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At a Loss for Words: What’s wrong with how schools teach reading
APM Reports Transcript
Billboard
Teacher: The power that we are going to learn today, it’s called Picture Power. Children: Picture Power!
Emily Hanford: There’s a theory about reading that’s deeply embedded in elementary school teaching practices.
Molly Woodworth: She said, if you don’t know the word, just look at the first letter. Is it the fox or the bear?
This theory was disproven decades ago by cognitive scientists. But it continues to be taught.
Erica Meltzer: They would get to an unfamiliar word. They would look at the beginning of the word then guess the rest of it.
When kids are taught this way, it’s more difficult for many of them to learn to read.
Margaret Goldberg: It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of reading as being easy.
David Kilpatrick: The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter, look at the picture, look at the context, you’re drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to read the word or to remember the word.
Coming up, an APM Reports documentary, “At a Loss for Words: What’s wrong with how schools teach reading,” from American Public Media.
First this news.
Part 1
Hanford: From American Public Media, this is an APM Reports documentary.
Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything. Good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she had a secret.
Woodworth: I fooled everyone.
Molly couldn’t read very well.
Woodworth: I was totally lost. There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me. When a teacher would dictate a word and say, ‘Tell me how you think you can spell it?’ I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings and I thought, how do they – how do they even know where to begin? You know I was totally. It didn’t make sense to me.
well enough to keep her on the honors track through high school. Molly’s reading problems didn’t really catch up with her until it was time to take college entrance exams.
Woodworth: I couldn’t get through the ACT. Someone in the gifted and talented program couldn’t get through the test. And it wasn’t because I was not intelligent. It was because I could not get through the reading fast enough. My tools were too slow.
I’ll tell you what happened with Molly and the ACT at the end of this program. But for now, we’re going to fast forward about a decade. Molly gets married. She has a little girl.
(Mic Handling Noise)
Claire Woodworth: Hi.
That’s Molly’s daughter, Claire, playing with my recording equipment.
Claire: It’s really loud! Hanford: It’s loud, I know. I should probably turn it down.
Claire’s in first grade. Learning to read has been hard for her. So, once a week, Molly brings Claire to a reading center.
Nora: All right, tell me the sounds in clap. Claire: /c/ /l/ /a/ /p/ clap
Claire is working on phonemic awareness. That’s the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds - or phonemes.
Nora: What’s trip without the /r/? Claire: /t/ /i/ /p/ tip Nora: You are so good at that. (high five)
Claire first came to this reading center before she started kindergarten. Her mom wanted to make sure she got off to a good start in reading.
Woodworth: And I felt really comfortable with where she was at going into kindergarten. You
know, she had a good base. There was no like alarming signs. You know, she was on track.
But alarm bells started going off when Molly saw how Claire was being taught to read in school. One day, Molly was volunteering in Claire’s classroom. The class was reading a book and the teacher was telling the kids to practice the strategies that good readers use.
Woodworth: And she said, if you don’t know the word, just look at this picture up here. There
was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, so look at the first letter. Ok, it’s a “b.” What sounds with “b,” you know. Is it the fox or the bear?
Molly was stunned.
taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn to read. And children who don’t get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. This can lead to a downward spiral where behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development. A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts In the United States, a third of fourth graders can’t read on a basic level. Most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
This hour I’m going to show you how a disproven idea about how people read is part of the problem – and how it is still widespread in curriculum materials that school districts spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on. We’re going to begin with the idea itself. For that, we need a little history.
(Music)
People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. There are basically two perspectives. One view is that kids need to focus first on sounds and letters.
McGuffey Archive Tape: McGuffey’s eclectic primer, lesson 1.
The sounds and letters approach – also known as phonics – was popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers. This is from a McGuffey audiobook I found on YouTube.
McGuffey Archive Tape: /c /r/ /t/ a rat a cat
The other view is that children shouldn’t focus on sounds and letters. They should focus instead on whole words.
Dick and Jane Archive Tape: This is Dick and Jane, ah reading level 2.
The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the “Dick and Jane” books that first appeared in the 1930s. This is a guy who grew up with Dick and Jane reading one of the books on YouTube.
Dick and Jane Archive Tape: Come here Dick. Come and see Puff.
The Dick and Jane books rely on lots of repetition – and pictures to support the meaning of the text.
Dick and Jane Archive Tape: See Puff play. See Puff jump. See Puff jump and play.
In the whole word approach, the idea is that learning to read is a visual memory process. See words enough and you eventually store them in your memory as visual images. With phonics, the idea is that children learn to read words by sounding them out.
