Teaching Reading Right
John McWhorter makes a somewhat overblown but essentially correct point about the screwed-up way we teach reading in this country. Basically, there are two main ways of doing this. One, “direct instruction,” involves an emphasis on phonics and teaching kids to sound words out. The other way emphasized teaching kids to recognize whole words. Research indicates that direct instruction is more effective, especially for poor children who often grow up in relatively language-poor environments, but the other method is more popular. It’s both strange and unfortunate that the education system is so unresponsive to this research and also strange and unfortunate that “education reform” efforts have so much focus on administrative structure of school systems and so little on these kinds of curriculum issues.
A word of caution I would offer is that the rhetoric in the column seems, in my view, to oversell this fix. I think it’s important not to set people up to believe that some proposed change is a silver bullet when that just sets the stage for a potential future backlash. Based on what we know, it would be much better in general—and especially for poor kids—to do more direct instruction. But there’s no need for subheads proclaiming “A solution for the reading gap between black and white children was discovered four decades ago.” Even the most egalitarian countries have statistically meaningful achievement gaps, and the United States is far from being the most egalitarian country. There’s no “solution” to the general existence of achievement gaps. There are, rather, policies that can be effective in narrowing them and this is one.
125 Responses to “Teaching Reading Right”
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January 14th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Ah yes, whole language. It works for some kids but for a lot it doesn’t give the kids any real patterns to analyze and confuses the hell out of them. My school only taught whole language and my mom had to teach me to read herself in the evenings because I just wasn’t getting any of it at school.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Institutional resistence DI with phonics comes from two sources: first, teachers simply don’t like having to read off a script. It’s not why they went into teaching. They went into teaching because they like the improvisational nature of performance in a classroom. Next, DI and phonics has been stigmatized as “something for poor kids.” Wealthier children in the suburbs can still function as readers using direct language approaches in part because they’ve likely already been exposed to reading from an earlier age, and if they fail to catch on, their parents will likely pour more resources into helping them. However, in an effort to prove that more poverty stricken schools are “just as good” as suburban schools, the inferior teaching methods of the suburban schools gets adopted (because it “encourages creativity!”).
I grew up as an upper middle class suburban kid. I won’t deny it. But in one of those accidents of my upbringing, I ended up spending the early years of my education in a Catholic school where I learned to read via phonics. It did me a world of good.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
It isn’t that hard to teach children how to read. Both phonics and whole word recognition need to be utilized. If a kid is beating his/her brains out on phonics, try whole word recognition.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Anecdotally, when my daughter was taking Spanish in HS, their method was to teach the meaning of a phrase, without stressing verb form. Conjugation of verbs was not taught at all first year. And, sadly, they aren’t even preparing them to be conversational in the language.
I took Spanish from elementary school on (grew up in New Mexico and Texas) and verb tenses were drilled from the start. We weren’t taught phrases, we were taught how to put together our own phrases.
Their aim seems only to prepare future construction foreman and meat-packing plant owners.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
To be fair to McWhorter, he almost certainly didn’t write that subhead.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
My town switched over to whole language in 1952 when I was in first grade, and nothing bad happened. Phonetics has been a right wing political football nationally ever since whole-language was introduced, though. And all the political footballs end up being punted at the inner city schools, which kills two birds (race and education) with one stone. The McWhorter piece seems to claim that whole-language hurts inner-city kids, even though it doesn’t hurt other kids.
One problem with the phonetic method is that English writing isn’t phonetic. There are a few rules and lots of exceptions.
The research wasn’t specified, but I’m wondering whether kids weren’t taken out of mediocre neglectful schools using whole-language and put into better schools using phonetics.
I favor mixed approach, but I think that that’s what a lot of schools use. The things people love about phonetics is that it’s traditions, structured, and authoritarian.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
“It isn’t that hard to teach children how to read. Both phonics and whole word recognition need to be utilized. If a kid is beating his/her brains out on phonics, try whole word recognition.”
I agree. It seems to me that a mix of phonics and whole language would be much better than either approach exclusively. It also seems to me that a little bit of phonics is very useful and goes a long way, but at some point you pass the threshold and have to switch to a whole language approach.
January 14th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Are there really teaching methods that completely eschew “sound it out” components?
January 14th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
“the rhetoric in the column seems, in my view, to oversell this fix”
Yes, McWhorter missed (or made the choice to not use) a large body of research on reading.
And there is a fair amount of evidence and research coming out showing some poor methodology in much of the research touting DI.
Few students will thrive solely on one system or the other; it would be like making students figure out multiplying by themselves or by memorizing the times table without application.
If all you need, or want to archive, is a basic reading skill then DI would be successful. But to be able to achieve more, explore more, be more fluent, then a whole language approach works better. For many students a WL approach brings a higher appreciation for the craft and variety of our language and instills more curiosity in exploring what our language is capable of. So, if reading chyrons is all that’s needed to be considered literate……
January 14th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Re: The other way emphasized teaching kids to recognize whole words. Research indicates that direct instruction is more effective, especially for poor children who often grow up in relatively language-poor environments, but the other method is more popular.
How can you possibly learn a language without sounding words out? Please tell me that ‘whole language’ BS is a joke. It sounds like, in Orwell’s famous phrase, an idea so dumb only an intellectual could believe it.
“Whole language” = “whole nonsense”. I suppose, though, Whole Language is one of those Stuff White People Like.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
One problem with the phonetic method is that English writing isn’t phonetic. There are a few rules and lots of exceptions.
Well, yes, but English certainly is pretty phonetic at the level of “bat” and “zip” and “frog” and “dog” and so forth. I think the important thing is to get kids to begin sounding out words for themselves as early as possible — and then hopefully they learn to love reading. Once they have that love, they can progress on their own to increase their reading ability (which, at that point, I suspect, does involve a lot of what is essentially a whole language approach).
January 14th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I’m a relatively young (mid 20s) kid from the most affluent suburb (given, not an affluent area to begin with) in the place I grew up and I never heard of this whole word stuff until 5 years ago. All I remember when I learned how to read was “sound it out!”
Of course, I hardly remember learning to read. I remember lying at the end of kindergarten that I knew how to, and then going to first grade and being in The Bears but not knowing how to read, and then all of a sudden I could read just fine.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Scratch that, The Bears were the lowest group. I was in The Lions. Tigers were the middle.
ROOOAR!
