trite statements that whole languagists try to elevate to the level of grand theory to support a mountain of nonsensical propositions and pernicious "practices."  What exactly would experimentation with print look like? Turning books this way and that? Copying letters? Making up letters?  Are these examples of literacy learning or are they pre-literacy play that, without instruction, leads straight to illiteracy?]

2.  "Children must develop reading strategies by and for themselves." (p.178) Weaver, C. (1988). Reading process and practice. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

[This is the basic constructivist mantra about "learners" discovering knowledge on their own.  Advocates of this notion would never allow physicians to discover brain surgery strategies by operating on advocates' children.  They would never dive out of an airplane in order to discover the strategy for opening a parachute.  They would never toss their children into a rip current to allow their children to discover the strategy for not drowning.  But somehow it is fine to let other people's children discover how to read--which, in the long run, means to discover what life is like when you are illiterate.]

3.  "All proficient readers have acquired an implicit knowledge of how to read, but this knowledge has been developed through the practice of reading, not through anything that is taught at school." Smith, F. (1973). Psychology and reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

[It is hard to tell if this is to be taken seriously.  How exactly does a person (who does not know how to read) learn to read by reading?  This would appear to be a logical impossibility.  Yet, making instructional claims that are logically absurd is nothing new in whole language.  Besides, does anyone suggest that children learn to read by, for example, dancing or by making sock puppets?  And how is "the practice of reading" not something taught in school?]

4.  "When language (oral or written) is an integral part of functioning of a community and is used around and
with neophytes, it is learned 'incidentally.'"  Artwergen, B., Edelsky, C. & Flores, B. (1987). Whole language: What's new? Reading Teacher 41, 144-154.

[This is an example of airy whole language twaddle that barely rises to the level of a wish passed off as if it were a universal law of anthropology.  Of course it is true for some children. But without systematic instruction, many children remain illiterate. What sort of morality allows writers to make such hyperbolic claims that are akin to sales pitches at medicine shows?]

5.  "Learning is continuous, spontaneous, and effortless, requiring no particular attention, conscious motivation, or specific reinforcement." (p. 432) Smith, F. (1992). Learning to read: The never-ending debate. Phi Delta Kappan, 74, 432-441.

[This statement is true if you are talking about sucking a lollipop. But as soon as you try to walk, ride a bike, read, learn a second language, or calculate the second derivative, you find that learning is nothing like Smith's preposterous statement.]

6.  "Saying that we are determined to teach every child to read does not mean that we will teach every child to read.'' (p.441) Smith, F. (1992). Learning to read: the never-ending debate. Phi Delta Kappan, 74, 432-441.

[Too bad that this caveat is buried in whole language writing.  If it were the first line, any rational teacher would say "No, thanks, I believe I'll pass," and any right-thinking parent would call a lawyer.]

7.  "The best we can do ... is ... to ensure that, if not every child lives up to our hopes, there is a minimum of guilt and anguish on the part of teachers, students, and parents." (p.441)  Smith, F. (1992). Learning to read: the never-ending debate. Phi Delta Kappan, 74, 432-441.

[Does this even require comment?  The best the whole languagist can do is to ensure that he or she does not feel badly about making children illiterate?!  Nothing about examining whole language to see how it damages children and then scrapping it.  Just ensure that you feel no anguish. Can you imagine this kind of talk in medicine?  A doctor says, "Well, I do kill half my patients, but I manage not to feel too much guilt and anguish. You might say I am self-actualizing."]

8.  "Methods can never ensure that children learn to read. .... It is the relationships that exist within the classroom that matter. ... Tests are not required to find out whether children are learning." (p.440) Smith, F. (1992). Learning to read: The never-ending debate. Phi Delta Kappan, 74, 432-441.

[This appears to be the basis for the claim that no method is needed to teach reading. And no method is exactly what whole language provides--which is why so many new teachers fresh from schools of education say, "I have no idea how to teach kids to read.  I know how to write a literacy philosophy, but not how to teach." ]

9.  "The child is already programmed to learn to read." Smith, F. (1973). Psychology and reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

[Another bit of sediment from the whole language bilge bucket.  This appeal to "naturalism" is apparently supposed to obviate the need to teach children to read because, being programmed to read, they will teach themselves. How then account for illiteracy? It must be the kids' fault--or maybe their parents' fault.]

10.  "Children can develop and use an intuitive knowledge of letter-sound correspondences [without] any phonics instruction [or] without deliberate instruction from adults." (p. 86) Weaver, C. (1980). Psycholinguistics and reading. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.

[What exactly would intuitive knowledge of letter-sound correspondence be? Does m look like it says /m/? How does a person intuit what the words "stupid idiot" sound like? And what does it mean to say that children "can develop and use..."? The question is How many ever do? But whole languagists never answer this question, because it would show that whole language does not work anything like as well as is claimed.  In other words, No data, no responsibility, no blame = business (tenure, consulting gigs, publications, control over education schools) as usual.]

11.  "We cannot teach another person directly; we can only facilitate his learning."  Rogers, C. (1961). On becoming a person. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

[No doubt Rogers had a lot of data to support this delusional statement. Apparently Rogers was not up to the idea that a teacher can facilitate learning by teaching some things directly.  As with latter-day whole languagists, Rogers may have been more comfortable with binary oppositions. Either x or y but not both."  This is called simpleminded.]

II. Skilled Readers Do Not Decode Words (See and Read the Letters). They Guess, Using Contextual Cues.

12.  "Phonics is incompatible with a whole language perspective on reading and therefore is rejected." Watson, D. (1989). Defining & describing whole language. Elementary School Journal, 90, 129-142.

[This is a fine example of whole language dogma. You don't reject something because the data say it does not work.  You reject something because is is incompatible with a set of beliefs (impervious to criticism) that are organized into a cult. And yet whole languagists try to call what they do science. So did the architects of the soviet system of economics.]

13.  "Reading without guessing is not reading at all."  Smith, F. (1973). Psychology and reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

[I would ask the reader if he or she is guessing at the words he or she is reading now--or is it feeding how, or bleeding cow, or dreading wow? Smith's arrogant assertion is a ploy designed to bolster the injunction against teaching children to decode words through knowledge of letter-sound correspondence.  We wonder just how much guessing is a child supposed to do before it is called reading?  "Look at Cherie. She is guessing at every single word.  She's a real reader.  But look at Debra.  No guessing at all.  She knows exactly what every words says.  That's not reading!" So stupid.]

14.  "Proficient readers seem unconsciously to use initial letters plus prior knowledge and context to predict what a word might be, before focusing on more of the word or the following context to confirm or correct." Weaver, C.  (Phonics in whole language classrooms) at: http://kidsource.com/kidsource/content2/Phonics.html

[Does Weaver seriously want to construct an approach to reading instruction based on what children "seem" to do? Is the whole languagist really capable of mind-reading as well--somehow knowing whether children focus only on the first letter or rapidly scan the whole word and say it fast? If whole languagists really can read children's minds--which may be true because they say they do not need test data to tell if children can read--then they ought to offer additional services to schools--services such as channeling Carl Rogers.  The point is, How does anyone know what other people are doing unconsciously?]

15.  “The student:  Attends to the meaning of what is read rather than focusing on figuring out words.   Uses context, pictures, syntax, and structural analysis clues to predict meaning of unknown words.   Uses fix-it strategies (predicts, uses pictorial cues,asks a friend, skips the word, substitutes another meaningful word). Oklahoma State Department of Education (1992). Reading learner outcomes. In the Oklahoma State Competencies,
Grade One, pp.15-22. [Online]. Available: http://www.ourcivilisation.com/dumb/dumb3.htm

[The good people at the Oklahoma State D.O.E. attempt to provide a rational for not teaching students to decode words by using knowledge of sound-symbol correspondence.  The glaring logical fault, however--glaring to anyone except the good people at the Oklahoma State D.O.E.--is that the statement applies to poor readers.  It is nice to know that the good people at the Oklahoma State D.O.E. want teachers to help children to use the inefficient, error-filled, frustrating, and basically inept methods used by struggling readers; i.e., children who were earlier mistaught by whole language. This is an example of the reproduction of illiteracy from one generation to the next--as the past generation's reading incompetence is reinterpreted as competence, and is then presented to teachers as a model of how to teach. This also helps to ensure a steady supply of struggling first graders for Reading Recovery. Let us recall that Orwell's 1984 referred to the time that whole language--and whole language newspeak--came to power.]

16.  "It is easier for a reader to remember the unique appearance and pronunciation of a whole word like 'photograph' than to remember the unique pronunciations of meaningless syllables and spelling units" (p.146) Smith, F. (1985). Reading without nonsense: Making sense of reading. New York: Teachers College Press.

[Smith must be insensitive to irony.  Surely he is not referring to his own book when he writes about reading without nonsense.  Of course it is easier to remember one word by sight than to learn the sounds that go with each letter.  What Smith neglects to tell the reader is that if a child memorizes ten words, the child can read only ten words, but if the child learns the sounds of ten letters, the child will be able to read 350 three-sound words, 4,320 four-sound words, and 21,650 five-sound words.  Moreover, if the child merely memorizes (but cannot sound out) "photograph," what is the child likely to "read" when the child bumps into "phosphate," "phonograph," and "phony ass?"]

17.  "One word in five can be completely eliminated from most English texts with scarcely any effect on its overall comprehensibility." (p.79)  Smith, F. (1973). Psychology and reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

[And the implication is....?  Therefore, let's get rid of 20 percent of the words in Shakespeare?  Or, let's try that with Smith's own statement and see if it has scarcely any effect on its comprehensibility.  "One can be completely eliminated from most with any effect on its overall comprehensibility." Yes, that means the same thing.]

III. Phonics Instruction is Not Needed.  In fact, it is Bad. 

18.  "Sounding out a word is a cumbersome, time-consuming, and unnecessary activity.  By using context, we can identify words with only minimal attention to grapho/phonemic cues. The message then seems clear: we should help children learn to use context first." Weaver, C. (1988). Reading process & practice: From socio-psycholinguistics to whole language. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

[Teachers who wish to ensure that most of their students remain illiterate should follow Weaver's orders.  By this statement, Weaver shows clearly that the whole language claim of balanced reading is simply a lie. Note that Weaver presents no data to support her bogus claim about sounding out words--there are no such data--but from her groundless and merely dogmatic statement she draws a "message."  This nonrational process of finding messages in a mess of verbiage is akin to predicting the future from sheep guts.  If it is a message, it is not from this or any other known world.  But, again, we see that whole languagists have special powers.]

19.  "Matching letters with sounds is a flat-earth view of the world, one that rejects modern science about reading."  (p. 371)  Goodman, K. S. (1986). What's whole in whole language.  Richmond   Hill, Ontario: Scholastic.

[Goodman's statement wins the prize for irony and self-delusion--a sort of biathlon.  Whole language is to modern science as throwing trash at a wall is to art, as Da Da is to poetry, as pounding a piano with a salami is to music.  But let us remember that Goodman was working for a revolution in reading instruction--a revolution (as with other revolutions) that requires followers to become maximally stupid so that they do not detect the essential madness in their leaders' flatulent eructations. "The man must be a prophet!  He sounds completely insane!"]

20.  "Reading by 'phonics' is demonstrably impossible (ask any computer)." Smith, J. (1986). Essays into literacy.  Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

[With this line, Smith clearly demonstrates that he may know as little about computers as he does about reading--a two-for-one deal. What is in fact impossible to demonstrate is anything but sight reading and guessing in kids who know nothing about phonics--i.e., which sounds go with which letters.  Throwing in the cute comment about computers may be Smith's way of diverting attention from the fact that good readers rapidly decode words on the basis of phonics knowledge.]

