by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 15, 2020 | Phonics, Reading Wars, The Science of Reading
When the most recent set of scores from the NAEP (National Assessment for Educational Progress) were released in 2019, the results for Reading were dismal: only 35% of fourth graders were rated Proficient or Advanced, whereas a whopping 65% were rated either Basic or Below Basic (up from 63% in 2017). For eighth graders, the results were slightly worse: 34% percent Proficient/Advanced vs. 66% Basic or Below Basic (up from 64% in 2017).
Obviously, these scores do not paint a particularly encouraging picture of American elementary and middle-school students’ reading skills.
One of the major criticisms the NAEP is that the score ratings do not align—and are not intended to align—with grade levels. For example, a student reading at the Proficient level is actually reading above grade level (has “demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter”), whereas one rated Basic is reading somewhat below (“partial mastery of fundamental skills”). And to be fair, the test itself is fairly challenging.
But crude and controversial a snapshot as the NAEP may be, the scores align remarkably well with another set of statistics, namely those released by the International Dyslexia Association in regards to the percentage of children who require particular amounts of explicit, systematic instruction to learn to read. Depicted by the Canadian reading specialist Nancy Young (https://www.nancyyoung.ca) in a popular infographic known as “The Ladder of Reading,” the statistics indicate that approximately:
- 5% of children learn to read without instruction
- 35% need only broad instruction
- 40-50% need a moderate amount of explicit, systematic instruction
- 10-15% need prolonged instruction, with extensive repetition (dyslexia)
Broadly speaking, these four groups can be subdivided into two larger ones: those who need little to no instruction (40%) and those who need more of it (60%)—and that, in turn, runs almost exactly parallel to the NAEP Proficient/Non-Proficient breakdown.
In fact, the NAEP figures over time reflect exactly what one would expect from a (non-)system based largely on the falsehood that reading is a natural process, and that children will “just pick it up on their own” if given enough time: the natural readers learn to read well, and the non-natural readers don’t.
To be clear, this correspondence does not prove cause-and-effect. It is a general correlation, if quite a striking one, and a very large-scale study would be required to establish such a relationship. But given the generally haphazard, unsystematic, and poorly sequenced manner in which American children are taught to read, it does nevertheless suggest that the children who are learning to read well are primarily those who would learn to read more or less regardless of what program they were given.
Worringly, the discrepancy between the two sets of figures runs in the direction of non-proficiency. Assuming the breakdown represented by Young is accurate, around 5% of children who require only broad instruction to become competent decoders still do not comprehend at a particularly high level. Unfortunately, that is hardly surprising either: once children have learned to decode competently, around third or fourth grade, reading proficiency largely becomes a reflection of vocabulary and background knowledge. If schools are de-emphazing subject knowledge in favor of reading-based instruction/test prep centered around the kinds of empty formal skills on which Common Core is based (identifying main ideas; comparing and contrasting; inferencing), then students are being deprived of the knowledge necessary to become strong readers. And the more years students spend in this type of vapid, random non-curricululm, the more pronounced the knowledge gaps become.
As Chalkbeat reported:
A new study, released in April [2019] through a federally funded research center, shows that states that changed their standards most dramatically by adopting the Common Core didn’t outpace other states on federal NAEP exams. By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.
“It’s rather unexpected,” said researcher Mengli Song of the American Institutes for Research. “The magnitude of the negative effects tend to increase over time. That’s a little troubling.”But the results are not getting better over time, according to Song’s research, so it’s hard to pin the findings on bad implementation.
That leaves Song puzzled. “I don’t have a good hypothesis for why the effects actually grow over time,” she said. “That’s something I didn’t expect.”
Song may be unable to offer a hypothesis, but here’s mine: in a 1986 paper, the researcher Keith Stanovich described the “Matthew effect” in reading, a phenomenon named after the Bible verse stating that the rich become richer while the poor lose what little they have.