Kind of messed up that they were dividing us up at the very beginning of first grade, though.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I learned to read before I went to school, Hector. I had my parents read street signs to me, and I figured out a lot of words from context, then figured out the phonics from precedent. How many times do you see the word “milk” on a milk carton before you make the whole word connection? There is nothing mystical about it.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
And yes, I know it wasn’t just random splitting up because it turned out that most of the kids who were in my group stayed in my group for years.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
It wasn’t really a bad idea. Nobody reads phonetically unless you encounter a Russian name you’ve never seen before. The idea was to skip a step. It does actually work better for some kids. Many autistic children can only learn via sight word recognition. They are an extreme example though.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Wiley,
I learned to read before I went to school, too. My parents sounded words out for me letter by letter, so I learned. Thankfully, they were educated in an Asian country where children are taught phonetically, not according to hipster “Whole Language” nonsense. With this ‘whole language’ fad it’s no wonder that Asian countries are overtaking the United States in primary education.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Excellent content here and a nice writing style too – keep up the great work!
January 14th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Sound it out only gets you so far in English, due to the huge number of exceptions.
Whole word only gets you so far in English, because there are so many words that recognizing enough is impossible at that age.
And yes, I show up at my kids’ school and help in reading for first graders. And they teach phonics, but many of the students are recognizing whole words too.
Rite ore rong, one approach won’t cut it.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Hector, how does one learn to read Chinese phonetically?
January 14th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
McWhorter is brilliant, but like most brilliant black men he can’t bear to acknowledge the possibility that the persistent achievement gaps between blacks and whites are mostly due to nature and not nurture. DI would help ameliorate the gap, of course, but a lot of the resistance to it stems from this refusal to acknowledge any inherent differences in intellectual ability, on average, between different racial groups.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
“Hector, how does one learn to read Chinese phonetically?”
The Chinese have higher average IQs than whites. They can learn in ways that the average black kid can’t. Refusing to acknowledge this may help the self esteem of liberals, but it only hurts black kids.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Whether or not you identify whole word recognition with hipsters, Hector, it works for some kids. Some people see the forest. Some the trees.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Hector, how does one learn to read Chinese phonetically?
My understanding is that basically all kids in mainland China begin learning Mandarin through pinyin, which is a phonetic system. Characters come later.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
I work in a primary school, not as a classroom teacher. I observe teachers using a variety of methods to teach reading and if first graders struggle, they get extra help. I admire my teaching colleagues and respect them for their dedication to their students. I suppose it’s possible that there are teachers and school districts that do not put their students’ needs first but in over 20 years in one district I really haven’t seen it. Perhaps I’m lucky (as are the kids who attend the district I work for).
January 14th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
I guess from inside Fred’s bubble, the rest of the world looks like it’s behind the wall of a bubble.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Huh, interesting. I seem to recall from my youth that discarding “whole language” in favor of “phonics” was a big hobbyhorse of some right-wing organizations…I got junk mail about it from the Eagle Forum, I think…
January 14th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
What wiley said: Teach both.
When I was three years old (1970!), my grandparents got me the Hooked on Phonics of that generation. I was reading by the next year. In second grade, I got whole language instruction. I was reading four grade levels above my grade by third grade, and was an self-taught speed reader by fourth grade.
Teach both. Teach both. Teach both.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Fred – hmm, interesting stuff. Would you mind citing a scientific study that proves that blacks are ‘inherently different in intellectual ability’?
January 14th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
Re: Hector, how does one learn to read Chinese phonetically?
Mobius, I was really talking about South Asia. All the literate South Asian cultures use alphabets of some sort, as do the Southeast Asians and the Koreans.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
It’s been scientifically proven that IQ is inverse to penis size.
And we all know who has the biggest penises.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
I have two children. The first had absolutely no use for phonics, and picked up reading on his own using things like the Living Books series of computer programs, not because we pushed it but because he wanted to. The second learned mostly via phonics. It varies by child, even those with the same background… Eventually everyone has to learn to recognize words and not sound out phonemes in order to read fluently at a reasonable speed.
Whether one starts out with phonics or whole words is orthogonal to whether one uses direct instruction, which is a particular teaching method across different subjects. You could teach early reading without phonics using direct instruction.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
“as do the Southeast Asians and the Koreans.”
From what I’ve heard, the Korean alphabet is the world’s easiest to learn. I have a friend who learned it the first day he was there. He could read something and speak it, but he had no idea what he was saying (he later learned the language). I did the same with Vietnamese, but it took me three days to get all the accent marks figured out. But Vietnamese has more sounds, some of which are difficult for Westerners.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
One thing’s been left out of the discussion, the political context. I think it’s true that the pendulum in educational research has swung toward phonics, much as new math went out of fashion (and who knows whether another parallel to non-drill fads, hands-on learning in many subjects, will as well). And it’s true that it’s probably good to ride out most fashions while sticking to basics like phonics but moderating it with enough concern for meaning to help students with English’s madness, to motivate and ground them with real meaning, and to encourage critical thinking — in other words a balance leaning heavily toward phonics.
And yet in practice, Matt seems ignorant that this column is not alone in overselling. It’s been a major right-wing talking point on education and with something of the same effect as with others Matt has fallen for in education. The idea is, don’t worry about the factors that a liberal might think might affect education (inequalities in school funding, crumbling schools, salaries and hours that’d never draw anyone to teaching, class sizes, effects of poverty and family and community). Who needs money? You morons just do it right (phonics) and get held accountable for it (merit raises, no unions) and you’ll be fine.
Matt, it’s not about how to teach. It’s about a political scam.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Our son had a speech impairment. He taught himself to write and spell out words by four, and could recognize whole words like “Nature” (from PBS), but the endless phonics exercises his teacher made him do in 2nd grade were a meaningless ordeal for him. He never “got” it. It was a struggle but by fourth grade he caught up and surpassed others who had had an early lead.
The danger of phonics (or any hamfisted dogma) is that it can kill motivation.
There really is no one way to teach reading.
The most important thing is not to discourage the child and to nurture a love of language with plenty of songs, stories, and poetry, I think.
There is only one way to teach English spelling, however, and that is one word at a time, encouraging the kids to close their eyes and visualize the letters.
I believe penmanship also needs to be taught (as someone who has very lousy handwriting). Form drawing and calligraphy help kids deal with their changing bodies, which means the muscle movements have to be recalibrated as they grow.
January 14th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
“Reading” involves a number of processes. Sounding out words is one. Making sense of sentences and paragraphs is another. I taught 6th grade and the kids could sound out words just fine, making you think for a few weeks that they could read. But it quickly became clear that they weren’t making any meaning.