21.  "In my view, reading is not a matter of decoding letters to sound but of bringing meaning to print." Smith, J. (1986). Essays into literacy.  Exeter, NH: Heinemann.

[This is a common ploy in whole language: create a false dichotomy that makes one "side" look ridiculous (teaching decoding) and therefore the other side (teaching reading for meaning--allegedly whole language) looks like a star.  However, what Smith (no doubt accidentally) fails to say is that: (1) Good teachers teach both decoding and reading for meaning; and (2) It is demonstrably impossible to "bring meaning to print" unless you already know how to read what the words say. Mr. Smith, as with so many whole language gurus and their followers, is apparently unaware of the logical absurdities in their "philosophy."]

 22.  "English is spelled so unpredictably that there is no way of predicting when a particular spelling correspondence applies" (p. 53) Smith, F. (1985). Reading. New   York: Cambridge University Press.

[How often do readers predict what words say?  What would that even look like? "I predict that w h e n says /when/." And then the reader waits around for the word on the page to start making sounds to see if the prediction is borne out?  So stupid it makes your nose run.  Readers simply read--correctly (i.e., the way other competent readers read)--or incorrectly.  They read incorrectly when they don't know what sounds go with what letters--i.e., when they were mistaught by whole language.]

23.  "Phonics, which means teaching a set of spelling to sound correspondence rules that permit the decoding of written language into speech, just does not work."  Smith, F. (1985). Reading without nonsense (2nd. Ed). New York: Teachers College Press.

[When you read enough whole language guff, you begin to induce a rule about what they are up to.  The rule is something like, "Say the most outrageous things--that are the absolute opposite of obvious fact--and you can be sure that you will mystify your audience."... "He must be in contact with Higher Powers, because he sounds utterly demented."  Notice the smug self-confidence that oozes from the phrase, "just does not work," as if there were any data to back it up--and of course there are no data.]

24.  "Carefully controlled vocabulary and decontextualised phonics instruction are incompatible with meaningful authentic texts."  Goodman, K. S. (1989). Whole language research: Foundations and development. The Elementary School Journal, 90, 208-221.

[This is a type of illogic called "straw man." Obviously, if you teach only letter-sound correspondence it will become pretty meaningless.  Just as it would become pretty meaningless if you only taught the atomic weights of the elements and never taught students to use this knowledge in doing experiments.  But of course any teacher with a minimum of brain tissue would be using phonics instruction (a little each day) as a means to an end--namely, having students accurately read and understand text. But whole language ideologues have to create a straw man (endless phonics instruction) or else they have no place to stand as self-created revolutionaries and adversaries of explicit phonics instruction..]

25.  "To the fluent reader the alphabetic principle is completely irrelevant. He identifies every word (if he identifies words at all) as an ideogram." (p.124)  Smith, F. (1973). Psycholinguistics and reading. New York: Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston.

[Apparently, Smith made a typo at an important spot.  He must have meant to write, "To the struggling reader mistaught with whole language, the alphabetic principle..."  Because besides students who do not know what sounds letters make, the only other readers on this planet who memorize words from the shape of words are readers of Chinese, Japanese, and a few other languages that use pictures for words.  But readers of alphabetic writing systems--not yet damaged by whole language nonsense--generally use the alphabet.  That's pretty much what it's for.]

26.  "We might offer students some phonics hints at an appropriate moment when they are writing and aren't sure how to spell something." Newman, J.M., & Church, S.M. (1991). Myths of whole language. The Reading Teacher, 44, 20-26.

[It's probably a great comfort to struggling readers to know that their "facilitators" are going to give a few hints (so that students can continue to struggle and guess) when their facilitators could just as easily have said, "That sound is sss."  But no, to the whole language cult diehard, actual information would thwart the struggling reader's path to developmentally appropriate illiteracy.  Moreover, to give sound information, rather than hints, makes the whole language teacher a mere teacher, rather than some kind of Rogerian demi-god therapist and artiste who occasionally deigns to give suffering clients a hint or two.  The most highly developed skill of the whole language con artist is disguising his or her essentially immoral "project" behind a curtain of high sounding bunk.]

27.  "Carefully controlled vocabulary and decontextualised phonics instruction are incompatible with meaningful authentic texts."  Goodman, K. S. (1989). Whole language is whole: A response to Heymsfeld. Educational Leadership, 69-70.

[Apparently, Goodman has difficulty separating instruction from application of skill.  Of course if a teacher is working on "phonics" ("This sound is /m/") it would be incompatible with reading authentic texts—or any texts--just as making a sandwich and at the same time eating the sandwich are incompatible.  Mr. Goodman cannot admit that instruction (learning to read) is separable from application (reading) because whole language is based on the nutty idea that children learn to read without explicit instruction in elementary reading skills. In whole language fantasy land, children learn to read while they are reading—which makes as much sense (and is about as immoral) as saying that surgeons will learn to do surgery while they are operating on your children.]

28.  "The worst readers are those who try to sound out unfamiliar words according to the rules of phonics." (p.438) Smith, F. (1992). Learning to read: the never-ending debate. Phi Delta Kappan, 74, 432-441.

[Note that Mr. Smith presents no data for this absurd statement.  In fact, readers who guess at words are the worst readers—indeed, they are not even reading.]

29.  "Early in our miscue research, we concluded…That a story is easier to read than a page, a page easier to read than a paragraph, a paragraph easier than a sentence, a sentence easier than a word, and a word easier than a letter. Our research continues to support this conclusion and we believe it to be true…" Goodman, K. & Goodman, Y. (1981). Twenty questions about teaching language. Educational Leadership, 38, 437-442.

[These lines have a nice rhythm--and they make sense if you have lost your mind.  The sane person wants to know how a child who cannot easily read a letter is able easily to read a word (which consists entirely of letters); how a child who cannot easily read a word is able easily to read a sentence (which consists entirely of words); how a child who cannot easily read a sentence is able easily to read a paragraph (which consists entirely of sentences); and how a child who cannot easily read a paragraph is able easily to read a story.  One wonders what kind of "research" would support the Goodmans' backwards-land belief.  Must be from another world.]

IV. Phonemic Awareness and the Alphabetic Principle are Insignificant.

30.  “The art of becoming a fluent reader lies in learning to rely less and less on information from the eyes.” Smith, F. (1975). Comprehension & learning: A conceptual framework for teachers. New York: Richard C. Owen.

[One wonders where children with sight get their information when reading, if not from what they see on the page.  Maybe—generalizing from Goodman's fantasy about reading being a guessing game—children stare into space and imagine what is on the page.  Or maybe they listen real hard to what the letters on the page are saying.]

31.  "Accuracy, correctly naming or identifying each word or word part in a graphic sequence, is not necessary for effective reading since the reader can get the meaning without accurate word identification. Furthermore, readers who strive for accuracy are likely to be inefficient" (p.826) Goodman, K. S. (1974, Sept). Effective teachers of reading know language and children. Elementary English, 51, 823-828.

[This is another example of whole languagists concocting utter rubbish in order to sell their failed methods.  In fact, readers who are taught—by whole language—to guess at words are inefficient readers—indeed, they are disabled readers--because they are often wrong.  They mistake lion and lying, this and these, the and there, car and can, etc.  Obviously, accurate reading is necessary for getting the meaning.  "The car is fast" does not mean the same thing as "The can is fat."  And "Caution. Toxic fumes"  does not mean the same thing as "Caution. Toxic tunes."  And the error is costly.]

32.  "It has become crystal clear to me--and it has taken about ten years to come to this understanding--that children learn phonics best after they can already read.  I am convinced that the reason our good readers are good at phonics is that in their being able to read they can intuitively make sense of phonics" (p. 44) Routman, R. (1994). Invitations. Portsmouth, NH : Heinemann.

[Routman makes the same logical error as Goodman and Smith.  Students are alleged to learn phonics—that is, which sounds are made by which letters—after they have learned to read.  This is logically impossible, because reading means (among other things) saying the sounds made by the letters.  What would "reading" look like if a child did not know that m says /m/ and a says /a/?  Is that what any sane person calls reading?]

33.  “Breaking whole language into bite-size, abstract little pieces, words, syllables, and isolated sounds makes learning to read more difficult.” Goodman, K.S. (1986). What's whole in whole language. Richmond Hill, Ontario: Scholastic.

[This is exactly the opposite of what serious research—for about 100 years—says.  It is easier to ride a bike if you first learn how to move your legs and use your hands to hold on.  It is easier to learn to swim if you first learn how to kick and paddle and breathe.  It is harder to learn to skydive if you do not know the elementary skills.  In fact, you will die before you learn--just as many kids who get whole language become illiterate because they don't know the elementary skills of reading.]

V. Scientific (Controlled, Quantitative) Research and Accountability Are Unnecessary. 

34.  "It seems futile to try to demonstrate superiority of one teaching method over another by empirical research." (p.220) Weaver, C. (1988). Reading: Progress and practice. Portsmouth, NJ: Heinemann.

[It is not at all futile.  It has been done many times, and whole language is usually shown to be far inferior to explicit instruction that focuses first on the elements of reading.  However, if Weaver had gotten enough people to believe it is futile, then no one would know how bad whole language is.]

35.  "Only one kind of research has anything useful to say about literacy, and that is ethnographic or naturalistic research." (p. 356) Smith, K. (1989). Overselling literacy. Phi Delta Kappan, 70, 353-359.

[This is surely a self-serving statement—because ethnographic research (uncontrolled and not subject to reliability checks)—can be made to provide data for any conclusions you want.  Only quantitative, experimental research can pit one approach against another, and tell how much children learned and how fast they learned it.  But whole languagists do not want these kinds of data available because these data show that whole language is inferior to explicit instruction.]

36.  "(Teachers are) wise to the often tortuous attempts of educational, psychological, and cognitive researchers to cloak themselves in the sometimes ill-fitting garb of 'science.'"  Zemelman, S., Daniels, H., & Bizar, M. (1999, March). Sixty years of reading research -- But who's listening? Phi Delta Kappan. [Online.] Available: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kzem9903.htm

[In fact, whole languagists are the ones who clothe their nonsensical "theories" and bizarre instructional methods in the garb of science—which, to them, means a few field notes ("ethnographic research"). Of course they don't like serious research—just as new age "healers" don't like experimental research—because it makes it clear to consumers that they are frauds.]

37.  "In my inaugural [Convention] address I called for a greater separation between school and state and the emancipation of education from the arbitrariness of political pressures.  I advanced the idea that schools, like religion and the press, needed the protection of something like a Constitutional amendment to keep education free of interference in matters of materials, methods, and curriculum from the winds of political change and the passing hysterias of public opinion." (NCTE president, Sheridan Blau) National Council of Teachers of English. (1999). Elementary school practices. [On-Line]. Available at http://ncte.org

[Blau fails to point out that the only reason the "state" got into the education business is to protect the public from fads—such as whole language—that have injured so many children.  This is no different from the state protecting citizens from poison passed off as medicine.]
 
VI. Don't Correct Errors.  Don't Ensure Mastery of Fundamentals.

38.  "The first alternative and preference is - to skip over the puzzling word.  The second alternative is to guess what the unknown word might be. And the final and least preferred alternative is to sound the word out. Phonics, in other words, comes last."  Smith, F. (1999). Why systematic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction constitute an educational hazard.  Language Arts, 77, 150-155.