Essentially, knowledge is “sticky”: the more you know, the easier it is to assimilate new information (because it can be connected to what is already known), creating a positive feedback loop. On the other hand, the less you know, the harder it is to absorb new information because there is nothing to connect the knowledge to. Thus, gaps that may initially be minor or moderate become larger over time. And that is precisely what is happening now.
Indeed, the Reading-score decline between 2017 (37% Proficient or Advanced in fourth grade; 36% Proficient in eighth) and 2019 (35%/34%) suggests that something on the vocabulary/knowledge side is also going in the wrong direction. Only those in the Advanced category made gains.
As E.D. Hirsch explains in The Knowledge Deficit:
Early oral language enhancement plus the systematic teaching of enabling knowledge are the keys to later gains in all academic areas, and also to narrowing the achievement gap beween demographic groups. It is in early language learning that the Matthew effect begins to take hold. Those who know many words and who possess the knowledge to comprehend what they mean will learn more words and world knowledge later on, while those who know few words in early grades fall further and further behind in later grades.
The key phrase here is “systematic teaching of enabling knowledge.” Simply giving children random passages of so-called “informational text” (penguins one day, George Washington the next, perhaps solar panels the day after that) does nothing to help them develop a solid base for navigating the written world.
If knowledge is to be retained, it must be retrieved, applied, and explicitly connected to other knowledge in a structured way, over an extended period. But what is happening knowledge-wise in the older grades is the equivalent of what all too often happens in the teaching of phonics: “g” may be taught as a hard sound (game) but not a soft one (edge); “ee” and “ea” may be taught incidentally as the long “e” sound in a particular lesson, with no mention of the fact that there are six other ways the sound can be spelled, and without follow-up practice in additional lessons or guided application in writing.
Although the Standards as such have faded from public view, it is important to understand that they are still exerting an enormous influence over American public education. Even states that have nominally moved away from them have in fact just relabeled them in order to avoid controversy while leaving them intact more or less verbatim.” So both today’s fourth and eighth graders have spent their entire school careers in a system dominated by Common Core, with knowledge gaps that start out small getting continually overlooked and gradually spiraling into something that leaves students at a serious disadvantage for years and perhaps even decades to come.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 11, 2020 | Phonics, The Science of Reading
The following guest post was authored by public-school teacher Valerie Mitchell.
Some learned to bake sourdough bread. Some took on home improvement projects. However, when it came time for me to choose a pandemic project, I decided to be a precision teacher. Unfortunately, it is not Instagram friendly, so I will simply write about it.
Let me introduce myself. I am a seasoned teacher with thirteen years in the NYC public school system with licenses in French and ESL. In fact, according to the NYC ratings system devised by the infamous Charlotte Danielson, I am even considered a highly effective teacher. I have also had skin in the game long enough to watch the DOE follow many fads, particularly the fad of big data. In fact, I bristle every time a supervisor asks how data informs my teaching. Why? Because I always considered teaching to be an artform – kind of like jazz – more Miles Davis than BF Skinner. So why would I learn a style of teaching associated with a man that some say put his own child in a box?
Like any relationship – it’s complicated. It also involves the baggage you bring to it, and I have some serious baggage. The shame of educational failure is something that haunts me from my own childhood. My first-grade teachers were hippies. My progressive school was somewhat of a cross between an ashram and an elementary school. We had goats in the back yard, yoga classes, and as an added bonus they taught me to play Blowing in the Wind on acoustic guitar. Unfortunately, they never explicitly taught me to read. I distinctly remember when Reading Time was announced. They would take me to a bookshelf filled with children’s books. I vividly remember being confused, and for the life of me could not understand why these nice hippies would not tell me what to do with these little books. To placate them, I would pick one up and stare at the pictures until Reading Time was declared over, and I could finally go back to the main purpose of school – singing more Dylan songs! The following year we moved, and I was put in a public elementary school. Here, my parents were given the unfortunate news that I was a seven-year-old illiterate. They immediately went to the Ed School at the University of Miami and found someone to catch me up. I do not remember exactly what the tutor taught me, but I do have a hazy memory of an elderly woman with a brooch. What my little girl-self did understand was that I was moving rapidly from the worst reading group to the best in the lightning speed of Mercury Morris. Yes, you guessed it, I was finally a Dolphin, that coveted 2nd grade reading group named after the Miami Dolphins during a winning season. I guess it was my winning season too.