Phonics is good for the first skill, but the latter mainly comes from reading a lot. Reading a lot happens when people enjoy doing it. And that happens more often when you’re interacting with rich, authentic texts, not carefully constructed but sterile phonics textbooks.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Fred has just won the award for greatest spoof in the blogosphere.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
There is no need for teachers to be forced to choose one method over the other. Both are useful for certain circumstances. Neither is useless. Teachers should have multiple methods of instruction to fit the specific needs of their students.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I wish Matt would quit talking about education because he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Neither does the writer of the article that he references. Direct instruction has a place as does whole language instruction. Not every kid learns the same way. The problem with children is that when a child comes to school and hasn’t slept, been fed, not been read to by an adult, doesn’t speak the language at home, etc., the child will have a harder time learning no matter what happens at school. The best things that could happen is pre-school for poor kids and breakfast. They also need to get more attention. I was in an elementary school class and there were 32 kids. 5 didn’t speak the language, no aides. There were kids that didn’t show up everyday. The teacher was doing a great job but you could see it wasn’t going to happen for some of those kids. The others were going to fall behind because he had to spend so much time with the problem children.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
This post is seriously flawed, first, by failing to explain what the Direct Instruction really is, and second, by failing to understand what whole language is (and the political motivations behind attacks on it).
First: Direct Instruction does *not* simply refer to “an emphasis on phonics and teaching kids to sound words out”. Instead, as described here, the primary feature of Direct Instruction is detailed (critics would say “canned”) scripts for teachers that are to be followed quite precisely in the classroom. Emphasizing phonics may be a big part of DI for reading, but it’s really the scripting part of Direct Instruction that rings so false for many teachers. Of course, you might say that teachers have a vested interest in keeping their work, well, interesting, but at least be accurate about what DI is.
Second, this propagates the myth that “sounding out words” is not part of a whole language approach to learning. Nonsense — whole language, as least as described about a decade ago by an educator I know, includes learning the sounds made by letters and combination of letters, and certainly sounding out words is an essential reading skill that is not neglected in whole language programs. But whole language does put a strong emphasis on learning to read words in context, as part of literature.
Looking at things from 2009, it looks as though the “whole language” versus “phonics” controversy is not about A versus B, but more about where best mix of time lies between learning sounds and learning meaning and context — something that can be adjusted for the needs of individual learners. But Direct Instruction is something else — not just a phonics program, but a scripted approach which seems to leave little room for innovation by teachers to respond to the individual needs of their students. Your post — and McWhorter’s article — should have told us at least that much.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Not to piss all over the general thrust of this post, but when you take a step back and look at any instructional solution, including class size, curriculum, or head-start, the effect that poverty has on performance outweighs any other measure. Now, I’ve read this blog long enough to know that Matt is aware of this research. So let’s stop wandering around in the weeds and focus on the big issue. If we improve the prosperity and safety of the bottom 15% of America’s families we can dramatically improve the performance of our students.
In the meantime, why can’t teachers be trained to use both methods and apply them to each student based on what works in the classroom? Oh, and I’m professionally familiar with what passes for decent statistical studies in the field of education and I have to say, it’s like the stone age compared to quantitatively informed social sciences (economics). I wouldn’t radically change our curriculum in favor of a one-size-fits-all solution based on current research.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Matt can’t even spell, so the idea his opinion counts for anything is a joke.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
I’m not sure about Chinese itself, but the Kanji part of Japanese has a phonetic component. With 40 phonemes (about the same as English) but about 2000 characters for literacy, multiple characters have the same phoneme. And most characters have two pronuciations depending on the usage in the word, on-yomi or kun-yomi, which has to do if the character meaning or just it’s pronuciation was imported from China. (and this is independent of hiragana and katakana, which are purely phonetic systems -> and easier than english with each having a one to one phoneme to character corespondence)
January 14th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
I agree, RL. It also helps when reading is a regular part of family life.
My last charge learned how to look up words in the unabridged before she started the second grade. I think that fosters a certain amount of independence and a relationship with words and meaning that all children should have by the time they are twelve.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Did you just get lucky, or did you know that the author of “The Pet Goat” (the book Bush is shown holding from that photo taken on 9/11/01) is the founder of the Natioanl Institute for Direct Instruction?
January 14th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Kids who know more words (read “high socio-economic status”) need less sounding out than kids who know fewer words (low SES), because in general, good readers recognize words by their shape rather than their spelling. If the word is part of their active vocabulary, it’s easier to recognize that way, so easier to read. Kids starting further back need more phonics.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Actual teachers in actual classrooms use a combination of techniques including memorization of the most common words encountered in texts (so-called “sight words”) and phonics-based strategies that entail teaching kids to listen for beginning and ending sounds, then vowel sounds, digraphs and blends. Finally reading teachers read good children’s books to the class, often with large editions of books where the class can follow along, as well as being asked to predict what will happen next, or asked why a character did what they did. This dichotomy between “whole language” and phonics is false. As for magic bullet curricula, as usual there is very little solid evidence favoring any of them, and plenty of evidence that the usual Bush Administration corruption and inside dealing is involved. See for example:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092901333_pf.html
January 14th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Having just graduated from a teacher education program (though admittedly for secondary ed), I can say that from within the university, these two methods have different names, and the issue has been popularly dubbed the Whole Language vs. phonics debate. In current teacher education programs, there seems to be some consensus that a combination of the two approaches is more appropriate. In younger readers, phonics (as far as it is applicable) is stressed, but as children progress, word parts are taught. There are very few circumstances in which an adult reader “sounds out” a word. Rather, we recognize word parts, and we make meaning from what we know about these word parts. In many high schools, word parts are now taught as part of the English curriculum. For anyone who is interested, Kylene Beers’ book When Kids Can’t Read is considered a bible by many reading teachers. Although, again, to worship this approach like any other is to espouse the pendulum tendency that has plagued our profession, but Beers offers some pretty solid practical advice for the astute practitioner.
The problem with teaching phonics to secondary (high school) students, is that it’s developmentally inappropriate – again, there are few situations in which adult readers (or children, for that matter) “sound it out.” Phonics may be a partial solution for beginning readers, but for struggling older readers, word parts and emphasis on fluency (whole word recognition) seem to be a more appropriate response. The more “sight” words a reader possesses (those words a reader can immediately recognize), the greater their fluency, and the more word parts they are familiar with, the more likely they will have the ability to “attack” unfamiliar words – just as skilled readers do.
As with many professions, education debates tend to take a frustratingly polarizing direction. I think balance is key here.
January 14th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Direct instruction is a method of teaching; phonics is a type of content. Direct instruction can be used to deliver lessons on any content area, although it lends itself best to simple, concrete learning objectives. Whole word can be taught through direct instruction.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
“Even the most egalitarian countries have statistically meaningful achievement gaps”
Whatever rationalization helps you sleep at night.