[Let's try this in medicine.  The first alternative—when you make an error--is to skip over it.  The second alternative is to guess at what you should do.  And the last and least preferred alternative is to do the procedure carefully step by step.  In other words, Smith tells teachers exactly how to ensure that children make the most errors possible; never learn that they are errors (just skip over them); and only as a last resort, do it right—say the sounds of the letters.  For whole language, up is down, false is true, and stupidity is wisdom.  Note that there was not one shred of evidence—and there is still not one shred of evidence—to support Smith's assertion that sounding out words is the least preferred and should be the last method used.  In fact, the research clearly says that sounding out unfamiliar words is the most preferred thing to do.  In other words, the founders of whole language simply made the whole thing up.]

39.  "Good spelling is merely a convenience.  … There are some people like secretaries, who need to be accurate, but usually even they can use a word processor with a good spelling check." Gentry, J.R. (1987). Spel . . . is a four-letter word. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

[Yes, good spelling is merely a convenience if you want society to become dumber and dumber and dumber.  Why learn math; calculators can do it? Why read history books; just get the Cliff Notes?  It is amazing how far into fantasy land whole languagists go to preserve their idiotic approach.]
 
VII. In the Absence of Logic, Scientific Evidence, and Moral Responsibility, Attack Your Critics.

40.  " … the interlocking directorate of the right-wing back-to-basics movement: John Saxon, Chester Finn, William Bennett, Diane Ravitch, Jeanne Chall, Charles Sykes." Zemelman, S., Daniels, H., & Bizar, M. (1999, March). Sixty years of reading research -- But who's listening? Phi Delta Kappan. [Online.]
Available: http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kzem9903.htm

[This is a common form of argument in whole language.  Simply insult critics—but provide no evidence to support the insult.  This is like charlatan "healers" who attack real physicians.]

41.  "It (direct instruction) is a scripted pedagogy for producing compliant, conformist, competitive students and adults." Coles, G. (1998, Dec. 2). No end to the reading wars. Education Week. [Online]. Available:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/vol-18/14coles.h18.

 

At what point is it mealy-mouthed cowardice to excuse the arrogant, dogmatic, relentless, and self-satisfied stupidity revealed in the above quotations as being merely "misinformed," or "presenting one side," or "passionately committed,"  or "a bit behind on the literature"? 

When do sanity and morality demand that we call this nonsense and these wack-job gurus and their disciples in school districts and ed schools depraved, perverse, insane, and raving?

Now would be a good time, I think.

When will parents and community-minded citizens attend school board meetings (or meet with superintendents) and, standing on their hind legs, ask questions such as:

1.  "What are the five main reading skills taught in elementary school?"
[If no one can tell you, then what exactly IS their job?]

2.  "On the basis of exactly what design features did you select the core beginning reading curriculum?"

3.  "What is the research base for the core curriculum?"
[It should be experimental research, with comparison groups, replicated in different settings and with varied samples, and should be longitudinal. If not, it's like giving your kids an untested drug.  We demand more testing of hand cream.]

3.  "What supplemental and intervention programs do you use across grade levels?"
[A complete curriculum will have core, supplemental, and intervention curricula that have all been tested and that are consistent in how they teach.]

4.  "What sorts of assessments are made of children's reading in grade school?"
[There should be four assessments: screening (to see if some kids need supplemental instruction from the start); progress monitoring (every few weeks); diagnostic (to identify specific skill weaknesses that make a child struggle to read); outcome (to determine overall progress each semester and year).  The assessments should be standardized and quantitative.  Examples of good ones are DIBELS, Texas Primary Reading Inventory, Gray Oral Reading, Woodcock Johnson.  If you are told that teachers make them up or that the school uses its own, you've got trouble.  This is the same as letting mental patients evaluate themselves.]

5.  "What decision rules do you use when kids are struggling in grades 1 to 3?" 
[They should FIRST give diagnostic assessments and then interventions for an additional 30 minutes a day.  They should NOT use Reading Recovery.  They should NOT assign kids to special education.  Almost all reading difficulties are the result of poor instruction.  The word "dyslexia" simply means a kid has a hard time reading. Dyslexia doesn't imply that the KID has the problem.  Don't let anyone excuse their poor program by blaming it on a bogus "disability."]

6.  "What methods do teachers use to teach the five main reading skills?"
[The right answer is "systematic and explicit instruction." Also, teachers should NOT be making up these methods or lessons; good programs TELL teachers exactly how to teach.  This is NOT about teachers being creative.  This is about TECHNICAL PROFICIENCY.   You expect as much from your hair cutter.  Teachers should be using much the same methods; otherwise, kids will be confused as they move from one grade to another.]

Districts that know what they're doing will answer these questions as precisely and easily as Grandma can tell you how to make biscuits (not bisquits).  If neither the school board, the district reading coordinator, or the school principal can adequately answer your questions, you got trouble.  Imagine the director of pediatrics at a hospital not being able to answer similar questions. 

You should get other citizens to join you in writing the strongest possible (but respectful) letter to the director of Reading First for your state.  Ask why it is that your district can't answer the simplest questions about scientifically based reading, and why it is that the district is NOT in compliance with the mandates of Reading First.  All states are receiving MANY millions from Reading First--and they are ACCOUNTABLE for using the money to create reading programs in line with the above questions. 

Here are resources on all of the above questions. 
http://professorplum.typepad.com/my_weblog/2004/10/why_kids_cant_r.html

Here's how to find your state's Reading First Director. Read the proposal and see if your district is in line with it.  Don't get angry at the state Director of Reading First.  She is almost certain to be on your side and wants to know who is not in compliance.  Why? Because any state that takes Reading First money but does not do what it AGREED to do, is going to get a nasty surprise.

Reading Recovery II: Reptiles are Clever Creatures

This is the second and final shipment of information on Reading Recovery. In our first installment
we learned that Reading Recovery is a 12 to 20 week, daily intervention for struggling readers in grade One.  It costs anywhere from $2000 to $8000 per student.  Yet, there is strong reason to question the claims of RR advocates that RR is effective and worth the price.  Basically, there is a lot of good research that says it doesn't work.

Why, then, is it RR popular--often the reading intervention of choice?  Professor Plum will offer some reasons at the conclusion, or end, of the "piece."  So, you'll just have to read it.

Let us now continue with our analysis. [How formal!]

 

Reading Recovery provides struggling readers with too little of the skill they need to become proficient readers.
Reading Recovery rests on the premise that teachers should emphasize context-cue guessing over first teaching children directly, systematically, and comprehensively to read (recognize words and comprehend) by using the code. However, a major reason why children struggle with reading in the first place, and are selected for Reading Recovery and other remedial programs, is that they (1) have not mastered phonemic awareness and sound/symbol relationships, and therefore (2) cannot fluently (accurately and rapidly) read words, and therefore (3) they cannot comprehend (or they quickly lose the sense of) what they are reading (Tunmer et al., 1998). 

In other words, struggling readers use context-cue guessing, and they do this precisely because they are not skilled at the most efficient strategy--namely, sounding out words (Nicholson, 1991; Raynor & Pollatsek, 1989). Indeed, children who use contextual guessing and picture cues are 4.5 times more likely to require Reading Recovery after one year of reading instruction (Chapman, Tunmer, and Prochnow, 2001, p. 146).  Furthermore,

The word recognition skills of these children remain relatively weak because they do not develop as rich a network of sublexical connections between orthographic and phonological representations in lexical memory as normally developing readers (Chapman, Tunmer, and Prochnow, 2001, p. 144).

By teaching struggling readers to use context-cue guessing (which is part of the reason they can't read to begin with!) rather than systematically and comprehensively teaching the code, Reading Recovery appears to decrease these children's later chances of being good readers, because (1) in more advanced text, the most important and informative words are harder to guess from the context; and (2) more advanced texts provide fewer and fewer context cues from which students might try to derive meaning (Schatz & Baldwin, 1986). Therefore, it would be expected that any benefits of Reading Recovery in grade 1 would diminish rapidly as text difficulty increases in higher grades, where context-cue guessing will not work.  This is exactly what does happen, as discussed in the next section.

Moreover, recent research shows that children in Reading Recovery learn to read better when explicit phonics instruction is added to a Reading Recovery program; e.g., "rime analogy training" (Greaney, Tunmer, & Chapman, 1997), segmenting, blending and riming (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993), and word study to develop phonological awareness and decoding skill (Santa & Hoein, 1999).  In other words, if you simply teach kids properly in the first place, they wouldn't NEED an intervention.  How come you don't hear advocates of RR offering that obvious solution?

Reading Recovery is Less Effective Than It Purports to Be and Does Not Provide Many Struggling Readers with the Skills They Need. 
For example, evaluation research shows that:

1. "…participation  in the RR programme did not eliminate or reduce (the) phonological processing deficits" that in part define children as struggling readers (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 1999, 2001).

2. The progress of Reading Recovery students remained "persistently well below that of the ND ("Normally Developing") children" (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, J.E., 1999).

3. "The RR group obtained significantly lower scores than the ND group on all reading performance measures on each of the three post-RR testing occasions… (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 2001, p. 165).

4. Following Reading Recovery, "…RR children performed relatively poorly in terms of word identification, reading comprehension, classroom book reading level, and reading accuracy" (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 1999, 2001, p. 165).

5. In a large study of Ohio's Reading Recovery, only 53% of the children eligible for Reading Recovery scored at the classroom average on book level measures by the end of grade 1 (Battelle, 1995).

6. "RR failed to significantly improve the literacy development of children considered to have succeeded in the program:  RR children showed no signs of accelerated reading performance, and one year after completion of the programme, they were performing at around one year below age-appropriate levels" (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 1999).

7. Twelve months after they were "discontinued" (i.e., finished with Reading Recovery), about 35% of children continued to benefit, about 35% were no longer "recovered," and "The remaining 30% probably would have improved without such intensive intervention, since a similar percentage of control and comparison students had reached average reading levels by this stage" (Center et al., 1995, p. 241).

8. Children who received Reading Recovery gained 4.6 book levels at time of discontinuation over children who needed remediation but did not receive Reading Recovery.  However, at follow-up, the RR advantage dropped to 2.4 book levels.  For the neediest of struggling readers, the advantage of Reading Recovery was only 1 book level at follow-up (Glynn & Crooks, 1992).

9. "…by third grade, the Reading Recovery instructed groups may not be significantly different from the comparison groups as indicated by measures of text reading" (Shanahan & Barr, 1995).
 
10. Regarding comprehension, former Reading Recovery students perform about the same as comparison groups of struggling readers who did not receive Reading Recovery. Specifically, "proficient oral reading performance at Grade 1 has not resulted in self-extending strategies to other literacy tasks in subsequent grades" (Hiebert, 1994, p. 20).

11. Maintenance of skills taught in Reading Recovery is low. 
For example, even when the primary criterion is a task that is common in RR tutoring—oral reading of text—levels of maintenance at Grade 4 are low.  In Grade 4, approximately 4 students or 5.5% of the cohort will be able to orally read text at the average school level and will score at the average school level on the WRMT-R (Hiebert, 1994, p. 23).

12. For children who completed Reading Recovery, the average score for Oral Accuracy was the only score which "met or exceeded grade-level standards," and "The lowest average score was for Oral Comprehension" (San Diego Unified School District, 1999, p. 4).

13. "Literacy Assessment test scores indicate first grade students who successfully completed the English version of Reading Recovery, on average, scored lower than the control group of non-participating students on all three sub-tests" (San Diego Unified School District, 1999, p. 5).

14. "SAT 9 test scores indicate first grade students who successfully completed the English version of Reading Recovery, on average, scored lower than the control group of non-participating students using the internal studies conducted by the District's RR/DL Program" (San Diego Unified School District, 1999, p. 5).

15. "…RR children showed declines in reading self-concept following RR, and they held more negative perceptions of ability in reading and spelling, and in general academic self-concept six and twelve months following RR" (Chapman, J.W., Tunmer, WE., & Prochnow, J.E. (1999).