Oddly enough, history repeated itself. My son experienced reading problems as well. When his first- grade teacher told me he was falling behind, we did a rinse & repeat. We spent the summer with my parents in Austin, and this time the University of Texas found us a literacy expert – newly minted from their Ed School. My son worked diligently, so did the tutor. Except that when we returned, he continued to free fall in school. As his elementary school could not get him to read on grade-level either, they immediately made it clear that it was neither their fault nor his – just an unfortunate roll of the biological dice. According to the child study team he had “processing problems” and ADD. In fact, one tutor that I paid a fortune to, told my son point-blank that his brain worked differently than other children’s so he should not feel bad about his reading difficulties.
So what happened? How did two struggling readers from the same family tree get two completely different results. The resemblances are striking. In both instances, it was caught early. In both instances, the parents sought advice from a respected university. In both instances, the parents were willing and able to get help for their child. But unfortunately, in the second instance there was no elderly lady with a brooch to come to the rescue.
Here are my two working theories.
- Theory Number 1: The elderly lady with a brooch might have taught me phonics. As for my son, I mostly observed the tutor use Texas’ standardized tests to practice with, as well as many vocabulary exercises – I never saw phonics. In fact, I recently looked at UT’s education site to see if they train teachers in phonics, and I could find no classes whatsoever on their website.
- Theory Number 2: There has been a sea change in educational philosophy cultivated by the psychological community. Invariably when a child struggles to read the onus tends to be taken off the teacher, and the school recommends neuro psych tests. In the case of my son, I was told that he had ADD and processing problems. Essentially the experts insist on accommodations rather than remediation. At the time, I remember being confused, as my own experience led me to believe that his problems could be remediated like mine were over thirty years ago. When I voiced my concerns to the principal who flaunted a Harvard PhD (Guess what: Harvard’s Ed School does not teach phonics either – hey but who’s counting Ed schools?) she was quite condescending, almost pitying of my predicament, and seemed down-right confused that I was not eager to get accommodations so he could keep up with the others. In fact, to this day, I find the scenario a bit like the story of the chicken or the egg. Is the manifestation of poor reading a result of poor teaching (i.e., nurture), or are we encountering a brain that simply isn’t well wired to match sounds and letters (i.e., nature)? Since there has been an explosion of processing diagnoses in the past ten years, I tend to align myself with the former explanation.
But let’s leave my theories aside and return to my son. It is seven years later, and I happened to meet a woman who had just done a training at a precision teaching school called Morningside in Seattle. She was looking for a guinea pig to finish her certification. After evaluating my son, she told me the only thing wrong with his brain was that he had never been taught phonics. Had I not experienced my own struggles with reading as a child, I might have written her off as a crackpot (she had no official teaching credentials) and continued to spiral down the road of Special Ed experts. Instead, I listened. She explained that mapping sounds to text in the brain essentially allows you to become a fluent reader, and automaticity is key. She prescribed an intense study of phonics; however, his remediation took much longer than mine (I was seven. He was thirteen.) Eventually the educational nightmare came to a slow-moving halt.