(Music)
Reading instruction was basically a series of pendulum swings between whole word and phonics until the late 1960s when a new idea came along. The basic theory was first presented in 1967 at the American Educational Research Association conference in New York. There’s no audio of the event, but here’s what happened.
An education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper called “Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game.” In the paper, Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves
Goodman proposed that as people become better readers, they rely less and less on graphic cues. Instead, they use context to predict the words and just sample from the letters to confirm their predictions.
This was a new idea about how people read. It helped form the theoretical basis of an approach to teaching reading known as “whole language.” In whole language, learning to read is not about memorizing words as in the whole word approach. And it isn’t about sounding out words as in phonics. Reading is coming up with words that make sense using what came to be known among educators as the “three-cueing system.” For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal is to comprehend text. If the sentences are making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.
Boy Reading: “I wish I had a garden,” said Toad. “Here is some flower seed.”
This recording of a boy reading was part of a BBC radio program about Goodman’s work produced in
Boy Reading: “Plant them in your ground,” said Frog.
What the boy reads is not exactly what the text says. Here’s the announcer explaining to the radio audience.
Announcer: What the book said was, “Here are some flower seeds. Plant them in the ground.” Boy Reading: “Here is some flower seeds. Plant them in your ground.”
When the boy read “is” instead of “are” and “your” instead of “the” he made a couple of miscues. That’s what Ken Goodman called them. Here he is in the BBC program.
Ken Goodman: And a miscue is, is, very simply, some place where something unexpected happens in oral reading. Where what the reader does isn’t what we expected the reader to do. That’s a miscue. By no means is the goal to produce miscue-free reading. Yetta Goodman: In fact, I keep saying...
That’s Ken’s wife, Yetta Goodman. They worked together.
Yetta Goodman: In my teaching, I want to help kids produce more, higher quality miscues.
A high-quality miscue is one that makes sense, where the meaning of the sentence is preserved even if the exact words are not read.
Yetta Goodman: And what we have to let the reader know is, it’s perfectly all right when you come to words you don’t know. We all do that in our reading. And what we do, we have a lot of strategies as adults. Legitimate strategies. We can skip it, we can read back, we can keep reading.
The Goodmans traveled all over the world in the 1970s and 80s talking to educators about their theory of how people read. One person they met was a developmental psychologist from New Zealand.
Marie Clay: My name is Marie Clay.
Marie Clay created a reading intervention program for struggling first graders called Reading Recovery. It became one of the most widely used reading intervention programs in the world. This interview is from a video tribute to Clay produced after she died.
Donald Bolger: This is our kind of humble facility.
That’s Donald Bolger. Also known as DJ. He studies how reading works in the brain.
Bolger: We have testing rooms upstairs, we might go upstairs…
We’re going upstairs in a bit to watch a demonstration of one of DJ’s experiments. But first I want to give you some background.
(Music)
Over the past fifty years or so, scientists in labs and classrooms all over the world have done thousands of studies about how skilled reading works and how people learn to do it. Something they were especially interested in early on is whether skilled readers use context to read words or whether they rely on the letters in the words. A couple of graduate students at the University of Michigan thought the context idea made sense. It seemed likely that as people get better at reading, they would rely more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to recognize words and wouldn’t need to pay as much attention to the letters. In 1975, graduate students Keith Stanovich and Richard West set out to see if this was the case in their lab.
They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. What they discovered surprised them: it was the less-skilled readers who were more dependent on context for word recognition. The skilled readers were able to recognize words without relying on context at all. Other researchers have done similar experiments and it turns out the ability to read words in isolation instantly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most well-
replicated findings in all of reading research. In addition, experiments show skilled readers do not read words as visual images. Instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That’s how a reader knows the difference between “house” and “horse,” for example. To better understand how all this works, we’re going back to the reading lab at the University of Maryland.
(Sound of door opening and walking upstairs)
We’re heading up to one of the testing rooms professor DJ Bolger mentioned earlier — to see a demonstration of an experiment he first did when he was a graduate student.
Two of DJ’s students have volunteered to be the guinea pigs for today’s demonstration. We climb to the top floor of the building and enter a small room with low ceilings and no windows. There are two cubicles set up with computers. It feels like a tiny call center in an attic. Student Alissa Cole runs through the experiment first.
Bolger: Alissa, you can start and hit number one.
Alissa is going to learn how to read some English words that are spelled using Korean letters. These are simple words like “bud” and “duck.” But Alissa doesn’t know how to read words spelled with Korean letters. So, she’s kind of like a typical kindergartner. She knows the meaning and pronunciation of these words - but she doesn’t know how to read them. She’s going to be taught using an approach that calls her attention to how the sounds in each word are represented by letters.