16. Reading Recovery does not appear to decrease the need for other services, such as special education and Title I (Shanahan & Barr, 1995, p. 987; Pollack, 1994). 

And all this for only 2 to 8 grand per kid!

Reading Recovery Evaluation Appears to be of Questionable Reliability and/or Validity.
The validity of Reading Recovery claims to effectiveness is weak in several ways.

1. The validity of findings and interpretations is threatened by the composition of the treatment group.  In many analyses, only students who are discontinued (i.e., judged successful) are examined. Some students are omitted because of absences and other learning problems.  Other students begin Reading Recovery but are eliminated at the teacher's discretion for low potential (Hiebert, 1994). This makes "the program appear more effective than it really is" (Shanahan & Barr, 1995, p. 991).

2. The major forms of evaluative data are subjective and may be biased.  In Reading Recovery, running records (a major outcome measure) are used to determine where a child places in the 20 levels of book difficulty (Clay, 1993). These records are provided by the Reading Recovery teachers (who have an obvious stake in the outcomes), rather than by impartial evaluators.  Moreover, running records involve qualitative analysis with a high level of inference.  For example, Clay says, "…you need to look at every error the child makes and ask yourself 'Now what led the child to do (or say) that?'" (Clay, 1993, p. 31).

The possibility of unreliability and invalidity are underscored by research showing that, although Reading Recovery teachers rate "discontinued" (i.e., successful) students who can read books at a level of 16., the same children's classroom teachers rate the children's reading book level as only 9 (Chapman, Tunmer, & Prochnow, 1999).

3. The design of many Recovery evaluations does not rule out the effects of maturation and other learning experiences (e.g., reading in class and at home) that can account for changes (Shanahan & Barr, 1995).  Again, claims to effectiveness are likely to be inflated.

Reading Recovery Appears to Violate Principles of Equity.
Reading Recovery may violate principles of equity in three ways.

1. A major objective of Reading Recovery is to bring struggling readers to the average level of first grade classroom achievement.  However, this average level differs markedly from school to school and community to community.  The average school performance in low income areas is generally at the 20th percentile, while the average performance in more affluent areas is at the 80th percentile.  Therefore, to bring low-income struggling readers to the 20th percentile sustains their educationally disadvantaged status (Grossen, Coulter, & Ruggles, 1996). 

Moreover, children who read at the 20th percentile level are not likely to be academically successful later.  Such child need school-wide effective beginning reading programs that aim for mastery before the end of grade 1.

2. Reading Recovery is designed to serve the lowest 20 percent of a school population.  This may be equitable in a school with few struggling readers. However, in a school where a majority of children are struggling readers, serving the lowest performing children will leave a large percentage of struggling children untreated.  In other words, Reading Recovery is not designed to solve illiteracy problems in schools with a high proportion of at-risk children.

3. Reading Recovery purports to work with the lowest achieving readers in a school. However, the most needy children may be excluded--sometimes because they are judged too difficult to work with or not likely to benefit.  For example, Glynn & Crooks (1992) report that "Reading Recovery teachers and/or STJCs in three schools said they would not take particular mainstreamed special needs children into Reading Recovery as they were 'too slow to go into Reading Recovery'."

4. In contrast to the explicit objective of Reading First and the No Child Left Behind legislation--which seek to produce high reading achievement in all children--Reading Recovery "never envisioned to recover 50% or more of the children reading below grade level…It was designed to recover 10 to 20% of struggling readers after one year of reading instruction using the New Zealand Balanced Reading Programme" (Reutzle, 1999, p. 323).

Reading Recovery is Very Expensive. 
Several studies report the high costs of Reading Recovery when teacher training, salaries, and materials are considered.
1. Heibert (1994) calculated that the cost per successful student was $8,333. 

2. Shanahan & Barr (1995) calculated that Reading Recovery cost between $4600 and $8333 per successful child. 

3. A longitudinal study (1991-98) by the San Diego Unified School District found that the cost per student ranged from $5,112 to $11,775.

In some districts, a child's one-to-one Reading Recovery (60 lessons) costs more than the entire year's schooling.  Grossen et al., (1996) state that "the data indicate that the cost for Reading Recovery (30 hours of instruction for one child) exceeds the national average per pupil expenditure for one full year of schooling."

Reading Recovery Does Not Appear to Foster Needed School Reform of Reading Curricula.
Reading Recovery is a one-to-one pull-out tutoring program for children in grade 1.  It is designed to serve a small number of individual children.  It is not the proper solution for schools and districts serving disadvantaged children--children who come to school ill-prepared for reading instruction.  These schools cannot wait for children to become struggling readers because of inadequate beginning reading instruction and/or phonological processing weaknesses (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1998).  Rather, these schools must focus upstream--on prevention of reading difficulties--rather than wait for problems to emerge in grade 1.

Such prevention requires school-level or district-level focus on effective reading curricula in pre-k to grade 1 that will teach children essential skills--such as language, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, sound/symbol relationships, decoding strategies, and comprehension strategies (as shown by the preponderance of scientific research)—so that these children by the end of first grade are becoming proficient readers who do not need remedial reading (Chall et al., 1990; Shanahan & Barr, 1995; Torgeson, 1998).  Arguably, only a small percentage of first graders (children with true processing difficulties) would need remediation if they were properly taught the first time.

There Are More Cost-effective Approaches Than Reading Recovery to Beginning and Early Remedial Reading. 
These cost-effective alternatives include the following.

1. In light of research cited above that questions the efficacy of Reading Recovery, it would be wiser for a district to implement school-wide and district-wide beginning reading instruction in kindergarten, and even in pre-k for at-risk children, using field-test curricula that provide direct, systematic, and comprehensive instruction on language, phonemic awareness, sound/symbol relationships, decoding (sounding out) strategies, fluency, and comprehension—-rather than wait for reading problems to emerge and then spend anywhere from $4000 to $11,000 on Reading Recovery per first grade child.

2. Systematic, explicit classroom instruction on phonemic awareness and phonics using decodable text was more effective with Title I children than a Reading Recovery support program.  Indeed, it was found that "It was the classroom curriculum effect, not the tutorial method effect that was significant (Foorman, Francis, Beeler, Winikates, & Fletcher, 1997, p.16). 

3. Reading Recovery students read better when explicit phonics instruction is added to a Reading Recovery program; e.g., "rime analogy training" (Greaney, Tunmer, & Chapman, 1997), segmenting, blending and riming (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993), and word study to develop phonological awareness and decoding skill (Santa & Hoein, 1999). 

4. Fincher (1991) found that "…teacher Assistants with almost no training and minimal teaching materials with which to teach and working in less than desirable conditions, outperformed the Reading Recovery teachers when their students' overall achievement was compared" (Fincher (1991). 

5. For at-risk or struggling children, it is reasonable to use standardized, objective instruments for identifying children's reading difficulties and then providing timely use of explicit, focused instruction (Lovett & Steinbach, 1997; Torgeson et al., 1999).  For example,
a. Lovett et al. (1994) developed a 35 lesson word identification program for dyslexic students for one hour four times per week. This program achieved highly significant results with the "core deficit"; namely, phonological processing and nonword reading skills (p. 818).

b. O'Conner et al., (1995) provided a program for at-risk readers.  The program lasted five hours (15 minutes twice weekly for 10 weeks), and taught letter-sounds, segmenting, and blending.  A second experimental group had a wider range of phonemic awareness activities.  The authors conclude that students in both groups generalized the skills they were taught and used them in the reading process.

c. Hempenstall (2002) developed and evaluated a 50-hour program for early elementary students with many of the same reading difficulties of students selected for Reading Recovery; e.g., below average scores on phonemic awareness, pseudo-word decoding, picture naming, digit span, and spelling--in other words, precisely the children whose core phonological deficits are present in most struggling readers. 

Hempenstall used an inexpensive (about $20) program, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (Engelmann, Haddox, & Bruner, 1983).  The design features of this program are consistent with the preponderance of empirical research.  In contrast to one-to-one Reading Recovery, students were taught in a more efficient group setting.  Comparing the remedial reading group and the wait-list group, Hempenstall found that the remedial reading group made statistically significant gains in word attack, phonemic awareness, phonological recoding in lexical access, phonological recoding in working memory, and spelling. 

In summary, in view of Reading Recovery's high cost, its ability to affect only a small number of children in a school, equivocal evidence of immediate and long-term effectiveness, and generally subjective measures, and in view of readily-available, effective, less costly, and pro-active alternatives, a district would be advised seriously to rethink a plan to use Reading Recovery.

Adams, M. (1990).  Beginning to read: Thinking and   learning about print.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.

Adams, M.J., & Bruck, M.  (1993).  Word recognition:  The interface of educational policies and scientific research.  Reading and Writing:  An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 114-139.

Battelle, Ohio Department of Education (1995).  Longitudinal Study of Reading Recovery, 1990-91 Through 1993-94.

Blachman, B., Tangel, D., Ball, E., Black, R., & McGraw, D. (1999).  Developing phonological awareness and word recognition skills: A two-year intervention with low-income, inner-city children.  Reading and Writing:  An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11, 273-293.

Brett, A., Rothlein, L., & Hurley, M. (1996).  Vocabulary acquisition from listening to stories and explanations of target words.  Elementary School Journal, 96 (4), 415-42.

Castle, J.M., Riasc, J., & Nicholson, T. (1994).  Getting off to a better start in reading and spelling:  The effects of phonemic awareness instruction within a whole language program.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 350-359.

Center, Y., Wheldall, K., Freeman, L., Outhred, L., & McNaught, M. (1995).  An evaluation of Reading Recovery.  Reading Research Quarterly, 30, 240-263.
Chall, J.S., Jacobs, V.A., & Baldwin, L.E. (1990).  The reading crisis:  Why poor children fall behind.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press.

Chapman, J.W., Tunmer, WE., & Prochnow, J.E. (2001).   Does success in the Reading Recovery Program depend on developing proficiency in phonological-processing skills?  A longitudinal study in a whole language instructional context.  Scientific  Studies of Reading, 5(2), 14-176.

Chapman, J.W., Tunmer, WE., & Prochnow, J.E. (1999).  Success in Reading Recovery depends on the development of phonological processing skill.  Revised Research Report for Phase Three of Contract ER35/199/5.  New Zealand, Ministry of Education.

Clay, M.M. (1979).  Reading:  The patterning of complex behavior.  Aukland, NZ:  Heinemann.

Clay, M.M. (1991).  Becoming literate: The construction of inner control.  Aukland, NZ:  Heinemann.

Clay, M.M. (1993).  An observational survey of early  literacy achievement.  Auckland, NZ:  Heinemann.

Cunningham, A. (1990).  Explicit versus implicit instruction on phonemic awareness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 50, 429-444.

Davidson, M., & Jenkins, J. (1994).  Effects of phonemic processes on word reading and spelling.  Journal of Educational Research, 87, 148-157.

Faulkner, H.J., & Levy, B.A. (1999).  Fluent and nonfluent forms of transferring reading:  Words and their message. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 6, 111-116.

Fincher, G.E. (1991).  Reading Recovery and Chapter I:  A three-year comparative study.  Canton, OH:  Canton City Schools.

Foorman, B.R., Francis, D.J., Beeler, T., Winikates, D., & Fletcher, J.M. (1997). Early interventions for children with reading problems: Study designs and preliminary findings. Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 8, 63-71.

Foorman, B.R. (1995).  Research on "the Great Debate--Code-oriented versus Whole language approaches to reading instruction.  School Psychology Review, 24, 376-392.