Clearly all this baggage leaves me bitter, and to some degree unable to move on. Why? Because I am a high school French teacher. That’s why! Around the same time my son’s educational challenges became manageable, I was given the lower levels of French to teach. These lower level textbooks have instructions in English, and I often ask students to read these instructions out loud. Often, I am aghast to hear them mispronounce easy words, skip lines, and read without any sense of prosody — all hallmarks of serious reading issues which remind me of my son. As I began to research these issues, I got seriously hooked on the science of reading – particularly phonics, direct instruction and of course precision teaching. I had never forgotten how precision teaching turned my son around, and I really wanted to see it in a more structured environment. Since Morningside was in Seattle, I set my sights closer to home and planned on making a field trip to the Fluency Factory in Massachusetts.
Then the pandemic hit. I knew lots of young children were going to suffer serious deficits. In fact, reading scores were already falling. The 2019 NAEP study had lower reading scores for 4th graders compared to 2017 with only 35% of students reading proficiently. Let that sink in for a second. That means MORE than half of 4th graders are not reading proficiently, and if you think the measures get better with 8th graders – think again. As a once failing reader myself, those statistics shook me to my core. Then it hit me! Here was a project that could get me through a tedious pandemic summer i.e. tutoring a child using precision teaching. I spoke with Richard McManus from the Fluency Factory, and he generously agreed to train me in this style of teaching. This was my way of paying it back to the precision teacher who helped my son years ago.
After some intense study over zoom and hours of practicing phonemes on my own, McManus gave me the go-ahead to find a guinea pig and start tutoring. If the NAEP study was correct, at least 1 out of 2 children on my block were not reading proficiently, and I was going to find one. Lo and behold the first family I spoke to had a child entering 6th grade in the fall who was reading at a 4th grade level. Her mother is a nurse who works the night shift at a local hospital. She gladly accepted my offer for free tutoring as long as we worked outside on the stoop due to Covid precautions. Let’s call the child Carla for privacy purposes.
During the initial assessment it was apparent that Carla was bright, hard-working and in my humble opinion had no learning disabilities. Here are my observations from that first day:
- She was never taught to properly grip a pen causing her handwriting speeds to be at a slow 90 wpm. She also never learned cursive. This can impede students later when writing in-class essays and taking notes, as they will lack the necessary speed to keep up with their thoughts.
- During read-alouds she read mechanically and stumbled frequently. She read at 110 wpm – ideally reading should be at the same speed as ordinary conversation which clocks in at 200 wpm. If reading is too slow, it impedes comprehension and students lose the thread of the narrative making comprehension difficult.
- When shown phonics sheets she had no idea what they were or how to pronounce the sounds. It was clear she was taught whole language. Students such as Carla who have not had adequate exposure to systematic phonics do not develop the orthographic mapping necessary to read fluently.
Clearly, she was suffering from what I call dysteachia and would not be too much of a challenge for a newbie.
The precision teaching folks are convinced that every child can learn if lessons are tailored to them and they receive enough practice to gain mastery. In fact, they take on all kinds of challenges: dyslexia, autism, English Language Learners, ADD, processing problems etc. with an admirable doggedness. This is a pragmatic educational realm where problems are remediated, not accommodated. The linchpin in this method is consistent data keeping. Each skill is practiced then timed for fluency, and students do not move on until the skill is mastered. I learned to use the Standard Celeration Chart and marveled at the purity of this kind of data driven teaching. Finally, I understood what meaningful data is, especially after years of seeing grade inflation at my own school due to measures such as “class participation”, “group work” or “project-based learning”. Here there are no points for good behavior, no homework to be copied and pasted from Google, or groupmates to exploit. It is just me, the student, the skill that must be mastered and my timer. I know it sounds clinical when compared to a blissful six-year-old singing Blowing in the Wind; but it gets extraordinary results.
These results are not lost on Carla who arrives for every session with great enthusiasm. So far, we have done 10 sessions, and I am astonished at her progress. Here are the four skills we have been practicing together:
- Say & Spell: These are high frequency words that must be read then spelled with a goal of 200-250 words per minute. On her first session she did 102 wpm. On the tenth she did 187. The first day I was surprised at how clumsy she was at rapidly identifying letters; however, by the tenth session she was attacking these same letters with gusto.