The reality is that use of phonics is incredibly simple, there is no logical reason to continue using the whole word method, and neglecting phonics altogether. Those above who mention a combination method certainly make a good case.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
I suppose I should dust off my MSEd Reading Specialist graduate education. I got my reading specialist Masters over a decade ago. People don’t really even talk about reading instruction like this anymore. This article might have been current in 1992 but even then reading research was all about a balanced approach that included phonemic awareness and comprehension.
Phonics is a political word that lumps together phonetic awareness (which everyone wants), analytical phonics (learning phonics from word parts) and synthetic phonics (learning the sounds and letter-sound relationships in isolation). Depending on who you are teaching, each of these have their place.
The main rule of the reading teacher profession is that most kids will learn to read no matter what we do to them. The fighting is over the percentage that don’t.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Matt,
Well said. You’re learning from me.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
And I learnt about penises and IQ from you Steve.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Perhaps both methods work with different effectiveness for different people… individual brains are very different.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
In general, phonics is better for kids who are in danger of never learning to read, while whole word is better for helping smarter kids read faster.
Not surprisingly, people in the education industry with graduate degrees tend to prefer using programs that work best on highly literate people, and dislike using boring fundamentalist programs that are intended to get not-very-bright kids up to a minimum level of competence.
I call this the Be-Like-Me syndrome. The education industry is full of people who were teachers’ pets as kids and then spent years getting advanced degrees. They don’t empathize well with kids who don’t like going to school, who just want to get out of school and get blue collar jobs that pay money. So, the advanced degree folks in the education industry are always coming up with programs that would have worked swell on them when they were students, but are useless on many of their actual students.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Another example of why the young, childfree generation of bloggers should spend a bit of time volunteering in actual classrooms before they opine on educational policy. Our school district, like most I am aware of, uses a variety of methods to teach reading including (**gasp**) _both_ phonics and whole word. We have 95% of our kids, including both the locals and the inner-city transfers, reading by the end of kindergarten and most of the remaining 5% by the middle of 1st grade.
Cranky
January 14th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
Fred,
I appreciate it. That was a difficult field study to do – “in the wild” indeed; measure 100 Caucasian penises, 100 Asian (not South Asian), and 100 black penises.
95% of the African-American penises were larger than the Caucasian penis size, and 99% of the Asian penises. I think that the single huge Japanese penis was, frankly, an outlier.
70% of the Caucasian penises were bigger than the Asian penises.
There is no way that this was simple random – it’s so many standard deviations, and marks on a graph in relation to IQ perfectly, and yet white liberals won’t acknowledge this truth, and in so doing hold African-Americans down.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
McWhorter’s point can be generalized. For example, strict discipline can be counterproductive for student achievement at an upscale school, but it’s absolutely crucial at an underclass school if anybody is going to learn anything.
For example, there was a controversy at a public high school in Berkeley a few years ago where the white parents (many of them UC Berkeley professors) wanted less discipline, less structure, more free-form and creative classes. Meanwhile the black parents (most of them well above the national average for blacks in income and education, but still lagging the white parents of Berkeley significantly) wanted their kids to enjoy discipline, fundamentals, the Three-Rs, and lots and lots of order.
It’s similar to the reason that so many blacks make a career in the U.S. Army — they find it a good, structured environment for them.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
So true Steve.
Though I’ve had many African-Americans with huge penises hold me down.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Dear LarryMoeandJesus:
Still spewing homophobia everywhere, I see… If you just came out of the closet, you’d likely find your stress level much relieved, and wouldn’t feel the need to go around claiming to be me.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Hector, you’re ignorant. As I pointed out, whole-word teaching has been used for fifty years in this country, and it’s worked pretty well. I’m glad you learned to read, though, and I congratulate you on that!
January 14th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Which ones are you and which ones are fake Steve?
Nice that you play the homophobia card, when you have portrayed yourself as the Joan of Arc of political correctness.
So have you recanted on the article with this title?
Gay Gene Or Gay Germ?
and of course your insightful take on transgender issues
and to finish off, the real reasons gays want to marry
And you dare play the homophobe card.
scum.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Shorter Fred:
I am a tumbling, tumbling dickweed.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Mythbusters should do a literacy instruction edition. It is false to suggest that whole-language-oriented instructors eschew phonics. It’s also false to say that direct instruction necessarily implies phonics. It implies teaching from a script, which I don’t think anyone should expect teachers to be that excited about. The fact is, few teachers are committed to one approach over the other, but rather most are committed to using the techniques that are appropriate for each child. That is actually the central tenet of modern education theory: meeting the needs of all children. It’s even encoded in federal law (hence the massive burden to states of unfunded federal special education mandates).
January 14th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Ditto Cranky Observer. I’m sure the DC schools could use plenty of volunteer help, Matt; go spend some time in actual classrooms with actual kids and see what’s going on. I’ve done that, not just in my daughter’s classes or schools, and consistently, what you say about education doesn’t match my experience.
January 14th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Oh sure. They practise “direct instruction” in a number of Canadian elementary schools. The end result, of course, is kids who can’t spell properly.
And there is also the little matter of understanding stems, suffixes, and prefixes which is thoroughly incomprehensible within a phonetic context. English is a very Latin-derived language; to not understand word structure is to not understand words at all. Did they go by phonetic instruction at Dalton, Yglesias? Yea, I thought not.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
How can I be a homophobe and handle that many penises James?
Hundreds were measured and I’m sure some of them were gay, as some got semi-erect to my touch. I think I would be classed as a ‘bear’.
To the tell the truth about homosexuals does not make me a homophobe, any more than telling the truths about blacks makes me a racist.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
By the way, if I had kids, I would never let them go through phonetic instruction. What a load of croak. I didn’t need that stuff and English was my second language; I did fine. I don’t see how other kids can’t do the same.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
As an ESOL teacher, I would say, between giving alternative assessments, dealing with oversized classrooms, having to deal with problem students as we are the ’second teacher’ in the classroom, being in charge of all paperwork based on the student, having to attend any and all in-services, and constantly dealing with student absences and lack of parent participation, blaming the style of reading instruction on how students learn is kind of silly. What I have found is, students who come to class, do their work, and have support at home do the best. Students who have none of the above listed traits do the worst. With very few exceptions, SPED and brand-new ESOL students being the exception, this has been true in the two schools I’ve taught at.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Why don’t we change to a phonetic spelling system instead of this nonsensical crap that is American English. I remember reading some guy in the WSJ who had made it his life’s mission to get words spelled the way the sound. Of course we would have to pick a dominate dialect, and I for one nominate Boston, because its wicked cool, and we wouldn’t need to fill up lots of draws with spelling books.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Quite interesting. I’m starting a master’s in Applied Linguistics, so this sort of thing will come up soon.