Foorman, B.R., Francis, D., Fletcher, J., Schatschneider, C., & Mehta, P.  (1998).  The role of instruction in learning to read:  Preventing reading failure in at-risk children.  Journal of Educational Pschology, 90, 37-55.

Glynn, T., & Crooks, T. (1992).  Reading Recovery in context:  Implementation and Outcomes.  Educational Psychology, 12, 249-.

Greaney, K., Tunmer, W. & Chapman J. (1997).  Effects of rime-based orthographical analogy training on the word recognition skills of children with reading disability.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 89, 645-651.

Grossen, B., Coulter, G., & Ruggles (1996).  Reading Recovery: An evaluation of benefits and costs. Effective School Practices, Summer, 15(3). On-line at
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~bgrossen/rr.htm

Hiebert, E.A. (1994).  Reading Recovery in the United States:  What difference does it make to an age cohort?  Educational Researcher, 23(9), 15-25.

Levy, B.A., Nicholls, A., & Kohen, D. (1993).  Repeated readings:  Process benefits for good and poor readers.  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 56, 303-327.

Liberman, I.Y., Shankweiler, D., & Liberman, A.M. (1989).  The alphabetic principle and learning to read.  In Shankweiler, D., & Liberman, I.Y. (Eds.), Phonology and reading disability:  Solving the reading puzzle (pp. 1-33).  Ann Arbor, MI:  U. of Michigan Press.

Lovett, M.W., Border, S.L., DeLuca, T. Lacernza, L., Benson, N.J., & Blackstone, D. (1994).  Treating the core deficit of developmental dyslexia:  Evidence of transfer of learning after phonologically- and strategy-based reading training programs.  Developmental Psychology, 30, 805-822.

Lovett, M., & Steinbach, K. (1997).  The effectiveness of remedial programs for reading disabled children of different ages:  Does the benefit decrease for older children?  Learning Disability Quarterly, 20 189-210.

Lyon, G.R. (1999).  The NICHD Research program in reading development, reading disorders and reading instruction.  On-line at http://www.ld.org/Research/keys99_nichd.cfm.

Lyon, G.R. (1996).  Learning disabilities.  The Future of Children:  Special Education for Children with Disabilities, 6(1), 54-76.

Nicholson, T. (1991).  Do children read better in context or in lists?  A classic study revisited.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 82, 444-450.

O'Connor, R., Jenkins, J., & Slocum, T. (1995).  Transfer among phonological tasks in kindergarten: Essential instructional content.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 87, 202-217.

Pollack, J.S. (1994).  Final evaluation report: Reading Recovery program 1994-94.  Columbus:  OH:  Department of Program Evaluation.

Pressley, M., Johnson, C.J., Symons, S., McGoldrick, J.A., & Kurita, J.A. (1989).  Strategies that improve children's memory and comprehension of text.  Elementary School Journal, 90(1), 3-32.

Pressley, M. (1998).  Reading instruction that works:  The case for balanced reading.  NY:  Guilford Press.

Pressley, M., Almasi, J., Schuler, T., Bergman, J., & Kurita, J.A. (1994).  Transactional instructional of comprehension strategies,: The Montgomery County, Maryland, SAIL, program.  Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 10(1), 5-19.

Reutzle, D.R. (1998/99).  On balanced reading.   The Reading Teacher.

San Diego Unified School District.  (1999, October).  Reading Recovery Research Project. San Diego, CA.  On-line at http://www.nrrf.org/sd_rrrp.htm

Santa, C., & Hoein T. (1999).   An assessment of early steps:  A program for early intervention of reading problems.  Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 54-79.

Schatz, E.K., & Baldwin, R.S. (1986). Context cues are unreliable predictors of word meanings.  Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 439-453.

Shanahan, T., & Barr, R. (1995).  Reading Recovery:  An independent evaluation of the effects of an early intervention for at-risk learners.  Reading Research Quarterly, 30(4), 958-996.

Stuart, M. (1999).  Getting ready for reading: Early phoneme awareness and phonics teaching improves reading and spelling in inner-city second language learners.  British Journal of Educational Psychology, 69, 587-605.

Vandervelden, M., & Siegel, L.  (1997).  Teaching phonological processing skills in early literacy:  A developmental approach.  Learning Disability Quarterly, 20, 63-81.

Torgeson, J.K. (1998). Catch them before they fall:  Identification and assessment to prevent reading failure in young children.   American Educator, Spring/Summer.  On-line at
http://www.ldonline.org/ld_indepth/reading/torgeson_catchthem.html.

Torgeson, J, Wagner, R. Rashotte, C., Rose, E., Lindamood, P., Conway, T., & Garvan, C. (1999).  Preventing reading failure in young children with phonological processing disabilities: Group and individual responses to instruction.  Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 579-593.

Tunmer, W., & Hoover, W. (1993).  Phonological recoding skill and beginning reading. Reading and Writing:  An Interdisciplinary Journal, 5, 161-179.

Tunmer, W.E., Chapman, J.W., Ran, H., & Prochnow, J.E. (1998).  The importance of providing beginning readers with explicit training in phonological processing skills. Australia Journal of Learning Disabilities, 3, 4-14.

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So, why do so many states, districts, and schools use Reading Recovery?  The words, “stunning stupidity” come to mind, but aren’t nearly insulting enough.  Let’s see.

No one who buys RR knows much about what reading is, how it is best taught, and how it is most-usefully assessed (for purposes of rational decision making). 

Surely, anyone with a bit of commonsense knows that learning to read takes some effort; its skills must be taught by a skilled teacher or by a person using a well-designed and scripted program (just as new surgeons follow a written routine), because even small error patterns can accumulate into big errors (e.g., reading “d” as “duh”); that the obviously best way to read words is to use knowledge of what the letters usually say (phonics) and that guessing using any other cues is NOT reading and only MAKES you dyslexic (“can’t read”).

Most ed schools have been under the sway of whole language and its demented theory of reading--as a psycholinguistic guessing game, in which teaching phonics is not only seen as unnecessary but positively harmful—when in fact NOT teaching phonics makes kids use guessing as a last resort—and guessing is what illiterate people do.  Therefore, most teachers, reading specialists, and administrators who come out of ed schools are not only ignorant but have a head full of nonsense.  They have NO idea how to teach reading properly.  They have NO idea what a sound curriculum looks like.  They have NO idea how to measure progress in all five of the main reading skills in a reliable and valid way. 

BUT THEY ARE CERTIFIED!  In a few years they have tenure.  You think they will be open to criticism?

And, in ed schools they were indoctrinated by their whole language and RR professors.  Approval and grades were contingent upon chanting and writing the mantras of whole language and RR.  I know of final projects that consist of students making a poster of their “Literacy philosophy.”

Debbie and Jenn’s Reading Philosophy

Reading is natural. [wrong]
All children have a right to read.  [Yeah, but you will squash it flat.]
All children should have access to authentic literature.  [Nice, but with you as teacher they won’t have any idea what the books say.]
Students should be life-long learners.  [Whatever that means.  As illiterate adults, they won’t be getting much learning from books.]

[Debbie and Jenn are my advisees.  They began as bright kids.  Now, they are as dumb as a sack of hammers.  So I give them a course in how to teach reading whenever they come for advising.  I won’t let them register until they perform the teaching routines.]

So, these new teachers get jobs in schools where what they have learned is EXACTLY how they are supposed to teach.

The circle is now closed.  Some of these teachers become reading coordinators and supervise other teachers—making sure that they keep teaching kids to guess.  “No, don’t have her sound it out!  Ask her, ‘What word do you THINK goes there?’”

In this way, idiocy breeds idiocy, world without end, Amen.

Worse, access to the way out of this maze of moronitude is blocked in several ways.  If a school realizes that the percentage of kids who can’t read is now so high it is obscene (50%?), then they have to do SOMEthing.  Well, who ya gonna call?  You call your buddies at the local ed school.  And what do they offer?  Reading Recovery. 

The administrators then spend all their Title I funds and spare change on RR and have nothing left to buy good materials, even if they thought (beginner’s luck!) that they ought to. 

If they take no quantitative data on each of the five reading skills, there is no way really to tell why kids can’t read.  So, you simply consider that the KID has a brain problem (“dyslexia”).  This means that you don’t have to critically examine the reading curriculum or how teachers teach, to see if there is any skill they are not teaching.  Therefore, there is no change in curricula or in teacher behavior.

In time, they get used to having a certain percentage of kids, and a certain “kind of kids” not reading.  Illiteracy is now normal. 

Finally, whole language and RR reading coordinators, administrators, and ed perfessers take positions at the state education agencies.  RR is no longer a district choice.  It is mandated!

That’s why you have to demand and support state efforts to make districts and schools accountable. 

Why you have to demand well-designed reading programs and professional development for teachers that is consistent with the preponderance of research. 

Why you have to demand that schools of education teach reading according to the preponderance of research or lose accreditation. 

And why it is wise to support President Bush’s Reading First. 

This alone may not produce needed changes (class action lawsuits would, I bet.) but doing nothing surely won't.

The tragedy here is that the needed change is so small and the benefits are so large. 

Here are all the resources you need to know what works.

Reading Recovery I. Anatomy of Folly

Professor Plum doesn't want to offend readers by inadvertently insulting them.

No doubt there are some readers who advocate Reading Recovery.  Professor Plum has nothing against these folks.  In fact, he would enjoy champing the foodstuffs with them at a bar somewhere.  Morover, some of the very best teachers using Reading Mastery and Corrective Reading (Direct Instruction programs) used to be Reading Recovery teachers who were lucky enough to RECOVER.

At the very least I believe there are substantial problems with Reading Recovery that do not warrant its strong advocacy.  Moreover, there are better (more effective and far less expensive) ways to accomplish the objective of trying to ensure that all kids become proficient readers.  I'LL TELL YOU EXACTLY WHAT THEY ARE LATER.

With that in mind, here's an overview.

1. Reading Recovery is an intervention for kids in grade one who are struggling to read.

2.  Reading recovery requires teachers who are specially trained to use Reading Recovery (RR) assessments and methods.  RR provides many sites around the world for this training.

3. Reading recovery is one-on-one. Sessions are given daily, for about 30 minutes, and for about 20 weeks.

4. Well over a million children have been in RR, in 49 of the United States.

5. RR costs anywhere from $2000 to $8000 or more per child.  You read that right!  Two to eight grand!!  FIRST GRADE!  How tough could the problem BE?

6. RR can use up ALL of a school's Title I funds.  I know of schools serving poor kids ("90% free or reduced lunch") that spend over $125,000 per year on RR.  These funds could have been used to buy every graduating fifth grader a computer or a set of the most important books in the world, or to buy better beginning reading curricula.

7. Serious questions are raised about the validity of RR assessment instruments (and therefore data), the assignment of children to intervention groups, and about claims of effectiveness.  For example, one objective (and claim to effectiveness) is that students end the RR intervention at least in the range of average for their classroom.  This NORM referenced criterion is not terribly useful.  What if the average for a class is low?  A similar example would be claims that a drug will lower your blood pressure to the average for your community.  Not a good thing if the average is 155/120!

8. The RR website has recently been changed.  RR is now presented in a way that makes it appear to be perfectly consistent with the preponderance of research—what reading is (the five main skills) and how best to teach it (systematically and explicitly)—as I presented here.  Professor Plum is not accusing anyone of duplicity, but it is a fact that RR has not been considered consistent with the tenets of Reading First, and therefore could not be used by states that wanted to receive Reading First funds.  Professor Plum is not saying that the RR website was changed for political and financial reasons.  He's just sayin,…whata coincidence!