- Sound Fluency: These are phonics drills. We review a series of sounds until she is confident then we complete timings. Day #1 Carla read sounds at 48 wpm. Day #2 she clocked in at 66 wpm. For the moment, this is her usual pattern. It takes two days for her to master each new series of sounds. Carla’s accuracy during these drills with unfamiliar phonemes is remarkable. She memorizes easily and is sharp as a tack.
- Word Fluency: These work on the same phonemes from the previous drill; however, now they appear in a series of words read in isolation. On Day #1 she did 60 wpm. On Day #10 with far more complex words she clocked in at 94 wpm
- Story Passages: These passages are from a decodable reader. They allow students to practice sounds they have already mastered in narrative form. Our practice sessions involve getting her to model my prosody before timings, as well as reviewing sounds and vocabulary from the story. Day #1’s reading was at a 110 wpm, and it was quite stilted. Day #10’s reading was at 147 wpm, and the quality of the reading was astonishing. It was no longer hesitant, and she now pauses at the appropriate punctuation. The other day when asked if she thought she made progress she yelled: “Oh my God, I don’t stop at every word now!” Subsequently, these reading sessions have made me ponder the concept of fluency, as it is clearly much more than speed. In fact, as her decoding skills increase in speed, she exhibits much more enthusiasm for the stories themselves. In other words, reading is enjoyable now that the cognitive demands have become more automatic.
All in all, there is an elegance to the materials and the method. Clearly this learning style is structured and systematic, and Carla knows exactly what is expected of her. She also knows that it is attainable, and she enjoys monitoring her progress with me. Any fears I may have had about Carla’s creativity being destroyed or anxiety created by these timed tasks were washed away. By the third session, Carla began confiding in me how much she hated school because she could not read as well as the other students, and it was like a weight had been taken off her. A few days ago, her mother texted to thank me, as she noticed a happier, more confident child.
Although I do not have a sourdough bread for my Facebook feed, I have accomplished a few things: an hour’s respite to a frontline worker, a gift of literacy to a child who did not have the words to explain how her school was failing her, and a fascinating educational experiment that I am only just beginning to understand.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 3, 2020 | Phonics, The Science of Reading
Because fluency is among the most misunderstood aspects of reading, I’d like to offer up some clarification on a few key aspects of this skill.
First, one of the most common misunderstandings about fluency is that it’s only a matter of speed. The reality, however, is a bit more complex: speed and fluency are related, but they are not precisely the same thing. In reality, speed is a result of fluency, not a goal in and of itself.
By definition, a person who reads very slowly/haltingly, and who continually stops to guess at unfamiliar words (a really big problem) or to sound them out (better, but still a problem), is not a fluent reader. The speed issue, however, is a result of the poor decoding skills. If a child in one of these categories were simply urged to read faster, without having their underlying deficits addressed, they would not magically become a fluent reader. Instead, they would continue to stumble, misread words, guess, etc.; they would simply do so more quickly, and probably become very frustrated in the process.
Second point: fluency is not about teaching children to speed-read. 200 words per minute—the speed at which skilled adults typically read—might sound very fast, but that’s actually the rate at which most people talk. (And in some places, they probably talk even faster).
So fluency involves reading at the speed of speech—essentially, it’s the point at which decoding ability meets speaking ability. That in turn permits conversational intonation (prosody)—the element that makes skilled reading seem so natural.
This is where timing comes in, as a tool for progress-monitoring. When a student’s progress is slow and incremental, it is not necessarily obvious just how much they’re improving from session to session just by listening to them read. Short (30-60-second), frequent, low-pressure timings provide objective feedback about whether things are moving in the right direction. They also reinforce the idea that speed is an important component of reading—not just something that gets tacked on at the end, after one has learned to sound out words.