Actually, I’d be interested in seeing MY talk about ebonics (AAVE).
January 14th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
What (among others) #40, #47, #48, #51, #56, and #65 said – this post is weirdly dated and disengaged from current practice. Not that there aren’t occasional exceptions, but it’s all about various kinds of mixed instruction nowadays.
Hector, what on earth it is with you and hipsters? First you’re sneering at me and tonemos in the Rice thread for resorting to “hipster discourse about agency” (ie, pointing out that antichoicers who piously intone that women who get abortions are victims not perpetrators are in fact full of crap); now you’re got them somehow tangled up in whole language? Did a six-fingered hipster kill some beloved family member of yours, or something? Do you even know what a hipster is?
While the parody Sailer and (partly) parody Fred comments are kinda funny, what some luckily blissful readers might not know is how close they are to reality (in terms of racist crap; I make no claims or guarantees as to their sexual preferences or predilections). After all, one of the most (in)famous current researchers in the psuedo-field of “race realism” is one J. Philippe Rushton, whose work our little Stevie has reviewed and praised, and which Fred probably absorbed through a grimy kind of osmosis. One of Rushton’s main ‘contributions’ is what Sailer calls the Rule of Three (and I always think of as his Goldilocks principle – too big, too small, just right) – which is roughly displayed in all its glory in (real?) Fred’s #22 & 31. And of course it’s Rushton who got in trouble for . . . well, as wikipedia puts it:
“Articles in the Canadian press based on interviews with Rushton’s first-year psychology students claim that in 1988 Rushton surveyed student participants by asking “such questions as how large their penises are, how many sex partners they have had, and how far they can ejaculate.”… First-year psychology students at UWO are required “to participate in approved surveys as a condition of their studies. If they choose not to, they must write five research papers. Also, many students feel subtle pressure to participate in order not to offend professors who may later be grading their work. However, if a study is not approved these requirements do not apply at all.”…For not telling them they had the option to not participate without incurring additional work, Rushton was barred from using students as research subjects for two years….
Also in 1988, Rushton conducted a survey at the Eaton Centre mall in Toronto where 50 whites, 50 blacks, and 50 Asians were paid to answer questions about their sexual habits. For not receiving the UWO’s ethics committee’s explicit permission, the administration at the University of Western Ontario reprimanded Rushton. This was “a serious breach of scholarly procedure,” said University President, George Pederson….”
“By the way, if I had kids, I would never let them go through phonetic instruction. What a load of croak. I didn’t need that stuff and English was my second language; I did fine. I don’t see how other kids can’t do the same.”
a) kids learn differently. A small % pick up reading seemingly like they pick up language – just provide household literacy exposure plus motivation and stir. Some will need extensive support of one kind or another. A lot of kids are in the middle in some respects, but possibly best served by various kinds of approaches. Etc.
b) Were you already literate in your first language – had you already ‘cracked the code’, so to speak – by the time you learned to read English? If so, do you remember how you learned?
January 14th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
James:
“Which ones are you and which ones are fake Steve?
Nice that you play the homophobia card, when you have portrayed yourself as the Joan of Arc of political correctness.
So have you recanted on the article with this title?
Gay Gene Or Gay Germ?…..
And you dare play the homophobe card.”
James, how exactly was that Sailer article you posted
the same as Fake Sailer’s stuff such as this for example:
“That was a difficult field study to do – “in the wild” indeed; measure 100 Caucasian penises, 100 Asian (not South Asian), and 100 black penises.”
You didn’t explain how. Maybe you could enlighten us.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
“Actually, I’d be interested in seeing MY talk about ebonics (AAVE).”
Oh sweet jesus no.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
I doubt that this will still be read but this all must begin with an important reality…we don’t have an agreed upon theory of how reading is learned. The “Simple View” posits a developmental progression:
1. Phonemic Awareness
2. Phonics
3. Fluency
4. Vocabulary
5. Comprehension
There are other theories. One place to look is the work of Dr. Carol Connor at the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR). Note this article, Beyond the Reading Wars: The effect of classroom instruction by child interactions on early reading. Here the key is that effective reading teachers need to be aware of what stage each child is within the classroom. This will dictate which tactic to use.
Of course, you’ll need a special kind of teacher to be sensitive to this.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:04 am
Dan S.,
You know exactly what I mean by “hipster”. It’s a catch-all term for all the trends I despise in the modern world, and it’s meant to be deliberately abusive (much like “theofascist” and other favorite words of the hipsters).
January 15th, 2009 at 12:11 am
I’m always skeptical of right-wing columnists citing studies and test scores, especially when they drag race into it. I wonder what studies and test results they left on the tree when they did their customary cherry-picking.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:17 am
My first language was Chinese; I am, for the most part, literate in that language, except for the character strokes, which are easy to forget over an extended period of time even for those who conducted their whole lives in Chinese. I didn’t start learning English until age 9; as far as I am aware of, my first language was of negligible assistance.
I learned by two approaches, mainly; for spoken English, via osmosis and immersion at school. For written English, via reading. I really, frankly, can’t see how if someone who started 3 or 4 years late and had not the benefit of an Anglophone home can master the language, someone with much more conducive circumstances cannot. To me the degradation of standards has much more to do with just that: degradation of standards. My independent high school was the only one I know of in the region which actually devoted an entire term of English class to the study and memorisation of grammar and syntax.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:28 am
Research indicates that direct instruction is more effective, especially for poor children who often grow up in relatively language-poor environments
How about some citations to back up this statement? Republican lite… brought to you by ThinkProgress and Matt Yglesias.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:32 am
It looks like the micromanagers got it wrong again. Teachers, when unionized and expected to under perform use the laziest and lest effective method to teach kids.
I wonder how long it would have taken private schools funded by vouchers to figure out the best way to teach kids.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:52 am
Comments 39, 40, and 41 really get at the crux of the problem, but -g at 75 by far gives the most valuable information in this entire thread. As one who has to battle poorly-written state standards in the hopes of providing scientifically-based resources for teachers on a daily basis, I have to balance state-mandated ideas of best practice with actual best-practice policies, as some have enumerated above. For a very basic (and barely more than superficial) comparison of where the country lies in sound educational expectations (similar to what MY provides in this very poorly researched post [and in that, I have to echo other commenters' sentiments that MY should quit posting on local educational policy issues like reading instruction]), look at the California standards for English/Language Arts Education to those of poorly conceived by Texas . California is a step in the right direction. Texas is by far living in the past, being burdened by the heavy weight of far-right conservatism [for added humor, note that the head of the TX State Board of Education is a....wait for it...dentist].