9. Which is the wisest hypothesis if some kids are struggling to read in grade one?
a.  These kids have something wrong with them, and need a special intervention that costs from 2 to 8 thousand dollars per kid.

b. The beginning (core) reading curriculum is not adequate for some kids—just as a standard diet does not give some kids the amount of iron they need.  We should examine the core curriculum in light of principles of sound design and, if indicated, get a better one.

We should also get good supplemental and intervention programs and create a complete curriculum.  We should use the supplemental and intervention programs with kids in grade one who are struggling (much cheaper and there is every reason to believe they would work).  And we should pilot test the new complete curriculum to see if the percentage of struggling readers decreases.  If there are still a few struggling readers, we should give diagnostic tests to see if they have phonological processing problems (e.g., they can't easily hear the separate sounds in words; they can’t quickly transform a thought into a spoken word; they have poor short term memory, and therefore forget the word they are sounding out), and, if so, give them specialized interventions noted above.

10. In my experience, RR has some features of a cult.  Its advocates identify closely with RR.  They (in my experience) are true believers in its theory and methods.  They are not open to criticism or to data from experimental research that questions the efficacy of RR or the validity of its theory of reading.

11. Whole language and RR are similar in many ways—qualitative and subjective assessments; teaching kids to use cues OTHER than the letters to identify what words say. 

Sometimes I think RR is "remediation" (what a dopey word) for kids who were mistaught by whole language.  Wouldn't THAT be an interesting bit of research?  How many kids taught to read with a solid core curriculum qualify for RR?

12. RR is emblematic of much that is wrong in the field of education. 

**Administrators implementing programs with no credible information on how well it works, without a serious examination of their own curriculum to see how exactly the new program fits, and with no idea of alternative programs.

**Teachers in ed schools NOT being taught enough about a knowledge system (reading, math, history) or about instructional design or about the canons of credible research that they can judge the logical and empirical adequacy of the programs their perfessers preach to them.

**The program, or method, or curriculum, or innovation is organized as a closed system that perpetuates and at the same time hides its inadequacies. For example, if you include memorizing words, holding a book properly, and identifying print (e.g., signs on the wall), as examples of early reading skills, then whole language appears to be effective—even though (given a sane definition of reading) the kids aren't reading.

And of you define success as bringing kids up to the average reading level in a class--even if the average--in a CRITERION referenced sense—is low (the average kids can't read worth a dang!)--then RR looks effective.

And so, ignorant principals and indoctrinated teachers cling to whatever methods now have a history in the system, and on which they've spent so much money and time and effort.  And the inadequacies of the method harm kids year and year after year. 

Following is an extended examination of RR. 

Caution. Boy is it ever pedantic! 

So, I've broken it into easy to digest installments.  You'll notice that I have not included my "real" name.  So, if you feel like using this post (feel free to copy it and distribute it as you see fit) I guess you'll just have to give the url.  Or, if you write to me, I'll tell you who I are. I don't mean to be coy, but I get into all sorts of hassles from what I've written--death threats, believe it or not. And besides, I'd like to keep this personal—me and thee, not me, thee, and the manyheaded.

Review of Research on
Reading Recovery
June, 2002

A number of empirical considerations render Reading Recovery a questionable intervention for early elementary students who need instruction to ensure and to accelerate: (1) the acquisition of essential elemental reading skills (e.g., phonemic awareness, sound/symbol correspondence, decoding strategies); and (2) fluent reading with high comprehension (Adams, 1990;  Blachman et al., 1999; Brett, Rothlein, & Hurley, 1996; Castle, Riach, & Nicholson, 1994; Cunningham, 1990; Davidson & Jenkins, 1994;  Faulkner & Levy, 1999; Levy, Nicholls, & Kohen, 1993; O'Connor, Jenkins, & Slocum, 1995; Pressley et al., 1989; Pressley et al., 1994; Stuart, 1999; Vandervelden & Siegel, 1997).  These considerations include the following.

1. Essential design features of Reading Recovery conflict with the preponderance of scientific research and with the guidelines of Reading First.

2. By emphasizing meaning and context-cue guessing over first teaching children directly, systematically, and comprehensively to read and comprehend words by using the code, Reading Recovery provides struggling readers with too little of the skills they need to become proficient readers.

3. Reading Recovery is less effective than it purports to be and does not provide many struggling readers with the skills they need.

4. Reading Recovery's evaluation methods and data appear to be unreliable, overly-subjective, and invalid with respect to individual student progress and the cost-effectiveness of Reading Recovery at school, district, and state levels.

5. Reading Recovery appears to violate principles of equity.

6. Reading Recovery is very expensive.

7. Reading Recovery does not appear to foster needed school-level reform of reading curricula.

8. There are more cost-effective approaches than Reading Recovery to beginning and early remedial reading.

The Essential Design Features of Reading Recovery Conflict With the Preponderance of Scientific Research and With the Guidelines of Reading First.
Reading Recovery rests on the assumption that reading is a problem solving process.  Readers scan the lines and the page for cues, make predictions about what words say and which words come next, cross-check (using more cues), and correct errors.  In this view, a child's sense of the meaning of sentences is the child's main guide to what words say—rather than what words say being the main guide to what a sentence means.  Therefore, in Reading Recovery, children are taught to use many other kinds of meaning "cues" before they are taught to use "phonics"--knowledge of sound/symbol relationships (m says /m/)--to decode and comprehend words.  These nonphonic cues include the size and shape of words, layout of the print, pictures on the page, analogies between known and unknown words, word order, syntax, and special knowledge from past experience.  Indeed, Reading Recovery teachers are told that stressing sound/symbol knowledge (as in word attack, decoding, or sounding out words) diverts from comprehension.  The founder of Reading Recovery, Marie Clay, states:

In efficient rapid word perception, the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words (Clay, 1991, p.8).

With meaning as both guide and goal, the reader checks what he thinks the text will say with visual information, and by carrying out analytic manipulations (Clay, 1991, p. 235).

We have minimized the explicit teaching of phonics.  We have taught the child a variety of procedures for analyzing words into sounds…" (Clay, 1979, p. 64).

However, in contrast to practices in Reading Recovery, instruction is more effective when children--especially struggling or at-risk readers--first master the "code" (sound/symbol relationships) than when they try to figure out words from the meaning-context (Foorman, 1995).  Reading words using the code--knowledge of sound/symbol relationships (m says /m/)--is the primary strategy used by good readers, and is the most reliably effective and safest method for teaching both beginning and struggling readers (Adams & Bruck, 1993; Blachman et al., 1999; Foorman et al., 1998; Greaney, Tunmer, & Chapman, 1997; Lyon, 1996; Pressley, 1998; Torgeson et al., 1999).  The following statements summarize the preponderance of research on this issue.

Skilled reading is not sampling features of the text on the run, it is not a psycholinguistic guessing game, and it is not incidentally visual.  Rather, research has shown that 'skilled readers process virtually all the words they encounter in connected text, and typically, all the letters in those words' (Vellutino, 1991, p. 82).  Research further indicates that skilled readers are sufficiently fast and accurate at recognising words in text to make reliance on contextual information unnecessary (Perfetti, 1985). (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993, p. 167).

NICHD and substantial non-NICHD research does not support the claim that the use of context is a proxy for applying decoding strategies to unknown or unfamiliar words…The strategy of choice among well-developed readers is to decode letters to sound in an increasingly complete and accurate manner, which is dependent upon robust development of phonemic and phonics skills (Lyon, 1999).

…the scientific evidence is simply overwhelming that letter-sound cues are more important in recognizing words than either semantic or syntactic cues" (Pressley, 1998, p. 16) and that heavy reliance on semantic and syntactic cues is a "disastrous strategy" for beginning readers (p. 32).

Enough? You bet!!  More later.

Why Kids Can't Read, And What You Can Do About It

Imagine an epidemic of smallpox.  If your child is not immunized, odds are 50/50 he or she’ll get smallpox and suffer life-long damage.  Luckily, there’s an effective vaccine.  The Public Health Center in your town has the vaccine but the staff won’t use it.  Why not?  Because everyone in the Public Health Center believes immunization is a bad thing.  They say,

“Using the vaccine is against our philosophy.” 

You say, “But how will children become immune to smallpox!?”

They say, “Children naturally become immune to smallpox.  They don’t need a shot.  In fact, the shot is bad for them—even if gives them immunity.”

You say, “But half the children who aren’t immunized will get smallpox!”

They say, “Well, not everyone naturally becomes immune.  Some children don’t become immune because they don’t get enough support from their families. And sometimes it’s a cultural thing.  In other words, if children get smallpox, it’s not our fault.”

This sounds bizarre to you, but you figure, “I’m JUST a parent.  What do I know?  They’re the experts.”  So you put your child’s life in their hands.  And your child gets smallpox.  Then you find out that Public Health Centers in other counties and other states DO immunize children, and almost NONE of these children get smallpox.  In other words, YOUR Public Health Center has destroyed your child.

How does THAT make you feel?  What are you going to do about it?  It’s too late, though, isn’t it?

This is exactly the situation in reading.  Anywhere from 25 to 50% of children do NOT learn to read well.  In fact, children struggling at the end of FIRST grade continue struggling in fourth grade and in eighth grade.  In other words, poor readers at the end of first grade are very likely to remain poor readers.  And this means low-self-esteem (“I’m a dummy.”), shame (“Something’s wrong with me.  I have dyslexia.”), and failure to learn other subjects that require skillful reading—math, science, history, getting into college, filling out job applications.  Whole lives (and our nation) are damaged when children are not TAUGHT to read well. 

I should say, They are TAUGHT to read poorly.

It would be a tragedy.  It would be malpractice.  And maybe it would be considered a crime, if children got smallpox because health providers didn’t BELIEVE in immunization---when the data clearly say what happens when you don’t give the immunization.  The same way, it ought to be seen as a tragedy.  It ought to be considered malpractice.  And maybe it ought to be considered a crime, when children are MADE illiterate because teachers do not know (or refuse to use) the effective methods for teaching reading, even though 50 years of research show EXACTLY which methods—simple methods, commonsense methods—work with 99% of children regardless of family support, income, ethnicity, or anything else.

So, I’m going to tell you what reading is and how properly to teach it.  I’m also going to tell you how reading is USUALLY MIStaught—so that children end up damaged in all aspects of school—except maybe gym.  I’m going to tell you how new teachers are MIStaught in schools of education—so that they do not know how to teach reading effectively.  And I’m going to tell you some of the myths and false beliefs that enable teachers, administrators, and education professors to misteach reading while at the same time insisting they are right—although they are totally wrong. 

But I want to make it clear that I do not blame most teachers!  They care for your children.  They try hard.  They work endless hours at night and on weekends preparing lessons.  But they have been MISEDUCATED at schools of education.  They have been indoctrinated into the weird Alice in Wonderland world of “progressive” education (which dominates American education), with its fluffy “philosophies” of education, its false beliefs about how children learn, and its useless and wasteful “methods” for teaching (gluing beans on popsickle sticks to assist counting; writing “journals” when children don’t even know how to read) that are entertaining to children, but leave them almost as ignorant at the end of the year as when they began.  Teachers are victims, too.

Damaging Myth  Number 1.  Reading is Very Complex.

A lot of teachers and education professors tell you that reading is so complex that it requires specially trained experts (guess who?) to teach it.  Indeed, the education professors tell teachers to think of themselves more as artists and not as technicians who know exactly what they are doing.  [Ask yourself, whom do you want to perform surgery on your child?  A physician whose aim is to be technically proficient (to do the job right), and who IS technically proficient, or a physician who sees himself as an artist, and strives to be creative?] 

This is nonsense!  A car is very complex, but you don’t need to know all about that to teach someone to drive!  Sure reading is complex—a lot is happening in the eyes and brain—but you don’t need to know all that in order to follow simple steps to teach reading.
 