To be clear, this type of low-stakes measurement, done in a safe, supportive environment, is far, far less psychologically stressful than the shame and humiliation that accompany a child’s self-identification as “a bad reader.” If adults are matter-of-fact and non-judgmental about the timings, then children will be as well—even if they’re anxious at first. Often, they come to enjoy them and look forward to the opportunity to beat their personal bests.
To return to my earlier point, however, I think that the impression given by a person who can read accurately with conversational speed and intonation contributes to the false belief that reading is a “natural” skill. When all the pieces are working seamlessly together, things seem very easy and very automatic. And for the skilled reader, that is in fact true.
But the surface appearance hides a much more complicated reality, namely that “reading” isn’t really one single skill—even though it’s typically (and unfortunately) treated that way—but rather many sub-skills that get combined into a whole. And for fluent reading to occur, all of the component pieces (e.g., phonemic awareness, knowledge of sound-letter correspondences, syllables and word recognition) must be individually operating fluently as well.
So although expressivity is considered a hallmark of fluent reading, it’s a result as well as a cause. Essentially, expressive reading is only able to occur when all of the other skills are in place and functioning more or less automatically. Telling a child who still has trouble discriminating between short “a” and short “u” to just read more dramatically, or to pretend to talk like a character, just won’t cut it.
If a child who is missing one of the component skills practices expressive reading with adult modeling that skill, they may improve their fluency on that particular text as a result of their growing familiarity with it, but they will be unable to carry that degree of fluency into new texts of comparable or greater difficulty because the underlying problem will still be present.
That is not to imply that modeled reading is useless for struggling readers—on the contrary, it is very important—only that it must be used in conjunction with other exercises targeted at the building the missing skills.
Allow me to make a sports analogy here: to be skilled at basketball, a player must be able to dribble, shoot, pass, rebound, steal, and block, and each of those abilities must be practiced both separately and in combination with the others. While some individuals may be naturally more gifted in some of these areas than others, it is nevertheless necessary to achieve a certain level of mastery in all of them to be considered a “good” player. The same is true for reading: fluency means that all the parts have been developed to the point at which they are able to combine into something greater than themselves. In reading, however, there is an additional twist in that all the sub-skills must be operating at the same time.
One of the things that I think makes the Fluency Factory such a special place—and indeed what gives the Factory its name—is that its methods are based on the understanding that every piece of the reading puzzle must be deliberately and individually practiced to the point of automaticity. Only then can the skills be combined to begin to produce a functional whole. (Note that I say “begin” because moving from working the parts separately to applying them in the context of a passage or story is often not a smooth process.) This is absolutely key, and yet as Richard pointed out to me recently, it’s something that’s almost never discussed.
When you think about it, this is actually an extraordinarily holistic approach to teaching reading, in the sense that it deliberately touches on every aspect of the reading process.
Students move through multiple exercises designed to systematically target each sub-skill, without getting bogged down in any given one, before they practice putting them all together—and they do this during every session. When I’ve spent time observing at the Factory, I’ve always appreciated that fact but also taken it somewhat for granted; however, it’s actually quite extraordinary and incredibly well thought-out. But that’s the thing: when a process is choreographed with such skill, it seems so obvious as to be utterly unremarkable—entirely natural, one might even say.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 23, 2020 | Phonics, Reading Wars, The Science of Reading
One of the most serious, and most persistent, misconceptions in the world of reading early reading instruction involves the use of context clues. Regardless of whether they are explicitly taught an incorrect interpretation of three/multi-cueing system or simply absorb its tenets in graduate school or via professional development, many teachers of beginning readers erroneously learn that children should focus primarily on beginning/ending letters and then use a variety of guess-and-check methods (e.g., picture clues, other information in the text) to make educated guesses about unfamiliar words.
If you’re not familiar with the research, a reliance on context clues has been identified as a compensatory strategy for weak decoding skills (Nicholson, 1992; Stanovich, 1986); as children become more proficient decoders, they spend less time looking at contextual information.