January 15th, 2009 at 1:20 am
People who think whole-word reading instruction is superior to phonics forget what every English-as-second-language speaker knows: English has a whole lot of words, more (I think) than any other widely spoken language. Worse, a number of very different words are spelled similarly (e.g., slat and slate, bar and bare, not and note).
If you learn letter sounds, learn to recognize long and short vowels, etc., you’ve learned to decode most words on a page and, in most cases, how to pronounce them. And you can usually guess how words are spelled from hearing them.
I have never understood how phonics became unfashionable, even controversial. Is it just because it’s old?
Next: Checking arithmetic by casting out nines. Anybody else remember that trick?
January 15th, 2009 at 1:27 am
I should add that the most widely used adult literacy instruction program employs . . . wait for it . . .
Phonics.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:49 am
Hey Jimboslice! I’m for the phonetic spelling, too. While we’re at it, we could throw in a gender neutral pronoun.
It’s amazing that some people have such strong feelings about phonics vs. whole word. Clearly, if you’ve been through kindergarten, first, and second grade without learning how to sound out basic words, you need some individual attention to find out what will work for you and to identify any problems with learning, seeing, hearing–whatever.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:23 am
I suspect McWhorter has never sat down with young black boys who can’t read and discovered why that is. Nor does he seem to understand what whole language is–it has very little to do with “whole word recognition”. Instead, whole language is more about learning in context, using many different clues to unlock a word. If you’ve ever tried to read a foreign language of which you only speak a few words, you’re using whole language techniques to unlock it.
We all learn to read by using whole language, and learn to read DESPITE phonics. More than half the words in the English language don’t follow fonics rules.
Here’s the problem: I remember sitting outside the classroom with Chris, who’d moved to a suburban school from inner city Chicago. He struggled to read a first grade reader, sounding out the words successfully using the phonics rules he’d been taught. But I sensed something was wrong. “The rabbit. jumped. over the. log.” Do you know what a log is? I asked. He shook his head. Nor did he know what a path was, which the rabbit had been hopping on.
What good does it do to sound out words if you don’t know the meanings? I can sound out words in Spanish and French, but that doesn’t mean I can read it.
McWhorter needs to get himself into a classroom, or rather, sit outside the classroom and learn one-on-one why children can’t read.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:34 am
If I remember correctly from reading theroy, most adult fluent readers mostly use something like ‘whole language’ strategies, they don’t mentally sound out letters or even individual words, they take in groups of words as wholes. That might be part of the logic behind trying to teach word recognition as a way of learning to read.
All the research I’ve seen indicates that’s not the optimal way for teaching most kids to read though some kids thrive on it and it doesn’t make much difference one way or the other for others. The problem is that there’s a significant minority of kids who can’t make the first hurdle of recognizing whole words. This is why the extreme whole language approach has more or less disappeared and some degree of sounding words out is almost always incorporated.
January 15th, 2009 at 3:01 am
I don’t think George W. Bush was staffing the Department of Housing Education and Welfare in 1968.
Project Follow Through, America’s longest, costliest and perhaps, most significant study of public school teaching methods quietly concluded this year [1994]…
Started in 1968, Follow Through was intended to help kids, from kindergarten through the third grade, continue the progress they had made in Head Start. But the Feds also wanted the find out which instructional methods delivered the most bang for the bucks. So they funded 22 vastly different educational programs in 51 school districts with a disproportionate number of poor children. Standardized test results were collected from almost 10,000 Follow Through children, as well as from kids not in the Follow Through program.
Abt Associates in Cambridge, Mass., analyzed the numbers, then issued the verdict. When it came to academic performance, children who participated in the Direct Instruction method blew their peers out of the classroom. More important, later evaluations of 1,000 Direct Instruction graduates showed that they were still ahead of their cohorts in their senior year of high school.
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~adiep/ft/tashman.htm
January 15th, 2009 at 8:07 am
If you are surprised by the reaction to this post about the methods for teaching reading, take a look at he way many schools now teach math. It’s based on the textbook Everyday Mathematics. If ever there was a travesty in our schools, it was the day this book was introduced in our schools. So with whole word for teaching reading and everyday math for teaching math now practiced by many if not most school districts, don’t be surprised if this generation can’t read and can’t count.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:57 am
For three days now I’ve been waiting for someone to note the mathematical challenges that Republican leaders face when claiming that they represent over 50 percent of American voters. The Scream: “They must be listened to!!”
I am trying to ponder that point when some states have Senators of both parties. So Mitch McConnell and that other guy at the top are getting away with some pretty desperate and spurious logic. We already know that the House is dominated by Democrats…and is population based…so the over 50 percent idea most be based on the Senate. (The Executive…we know is over 50 percent Democratic.)
so where can Repugs say they are have represenatation of 50 percent plus? Governors? California does have a Repug. Gov. but Two Dem Senators? So who gets the D for that state? Or do they claim if One Senator from a state is Repub. and one is Democrat…that state is in their column as a Republican one. (and not a Dem. one?)
With that sort of logic Democrats could probably say they are like representing 75 percent of the country (counting any dog catchers and justices of the peace that happen to be Dem. could even up the percentage more..) .
This kind of illogic is frightening. No wonder under Reagan-era dominated logical fallacies our 401’s tanked and we’re racing to the be a Third world country with massive poverty due to Republican mathematical models. ‘Cuz they represent more than 50 percent of Us!
January 15th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Hey #35 – Sounds like you’re talking about the Steiner method
taught in Waldorf schools. A wonderful way to teach and learn.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:50 am
I’m flabbergasted that an intelligent guy like Matt–an one in a committed relationship with an education policy expert, no less!–could be so credulous about McWhorter’s polemic. As numerous commenters have pointed out, McWhorter bungles the basic facts, presents an extremely tendentious version of the current state of debate, and ignores research that doesn’t conform to his ideological allegiance to phonics-only instruction.
Any claim that a particular curriculum or pedagogical technique is always and everywhere appropriate should be viewed with suspicion. And any op-ed piece that purports to have a silver bullet for closing the achievement gap should be dismissed out of hand.
The “liberals refuse to teach phonics” trope is a fiction. In truth, there really is a faction in the debate over reading education that slavishly clings to a narrow orthodoxy for essentially ideological reasons, and that’s the right-wingers who favor “phonics only” reading instruction.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:59 am
“Any claim that a particular curriculum or pedagogical technique is always and everywhere appropriate should be viewed with suspicion.”