You can teach almost any beginning reader the basic skills (so that the child goes from no reading to reading on a second grade level) in 100 days (usually less) with only 15 or so minutes of instruction a day.  In other words, if you teach reading right, and you start in September, your child will probably read greeting cards to you on Christmas.  “Merry Christmas from all of us.”   

Hundreds of thousands of homeschooling families support that statement, and they don’t have degrees in reading instruction.  In fact, they haven’t taken ANY classes at a school of education.  Yet, tens of thousands of school teachers—who’ve been teaching for years and may have masters degrees (often in reading), can’t teach 30 to 50% of children (who have normal intelligence and who try hard) to read in 4 or more years.  That’s 720 days! 

A vast amount of serious research shows that skilled reading involves the following.
1. You learn to hear the different sounds in words.  Run has three sounds:  rrr, uuu, nnn.  [This is called phonemic awareness.]

2. You learn that there are about 44 letters and letter combinations (a, m, s, sh, th, w, wh, r, e, etc.) and that each one goes with a certain sound.  m says mmm.  This is sometimes called phonics, or the alphabetic principle.

3. You learn to use knowledge of phonics to sound out unfamiliar words.  The sentence has the word “shift.”  The new reader says, “shhhh  iiii   ffff   t.  shift.”  This is called decoding.

4. You read the same words (shift, the, said, run) so many times that you no longer sound them out.  You see the word; your eyes scan the letters rapidly; and you say the word.  Reading words is now automatic.  This is called fluency.

5. As you read, you pick up vocabulary.  “The tires gained traction.  Traction.  Attract.  Things pull together.  Tractor.  Tractors dig in and pull. Traction is like grabbing. I get it, the tires finally started to pull the car.”

6. And you use different methods to make sense or to comprehend what you’re reading.  For example, you figure out who did what, when, where, and why; what came first and what came next; how characters changed; what lessons can be learned.

Does reading sound like something only an expert, only an artist, only someone trained at a school of education can teach?   The fact is, if you teach all the above skills correctly (which I’ll tell you about later), 99% of children will learn them quickly.  Teach them wrongly (the usual way), and children still won’t read in fourth grade.  It’s when you don’t know what you’re doing that the job seems complex.

Damaging Myth 2.  Children Pick up Reading Naturally [Oh, sure!  Just as they pick up math naturally.]

Many education professors who MISeducate new teachers, believe that learning to read is a “natural process”--as easy to learn as speaking.  Therefore, just as parents and children usually don’t have special language lessons in the home, so (it is argued—wrongly!) children usually don’t need carefully crafted instruction on every reading skill.  This is flat wrong—and destructive--in so many ways.

First, if learning to read is as natural and easy as learning a language, then how come 25-50 percent of children CAN speak but can’t read?  Second, reading involves decoding completely meaningless squiggles (letters) on paper.  These squiggles represent SOUNDS--not words.  You have to learn the SOUNDS that go with the LETTERS in order to read the words.  No one can learn which sounds go with which letters “naturally”—without instruction.  Any more than you can learn math without instruction of some kind.  Someone has to say “That letter says mmm.”  And they have to make sure the child is looking right at it and hears the sound.  And they have to use different examples of “m”—to show that color and size and placement on the page don’t matter—only the shape matters.  And they have to show the child how to compare “m” and other letters—“n”, “a,” and so on—so that the child learns EXACTLY which squiggle says mmm and which squiggles do not. 

But most teachers have been taught that you don’t need to teach children which sounds go with which letters (“the alphabetic principle,” or phonics) and that you don’t have to teach children to sound out words using phonics knowledge.  “rrraaannn.  Oh, ran!”

No, instead they believe that if you just read to children a lot, and occasionally point out the letters and sounds, and have children write “journals” (How can a child write if the child doesn’t know how to spell?), and have lots of material for children to read (How can children learn to read by looking at books?  Do books talk back and say the words?), then children will eventually “construct” knowledge of reading and will, in their own time (by grade three or four) be good readers. 

In fact, these teachers (who are the MAJORITY) and education professors (who DOMINATE schools of education) believe that children should NOT sound out words!  Instead, children should (hold on to your seat!) PREDICT what a word says—based on (1) the shape of the word (“Gee, that looks like it says horse.”), or (2) based on what word seems to fit (“She…..on the ice… Uh, slammed.  No, slapped… No, slipped.  I guess it’s slipped.”), or (3) pictures on the page (“The…had big teeth… Uh… Oh, look.  A lion.  The lion had big teeth.”)

THIS IS NOT READING!!  This is guessing?  Would you call it “doing math” if your child didn’t know the strategy for solving problems, and instead used pictures to guess the answers?  Sounding out (decoding) unfamiliar words is THE best strategy for solving the “problem” of what a word says.  But most schools of education teach new teachers to teach children to guess and only (at most) to check their guess using knowledge of which sounds go with which letters (phonics).  But since teachers hardly TEACH any phonics, and teach it INCORRECTLY, how can children use phonics to “check” their guesses?  THEY CAN’T.  Besides, if children KNEW phonics, why would they guess?  They would just sound out the word and KNOW what it says.

This weird approach to MISteaching reading is called “whole language.”  But if you ask teachers what approach they use, they will say “balanced literacy.”  “Balanced literacy” is code for whole language.  Teachers know that many persons and groups finally realize that whole language is bunk.  But many teachers like it.  They believe in it.  [That--not children reading—is what’s most important.]  So, to avoid having to defend themselves or having to change how they teach, they disguise what they do.  I mean, who could be against BALANCED literacy?  But it’s the same whole language baloney in a different package.

Here are some of the bizarre and false things education professors in whole language (the majority in education schools) believe—and then pass on to new teachers who (mistakenly) trust them.  I have added comments in brackets to show how ridiculous and destructive these beliefs are.

“Children must develop reading strategies by and for themselves.” (p.178) Weaver, C. (1988). Reading process and practice. Exeter, NH: Heinemann.
[This is the basic weird idea in “progressive” education (which dominates public education) that teachers should not TEACH (transmit knowledge) but should merely be “guides” that help “learners discover knowledge” on their own.  Of course, advocates of this so-called “student centered” notion would never allow physicians to discover brain surgery techniques by operating on their children.  They would never toss their children into a rip current so their children could discover the strategy for not drowning.  But somehow it’s fine to let other people’s children—YOUR children—discover how to read—which, in the long run, means to discover what life is like when you are illiterate.]

“Children can develop and use an intuitive knowledge of letter-sound correspondences [without] any phonics instruction [or] without deliberate instruction from adults.” (p. 86) Weaver, C. (1980).  Psycholinguistics and reading. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.
[What exactly would intuitive knowledge of letter-sound correspondence be? Does m look like it says /m/?  Does “4” look like it means ////?  There is NO intuitive knowledge of what letters “say.”  You have to teach it DIRECTLY.  “This sound (point to the letter) is mmm… Say it with me?... Your turn.  What sound?...]

“Phonics is incompatible with a whole language perspective on reading and therefore is rejected.”  Watson, D. (1989). “Defining & describing whole language.” Elementary School Journal, 90, 129-142.
[In other words, they reject THE essential reading skill just because they don’t believe in it?!   But what does the RESEARCH say?  It says, if children don’t know phonics, they will NOT read well and will HAVE to guess.  In other words, they will be using the strategy—guessing—that is used by persons who are illiterate.  Terrific.  So, whole language teaches children the strategy for becoming illiterate!]

“Reading without guessing is not reading at all.”  Smith, F. (1973). Psychology and reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 
[Are YOU guessing at the words you are reading?  Or do you KNOW what they say because you know what sounds go with the letters?  Do you know ANYone who is a good reader who guesses?  How these people can spout pure nonsense that is contradicted by common observation is beyond me.]   

“It is easier for a reader to remember the unique appearance and pronunciation of a whole word like ‘photograph’ than to remember the unique pronunciations of meaningless syllables and spelling units.”
(p.146)  Smith, F. (1985). Reading without nonsense: Making sense of reading. New York: Teachers College Press.
[Of course it’s easier to memorize one word than to learn the sounds that go with each letter of the word.  But you should know that if a child memorizes “the unique appearance” of ten words, the child can read only those ten words.  However, if the child learns the sounds of ten letters, the child will be able to read 350 three-sound words, 4,320 four-sound words, and 21,650 five-sound words.  Which do YOU think is best for your child?  Moreover, if the child merely memorizes (but cannot sound out) “photograph,” what is the child likely to “read” when the child bumps into “phosphate,” “phonograph,” and “phony?”]

“Sounding out a word is a cumbersome, time-consuming, and unnecessary activity.  By using context, we can identify words with only minimal attention to grapho/phonemic cues. The message then seems clear: we should help children learn to use context first.” Weaver, C. (1988). Reading process & practice: From socio-psycholinguistics to whole language. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. 
[Is this a good idea?!  Teach children NOT to sound out words?  Instead, teach them to guess using context cues—pictures!  Then every youngster will be called “dyslexic” and will get special education—which won’t help, because many special ed teachers use the same weird ideas.]

“Accuracy, correctly naming or identifying each word or word part in a graphic sequence, is not necessary for effective reading since the reader can get the meaning without accurate word identification. Furthermore, readers who strive for accuracy are likely to be inefficient” (p.826) Goodman, K. S. (1974, Sept). “Effective teachers of reading know language and children.” Elementary English, 51, 823-828.
[This is another example of whole language nonsense.  In fact, readers who are taught—by whole language—to guess at words are inefficient readers—indeed, they are disabled readers—because they are often wrong.  They mistake lion and lying, this and these, the and there, car and can, etc.  I have tested thousands of poor readers, and that is exactly what they do—because that is what they have been TAUGHT to do. They are GOOD learners!  And there’s the tragedy!  Obviously, accurate reading is necessary for getting the meaning.  “The car is fast” does not mean the same thing as “The can is fat.”  And “Caution. Toxic fumes” does not mean the same thing as “Cauldron.  Box of tunes.”]

I hope you get the point.  Whole language and balanced literacy are crackpot schemes, snake oil, more theology than science, based on speculation and weird theories of reading that have nothing to do with reading and are discredited by serious research.  And they make your children illiterate.  [But the professors get tenure and the authors get royalty checks.]

Here is What You Want to See.

The following is supported by the vast majority of scientific research (not untested theories) on reading and is consistent with the President Bush’s Reading First program that provides funds to states and school districts to improve reading curricula.

First, your child’s beginning reading curriculum works on the five main reading skills.  Most of the early work is on phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle.
1.  Phonemic Awareness.  The ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words. There are about a dozen ways to hear and manipulate sounds in words—a dozen examples of phonemic awareness.  These are best taught from easier to harder.  For example,
a.  Identify words that sound the same and different.  run, sit, fun

b.  Rhyme.  can, man, fan,  rrr__

c.  Count the number of words in a sentence.
     The dog sat by the cat = 6 words

d.  Count the number of sounds (phonemes) in a word. 
     sat = /s/a/t/ = 3  sounds

e. Segment words by identifying the first, last, and middle (medial) sounds.  “What is the first sound in rrrruuuunnn?”

f.   Identify what word it would be if one sound were removed (phoneme deletion).   “Listen… sssaaaat.  Take out the ssss.  What word now?...”

g.  Identify what a word would be if a sound were replaced with another.  “Listen…. ssssiiiit.   Take away the ssss and put in fff.  What word now?...”