Computer Speaking: /b/ /u//d/ bud …
Bolger: We wanted to kind of get an inside glimpse of what these brains would look like in these two different learning methods. And I was expecting that those with holistic learning method would look like almost your run-of-the-mill dyslexic in that many children with dyslexia learn to memorize lots of whole words, but they actually don’t tend to activate the areas of the brain that are associated with phonology and pronunciation.
And this is exactly what he found. His experiment – and other studies – show that people who are taught phonics learn better because focusing on letters and sounds increases activity in the area of the brain that is best wired for reading.
Hanford: So, if you teach people through whole word method you’re teaching them to read like a dyslexic reads? Bolger: That is correct.
However, just because a student is taught to read with the whole word method doesn’t mean he’ll end up stuck reading words that way. In DJ’s study, about half the students in the whole word group were able to get beyond memorizing words. They figured out the relationships between the sounds and the letters. But half the students in the whole word group weren’t able to teach themselves to read. That’s in contrast to the phonics group, where everyone learned to read.
Bolger: Phonics worked for everybody. For all of the participants in the phonics group, they were uniformly doing well.
What does all of his have to do with the idea of using context to read? After all, in DJ’s study, the students were reading isolated words. Wouldn’t putting those words in the context of a sentence help? Well, think about it – if you’re a beginning reader and you don’t know any of the words in a sentence, context isn’t
going to help you much. If you already know how to read a lot of words, it’s a different story. Even expert readers need context in some cases. Take a word like “match.”
Kilpatrick: We can’t even know what “match” means unless it’s in context cause it can mean a competition, it could mean something you light a fire with, you know, it could mean two things that look alike or that are the same.
This is David Kilpatrick. He’s a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland in upstate New York and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties.
Kilpatrick: We need context for comprehension, for understanding. Nobody questions that. But the confusion is that, when you see the word “match,” the word “match” jumps out at you. You don’t need context to figure out that that’s the word “match.” You need context to figure out the meaning.
If you’re a skilled reader, you know the word match instantly – whether that word is by itself or in a sentence. In fact, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word “match” faster than you process a picture of a match. You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?
(Music)
It happens through a process called “orthographic mapping.” Orthographic mapping occurs when you attend to the letters in a written word and link the word’s pronunciation with its sequence of letters. Orthographic mapping requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how
Kilpatrick: So, the minute you to ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you’re drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to either read the word or to remember the word.
(Music)
Some kids realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. They don’t necessarily need to be taught this. They figure it out. Those kids tend to have good phonological skills. It’s not difficult for them to understand the ways that sounds and letters work. But if this doesn’t come easily to you – say you’re Molly Woodworth, who we met at the beginning of the program – if you’re Molly and the sounds and letters thing just doesn’t make sense, and no one teaches it to you – you’re going to come up with a bunch of other strategies to try to get by. Reading for you is kind of like being a detective, you’re hunting everywhere for clues. Now consider a kid who’s in the middle. OK phonological skills, not great. Maybe he could eventually figure out reading on his own. But then along comes his teacher who tells him – being a good reader is like being a detective. You need to search for clues and develop a bunch of strategies to solve all those tricky words. In the United States today, this is how many children are being taught to read. According to David Kilpatrick, the three-cueing system is “ubiquitous” in American schools.
(Music)
Coming up after the break, we’re going to find out what three-cueing looks like in the classroom, why schools are still teaching it … and how it harms children.
You’re listening to “At a Loss for Words” from APM Reports. There’s more at our website, apmreports.org. You can find an annotated version of this story with links to articles about the cognitive science research.
Support for APM Reports comes from the Spencer Foundation and Lumina Foundation.
Back in a moment. This is APM, American Public Media. Part 2
Welcome back. I’m Emily Hanford and this is “At a Loss for Words,” a documentary from APM Reports. We’re going to Manhattan now to meet Erica Meltzer. Until a few years ago, she was an SAT tutor. This was $400 an hour tutoring, kids who went to schools considered among the best in New York City. Erica was startled by the way some of her students read.
Meltzer: They would get to an unfamiliar word. They would look at the beginning of the word and then they would just sort of guess for the rest of it.
They wouldn’t even try to sound it out.
Meltzer: They would just plug in a word that looked like the word that was there and it wouldn’t occur to them that they were misreading the word.
These were not students with diagnosed learning disabilities. She says it was hard to raise their test scores.
Meltzer: And I was like, what is this?