Why trot out that straw man? The point is that the sort of technique that is appropriate and effective for marginal students, including most black students, is different from the one that is appropriate for gifted kids and that most teachers find interesting
January 15th, 2009 at 10:00 am
From the nonsense that “Fred” is spewing, is anyone else here remembering “Fred Jones”? He was a frequent commenter at Ezra Klein’s a while back. What a douchebag.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Further to 91, I should also point out that I have a first grader who is currently learning to read, and who has some difficulties keeping up with the rest of the class in her primarily affluent school district. Contrary to right-wing myth, her teachers regularly challenge her to “sound it out”. But they also teach her (correctly, it seems to me) to use a variety of reading strategies: sounding out unfamiliar words, memorizing certain “sight words”, inferring the word from context, etc. When she reads to me, I can frequently detect her piecing together the sounds from an unfamiliar word. With her sitting on my lap, I can clearly sense that this is a tedious, frustrating process for her, so I encourage her to be persistent. By contrast, when she encounters a string of familiar words, she flies through with ease and pleasure. It’s clear to me that “sounding it out” is a crutch to get her over the hump of memorizing the words by sight, at which point she will have achieved true fluency in reading. So the notion of teaching phonics exclusively seems horribly wrongheaded, from my limited personal experience in the matter.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:30 am
I have a first-grader like Knecht, who is learning both with phonics and whole language. As she progresses, phonics are of less and less use to her– as others have said, when the words are ‘cat’ and ‘ball’ there’s no problem, but she’ll stumble over something with phonemes that are unfamiliar or that haven’t already been covered in class. As the consensus– and I believe the conventional wisdom at this point– indicates, a mix of both styles seems to be most productive.
George Bernard Shaw was a great advocate of making spelling consistent but he never got very far, and as far as I can tell we borrow too many words too quickly from other languages to ever make it work.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:47 am
There were a lot of Americans who wanted a language reform. I believe Dale Carnegie was one. American English is the only major language that didn’t go through a language reform in the last 100 years. Irish, Russian, French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Japanese…all had language reforms. So perhaps part of our “phoenic problem” lies there. America seems to be a country with a “can’t do” attitude. Switch to metric? “We can’t do it”, I’m told. “It is too expensive”. Would it cost more that the 1 trillion + we’ve spent in Iraq, or the 800 billion + we’ve spent on bailing out Wall St.? No, but people want any excuse to avoid change and hard work. Americans are quite a lazy lot.
As far as phoenics go, they are an invaluable too. I still use it today when I encounter a new word, such as pecuniary. I was taught phoenics, and it is funny that people hate it so much. Is it because you found it boring and tedious? Some here have even lied about its shortcomings, claiming that a first grader didn’t know what a log was. Phoenics exercises come with pictures, so you know what you are supposed to be saying.
Overall, there seems to have been a concerted effort to destroy education in America. Once upon a time teacher’s set the standards for grading, and if the students didn’t meet it they didn’t get good grades. If no one did the work deserving of an A, then no one got an A. Today schools are filled with “self esteem building” and grade inflation. Is it then any wonder that our schools are slipping further and further behind the rest of the world? Is it any wonder that we are throwing money at the problem to no avail?
January 15th, 2009 at 11:03 am
I sent our younger child to Waldorf kindergarten and later to Waldorf School, but both our kids learned to read in public schools. Waldorf has no special ed. and would not have been suitable for our older child. Though I wish he had gone there.
I myself learned in a British school overseas and we did a lot of poetry and bible stories and Greek and Roman myths and history. It was heaven. Coming back the the US was a terrible let-down.
I was a somewhat late reader, but I don’t remember it as a chore, or even an issue. I just felt bad at being behind and was extra motivated — of course I was also younger than most of the other kids.
My grandmother was a public school teacher in the US (in Harlem) — both my grandmothers were teachers — and she recited reams of poetry that she used to teach (or perhaps that she had learned to recite as a girl) just for pleasure, as we were doing chores — that was the way people did her day. The Calico Cat, The Grandmother with the Slippery Knee (Walter de La Mare). The Lost Doll. Maybe she and I just liked poetry. In any cases I honesty thing the aesthetic dimension is a great motivator. She was a great reader, too, as were my mother and father.
The Waldorf method is extremely good (in theory) but the practice is a little thin and anti-intellectual, with a tendency to dogma. I think parents and teachers don’t fully believe in it — or something. However, I think it is the best thing going.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
One might think that so-called “progressives” would be interested in learning about how, say, the Cubans or the Vietnamese achieved near-universal literacy (in the latter case, going from a largely illiterate peasant population) in a generation. Or, say, the Venezuelans today, who are currently pursuing a major effort to achieve universal literacy. I guarantee that they didn’t use hipster BS like “whole language”.
But then, the Stuff White People Like hipster cosmopolitan crowd has never shown much interest in actually learning about the history of other countries. Not when it would get in the way of feel-good, child-centered multicultural nonesense like “whole language”.
I see no reason, by the way, why there should be a ’spelling reform’ in English. The English Language is what it is, and today’s hipsters have no right to try and change it just because their poor educational preparation leaves them unable to understand it.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Hector, first of all, I assure you that ed-school scholars and policymakers are the least-hip people around. Second, as you can see from this very thread, there is active, vibrant discussion amongst we yuppie hipsters regarding different methods of reading instruction, even if you delete the Sailer and Fred comments.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
The Waldorf method is extremely good (in theory) but the practice is a little thin and anti-intellectual
That’s a pretty fallacious claim. Eton, Harrow, and Rugby are anti-intellectual, at least to a degree; it didn’t stop them from being the world’s best high schools.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Benny Lava, most of the countries you’ve mentioned have official languages. And when and were were the offical reforms to British English and Canadian English?
English is a unique language in part because there is no official body to govern it– no Academie Français to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. It’s part of what gives English its richness.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
It’s kind of hilarious to see a misspelled discussion of spelling.
Academie Française. It’s a feminine noun and thus the feminine form of the adjective should be used.
January 15th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
As always on this topic, what Cranky said. And:
Try reading this. Believe it or not, you can.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cloud aulacity uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mattaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it woulthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!
January 15th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Italian also doesn’t have a central authority (though it once did). Usage is determined by consensus, as in this country.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
Italian and Spanish populations don’t suffer from dislexia (at least not overtly) because their spelling systems are regular and predictable.
In fact, a close friend of mine, an English speaker, had terrible dislexia until he took Spanish in school — at the age of 12, he finally learned to read English and now is a enthusiastic bookworm.