Phonemic awareness helps children learn to read and do other literacy skills.  How?  A student who can hear and manipulate the sounds (phonemes) in words, can more easily: (1) remember which sound goes with which letter; (2) sound out words [cat.  k/aaaa/t.]; (3) spell [How do you spell cat.  kaaaat . /k/ is c.  /a/ is a.  /t/ is t.” ]; and (4) detect and correct errors in reading and spelling.

Your child’s teacher should be able to tell you what phonemic awareness is and exactly why it is important, describe at least six kinds of phonemic awareness, provide about 15 minutes of instruction on it every day as a separate activity (not embedded in anything else), and should tell you exactly how she teaches it.  See http://reading.uoregon.edu/pa/index.php for more information on phonemic awareness.

2.    The Alphabetic Principle.  The ability to associate sounds with letters and to use this knowledge to sound out/decode words.   Notice that the alphabetic principle (sometimes called phonics) has two skill-parts.   
a.  The children know letter-sound or sound-symbol relationships: that m says /m/, i says /i/, and r says /r/. 

b.  When the student sees an unfamiliar word (rim) in a story book, the student uses letter-sound knowledge to sound out or decode the word— perhaps letter by letter at first, and then quickly.
     “The bike has a bent rrrriiiimmm….rim.” 

Using the alphabetic principle (shown above), the student knows exactly what the word says. 

In contrast, children who are not taught phonics in a systematic way, or who are not taught to use phonics knowledge as the first and most reliable strategy for identifying words, have to guess or “predict” what words say using “context cues,” such as pictures or what seems to fit the meaning of a sentence.  For example, instead of reading “The bike has a bent rim,” the student guesses…

     “The bike has a be…be..bell…belt….ri…ri…rip.  The bike has a belt rip.”

Often, these mis-taught children never learn to read skillfully.

You want your child’s teacher to know the two sides to the alphabetic principle (letter-sound relationships and sounding out/decoding words).  You want her to tell you why it is ESSENTIAL.  You want her to show you HOW she will teach these.  It should look something like this.
a.  “Boys and girls.  Look.  New sound.  This sound (points) is rrr.  Say it with me…. Your turn.  What sound?..”

b.  “Boys and girls.  I’ll show you how to sound out this word.   [“ran” is on the board or is written in large letters in the teacher’s book.]
”Here I go.”  [The teacher slowly moves her finger under the letters and clearly says the sounds.]  “rrraaaannn.”
”Say it with me.”  [The teacher slowly moves her finger under the letters as both she and the children say rrraaannn.]
”Your turn.  Sound it out.”  [Teacher runs her finger under the letters.]
”What word?  Say it fast!”  [The teacher quickly moves her finger under the word and children say “ran!”]
”Yes, ran.  You are SO smart.”

If a teacher teaches letter-sound relationships and sounding out as shown, or some version of it, then she knows what she is doing.  The instruction is focused on ONE thing.  She clearly MODELS the information.  She LEADS children to do it. Then she TESTS them (“Your turn”) to make sure they got it.  And she CORRECTS every error.  “That sound is rrrr.  What sound?”

Also you want to see the teacher moving from teaching letter-sound relationships to sounding out words--like this.
1. Teach a says aaa and m says mmm.
2. Then sound out am and ma.
3. Then teach s says sss.
4. Then sound of sam and mas.
5. Then teach (for example) that t says t (not tuh) and r says rrr.
6. Then sound out sat, rat, mat.
7. Then sounds for e, d, i, f, and other high-frequency sounds and words.
8. Then read simple stories made from these words.

In contrast, you do NOT want to see the teacher holding up a “big book,” reading the sentences and occasionally telling children the sound of a letter, and working on more than one or two letter-sounds during a lesson.  This is called “embedded” phonics instruction.  It is about 50% likely to result in poor readers.  There is just too much information for children to “get” which letters say what sounds.  They will quickly become confused and stop paying attention.

And you absolutely DO NOT want the teacher to say, “Well, phonics is only one skill among many” or “Phonics is just teaching meaningless associations.  Reading is about understanding.”  Also, you DO NOT want to hear a teacher say “There are multiple ways to recognize words” or “There are several different kinds of cues—for example, pictures, the shape of words, and what fits in the sentence.”  Or, “We teach children multiple strategies.” 

Any teacher who talks that way does not know the research, is into whole language, and is VERY likely to damage your child.  DO NOT BE FOOLED!  Direct, focused and systematic instruction on letter-sound relationships and on sounding out words is for many children the difference between becoming proficient vs. struggling their whole life.  Remember, guessing or predicting using “context cues” is what POOR readers do.

3. Fluency with Text.  The nearly effortless and automatic ability to read words accurately and quickly in connected text. Fluency is reading with accuracy and speed.  Fluency is important both for enjoyment and comprehension.  If a person struggles with words (gu…qu…guil…quil…) , the person will also struggle to figure out the meaning of sentences.  In fact, dysfluent readers spend so much time and effort trying to figure out what the separate words say, they can barely pay attention to the meaning of the sentence.  “The ju..jur….jury found her gu..qu…guil…quil…”) In other words, they learn very little from reading.

To help children read connected text (e.g., story passages) accurately and quickly, it is important to:
a.  Teach children to decode separate words (regular and irregular—“said,” “the”) accurately and quickly—which means (1) using knowledge of letter-sound correspondence (not guessing); and (2) blending the sounds into words.

b.  Teach children to self-correct.

c.  Provide practice on reading words enough times that it is almost automatic; that is, the words become “sight words.”  Note:  sight words are not words a student memorizes.  The student still knows how to decode them letter by letter.  Rather, the student has read the words so often that decoding takes only an instant.

d.  Provide practice reading text with which children are already accurate, encouraging them to read faster and faster without making errors (i.e., more words correct per minute, or wcpm).
Read more about fluency here.  http://reading.uoregon.edu/flu/

4.  Vocabulary.  Understanding (receptive) and using (expressive) words to gain and express meaning.  The three reading skills above—(1) phonemic awareness, (2) the alphabetic principle (letter-sound correspondence and the strategy for sounding out or decoding words), and (3) fluency—have to do with the mechanics of reading.  The last two skills—vocabulary and comprehension—have to do with making sense of the written word.

Vocabulary and comprehension cannot be taken for granted.  Students need to be taught how to get and express the meaning of words and passages.  This is especially important for children of low socioeconomic status.  These children are read to less often, hear fewer vocabulary words, and therefore understand and use far fewer words than children born to working class or professional class families. 

Following are some of the more important methods of vocabulary instruction.
1.  Read storybooks to children.

2.  Provide direct instruction of new vocabulary words by selecting important words in a story; giving explanations or definitions of the words; and giving children many chances to discuss and use the new words. 

3.  Teach older children to use morphemic analysis (analysis of word parts) to determine meaning.  For example,

“Bisect.  Bi means two.  Sect means divide.  So, bisect means divide into two parts.”

4.  Teach contextual analysis—inferring the meaning of a word from the context in which it occurs. 

“The fan’s oscillations cooled everyone in the room…Sometimes fans move back and forth.  If everyone was cooled, it probably means the fan blew on everyone.  So, oscillate probably means to move back and forth.”

You can find more on vocabulary here.  http://reading.uoregon.edu/voc/

5.  Comprehension.  Reading and reflecting on a text to gain meaning.  In other words, sentences don’t tell you what they mean.  You have to interact with the text—for example, ask questions, check to see if the text gives answers, reread, connect one sentence with a later sentence to get the flow of the argument or the flow of events in time.  These comprehension strategies are learned best when they are taught explicitly.  This kind of instruction includes the following.

1.  Set comprehension objectives; for example, children will answer specific literal (who, what, when), inferential (why), and evaluative (can you think of a better way…?) questions.

2.  Focus on main ideas in a story or informational text.

3.  Preteach vocabulary words important for comprehending the material.

4.  Read (with children) the material in manageable chunks, and ask literal, inferential, and evaluative questions on each chunk.

5.  Have children think about and discuss what I know; what I want to know; and what I learned.

You can learn more about comprehension here. http://reading.uoregon.edu/comp/index.php

The second thing you want to see is systematic and explicit instruction.  This is the most effective form of instruction.  But most reading teachers and most of the education professors disagree.  They think that systematic and explicit instruction is too “directive,” stifles children’ creativity (as though being illiterate enables you to be creative!), and is not needed.  “They will learn naturally.” 

However, most reading teachers and most of the education professors that teach them are flat wrong!  Respected scientific research in education and psychology shows clearly that instruction yields higher and faster achievement in more children (with and without learning difficulties) when instruction is systematic and explicit. 

But what does systematic and explicit mean?

Systematic means that:
1.  Instruction is given in a planned, logically progressive sequence of things to be taught.  For example, certain letter-sounds (a, s, i, m, r) are taught before other letter-sounds (b, n, y, sh) because they are easier to learn and are used more often.

2.  Instruction is guided and assessed with clearly defined objectives for everything taught.  Objectives are stated in terms of what children will do.

     Good objective.  Students are given two minutes to read the assigned passage from “The bear and the hare.” They read the passage at a rate of at least 100 words correct per minute.”

     Poor objective.  Students read story books quickly and get most words right.

3.  Instruction is focused precisely on the thing (knowledge unit) to be learned, as specified by the objective.  For example, if children are to read a passage at 100 correct words per minute, then that is exactly what the teacher focuses on during the ten minute fluency exercise during lessons.  She does not work on fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension at the same time.

4.  Instruction provides planned practice to strengthen all of the skills worked on.

5.  Instruction provides planned work on new examples (e.g., words, text) to foster application or generalization of previously taught knowledge.

6.  Instruction includes assessments designed and used in a timely fashion to monitor the different phases of instruction, or mastery: acquisition, fluency, generalization, retention, and independence.

Explicit means that:
1.  The teacher reveals in an obvious and clear way to children the knowledge she is trying to communicate.  She does this through demonstrations (modeling) and running commentary to children.  For example,

     “I’ll show you how to sound out this word.  [man is written on the board.] Listen.  I do NOT stop between the sounds.  [Teacher touches under each letter as she says the sound.]  mmmmaaaannn.  Now, I’ll say it fast.  [Teacher slides her finger under the word.] man.”

2.  The teacher ensures children’s attention to important features of an example or demonstration.  “Look [points to the word ate] here is a vowel, then a consonant, and then an e at the end [name].  So, we do NOT say the e at the end.”

Here is an example of instruction that is NOT explicit.  It is implicit—or buried in the teacher’s talk.  [You don’t want to see this!]

The teacher holds up a big book that has a paragraph from a story.  The children cannot read most of these words.  Also, they do not know which sounds most of the letters make. She reads the words slowly. Occasionally she points to the letter r and says rrr.  She expects that this will be enough for children to get the connection between the letter and the sound.  Of course, many children do not get it.

In contrast, explicit instruction would have the teacher hold up the big book and say,

“New sound. This sound (points to the letter r in ran) is rrr.  Say it with me… And this sound (points to r in car) is rrr.  Say it with me… And this sound (points to r in barn) is rrr.  Let’s see if you remember our new sound.  What sound is this?  (points to r in ran)… What sound is this?  (points to r in barn)… What sound is this?  (points to r in car)…. Now I’ll read the story.  (Teacher points to each r as she reads and has children say rrr and then read the whole word.)

As you can imagine, this explicit instruction of letter-sound correspondence is more likely to teach most children quickly.

Perhaps the most important thing you can do—since you can’t be sure that President Bush’s Reading First (which provides powerful incentives for schools to teach reading correctly, according to the research) will produce change in your children’s school—is to teach your own children beginning reading skills or at least be prepared if they begin to struggle.  This is not hard to do.  In fact, it is a piece of cake.  Just get “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.”  And your child will be reading in 100 easy lessons.  [I have no financial interest in the book.]