However, I do think that we must recognize that in teaching spelling, English words need to be learned one by one. (I say this as someone who had to laboriously teach themself to spell after graduating high school.) The Chinese learn ideograms one by one, we can teach English spelling one word at at time as well. Phonics is of little help, here. Here again the important thing is for children to be encouraged and motivated not give up.
Reading is an exceedingly complex mix of abilities.
By the way, I gather that in perceiving letters we need only look at the tops of the letters for the letters to be legible.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I’d like to thank Hector and Persia for demonstrating the typical American Can’t Do attitude. Did you ever wonder why America is one of only 3 countries in the world that doesn’t use the metric system? Did you ever wonder why America has such problems with literacy? Or why we spend so much time on spelling? Or why we have things like “dyslexia”. Or why America spends more per capita on health care but isn’t in the top ten for longevity? Probably not, because you’re probably the typical can’t do American.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Myles, Waldorf schools promise to deliver two ancient and two modern languages and to teach a musical instrument. In practice they don’t for the same reasons that the public schools don’t deliver these things. The Latin was Church Latin with no reading at all from ancient authors. There was no Greek not even the Greek alphabet (which we at least learned about, along with the Phonecian alphabet in my third-grade overseas school).
The music was too little, too late, thought the choral music was ok. German and French teachers often gave up after twenty minutes and let the kids play games in class. Foreign languages were twice a week, whereas best practice says three times a week is the minimum.
Basically, American schools don’t believe that these things can really be taught or that people can learn them and they give up before they even begin.
Eton and Harrow do deliver the languages, at least.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
McWhorter’s and Yglesias comments are equally silly. Neither is the solution in and of themselves. Elite schools take both approaches, just at different points in time. Beware of all talk of handy-dandy “problem solvers” Many roads lead to actual learning.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
McWhorter’s and Yglesias comments are equally silly. Neither is the solution in and of itself. Elite schools take both approaches, just at different points in time. Beware of all talk of handy-dandy “problem solvers.” Many roads lead to actual learning.
January 15th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Let’s face it. “Phonics” is a typical right-wing wedge issue. The popularity of the internet ought to boost motivation for reading atronomically and remove some of the silly anxiety about it that parents and teachers exhibited in the 80s and 90s.
January 15th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Benny Lava,
The though of me being some sort of America superpatriot is truly hilarious. I’m probably the least patriotic person I know, and I think that most of what defines modern America- capitalism, liberal democracy, secular individualism- is, at best, gravely deficient.
Those other nations that you mention which have superior educational systems also, I guarantee, use phonics. None of this “whole language” crap.
January 15th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
No, no, Hector, we think our language being fine the way it is is because we hate America! (I think.) I’m just stunned by the notion that having a correct, standardized spelling system would fix our education system. (For anyone who cares, dyslexia was first officially diagnosed in Germany. You can learn about more about the relationship between consistent pronounciation rules and dyslexia on wikipedia here, if you’re like me and avoiding work.
Sorry I missed the e on the end of Française, I was so excited to have an excuse to use the ç I completely forgot about gendered adjectives. (This is why, if I ever take a language again, it will be Japanese.)
January 15th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
The difficulty with spelling reform for the English language should be pretty obvious; it’s not a syntactically homogenized language like German or Spanish. Whereas German or the Roman languages would each only have to contend with one source of linguistic derivation, English has to contend with both Latinate and Germanic derivations. And the two are nor similar at all phonetically. A phonetically unified spelling would, therefore, render English spelling completely illogical and devoid of context.
Another problem is that we don’t really pronounce the Latin prefixes and suffixes the way they are written; again, it would vacate linguistic logic if were to change spellings of those, as no Romance language has really done.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
“ I think that most of what defines modern America- capitalism, liberal democracy, secular individualism- is, at best, gravely deficient.”
In other words, you hate us for our freedoms? Well, good to know somebody does.
re: “hipster,” “multicultural,” “whole language,” etc. – words have meanings, you know? Now, I’m a fan of impressionistic or idiosyncratic usage myself, but Humpty Dumpty aside, if you want to communicate, it helps to sorta go for consensus definitions.
(Although to be fair, “a catch-all term for all the trends I despise in the modern world probably is one of the definitions of “hipster” . . .
But bouncing off that, McWhorter’s piece and Matt’s post really do say something about a lot of talk about education: it’s too often by folk, in positions of pop-conventional wisdom influence who don’t have the faintest clue – personally or professionally – what on earth they’re talking about. (This thread, some of its odder moments excepted, is a happy contrast to that).
#103 – Ohio Mom, that was awesome.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Re: English has to contend with both Latinate and Germanic derivations. And the two are nor similar at all phonetically. A phonetically unified spelling would, therefore, render English spelling completely illogical and devoid of context.
I really don’t understand the point of this. All languages differ phonetically from each other, even those that are closely related. French sounds nothing like Spanish, and German has sounds that do not occur in English (and visa versa). Moreover other languages manage to accommodate vocabulary from Greek, which is not Latin or German either.
The biggest obstacle to spelling reform in English, IMO, is the fact that English is the majority (and official) language of far too many countries and I doubt you could get them on the same page for such a reform.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:02 am
If it’s completely illogical then we’re back to memorizing each word one by one, without the benefit of eytmological transparency (which I think even Chinese characters have to some degree), so it’s a no go.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:50 am
I read the post and a number of comments. Here’s what’s not clear to me (a high school history teacher): Are we talking only the youngest kids – about getting them to read in the sense that they can look at the words and say them or are we talking about developing comprehension.
I remember learning to read by being taught to sound out words and I remember how helpful it was to do this. Are there teachers today who aren’t teaching the letters and their sounds?
I also remember than many words couldn’t be sounded out and that I needed to ask grownups for help and that after awhile I began to recognize these words. Aren’t kids still doing that today?
My high school kids can “read” but have trouble making sense of what they read. I’m not sure if this debate is about their problem or not. I guess I’ll read McWhorter and see if I can figure it out.
January 17th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
. Are there teachers today who aren’t teaching the letters and their sounds?
The issue is not about whether they are being taught at all, but about teaching them systematically, explicitly, and to automaticity–it’s about making sure all students master decoding and memorize irregular words and learn morphemes (smallest parts of words with meaning) not just at the individual teacher’s whim, but universally to the point that they no longer have to spend any time puzzling about the mechanics of reading, and can focus all their attention on comprehension.
Yes, pure “whole language” is no longer in vogue, but the problem with “balanced reading” is that it’s often not about combining the best of both approaches (systematic, direct instruction and engaging, fun, socially positive interaction) but about doing a little phonics (not enough to make sure all kids are getting the benefits) and spending the majority of the time on less systematic approaches.
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