Louise Spear-Swerling, professor of Special Education at Southern Connecticut State University, sums the findings up as follows:
Skilled readers do not need to rely on pictures or sentence context in word identification, because they can read most words automatically, and they have the phonics skills to decode occasional unknown words rapidly. Rather, it is the unskilled readers who tend to be dependent on context to compensate for poor word identification. Furthermore, many struggling readers are disposed to guess at words rather than to look carefully at them, a tendency that may be reinforced by frequent encouragement to use context.
In her 1998 article on the misinterpretation of the three-cueing system, Marilyn Jäger Adams furthermore makes the point that while skilled readers do in fact make use a combination of orthographic, syntactic, and semantic clues, they do so in order to construct meaning rather than to literally decode words. The misinterpretation of the graphic that has filtered down into many elementary-school classrooms is based on a confusion between “reading as extracting meaning from text” (which presumes solid decoding) and “reading as turning squiggles on a page into words.”
To be clear, using a combination of first letters and pictures, or other parts of a text, and making educated guesses based on “what would make sense” may indeed result in beginning readers coming up with correct words, or a generally accurate understanding of a particular scenario. But that’s beside the point.
Short-Term vs. Long-Term Thinking
To have a serious discussion about what types of strategies should be taught, and when, and why, it is necessary to distinguish between short-term and long-term thinking.
In short-term thinking, the focus is on getting the child to understand the particular text in front of them, at that particular moment. Exactly how that happens is not overly important.
And after all, the purpose of reading is to understand the text (or, to put it in edu-parlance to “construct meaning”). Obviously.
Understandably, this is a very appealing viewpoint, and one that seems to make intuitive sense: learning to read can be very challenging for certain children, and if especially one is working with a slow, struggling reader, the impulse to have them glean whatever they can, however they can, is entirely understandable. Any tools they can use to figure out what’s going on are helpful, right?
In the long term… No, actually.
The problem is that the (cueing) strategies that allow a beginning reader to get the gist of simple pictures books fall very, very far short when applied to the far more challenging texts students will be expected to read only a few years later. A kindergartner or first-grader who appears to be basically on track may in fact be missing very fundamental key skills.
Moreover, the habit of guessing at unfamiliar words is not one that children naturally outgrow—once established, it is often extraordinarily difficult to break.
Combine that with persistent decoding issues, and you end up with a burgeoning middle-schooler who’s just old enough to really push back when someone tries to intervene but not quite mature enough to appreciate why it’s so important for her to learn to sound out multisyllabic words phonetically (as Richard McManus will currently attest).
All that said, the use of context clues does in fact have a place in early reading instruction. But the key piece is that context must be used to support phonetic decoding (and thus orthographic mapping), not replace it.
Practically speaking, this involves the decoding of words that are only partly phonetic, or whose exact pronunciation cannot be determined from the way they are written.
As Tunmer (1990; see pp. 112-113) has explained, phonetic knowledge and the ability to use context combine to create a positive feedback loop in which context is used to actually strengthen phonetic understanding and facilitate orthographic mapping—the process by which words get stored in the brain as sound-syllable correspondences and made available for automatic retrieval.
Essentially, when children with a solid phonetic understanding of the English code encounter irregularly spelled/pronounced words, they may use context clues to bootstrap themselves into an understanding of how those words are pronounced. That reinforces an understanding of more complex phonetic patterns and allows challenging language to be read more easily in the future.
Some children may figure this out their own, but there is no reason that others cannot be taught this strategy explicitly.
This phenomenon also supports the finding that children with good decoding skills can often infer the pronunciations of moderately irregularly word (Groff, 1987), something that directly contradicts the notion that English is too irregular for phonetic knowledge to be effective.
What the Heck is a MOSS-kwih-toe?
I’m going to illustrate this with a personal anecdote involving one of my earliest reading-related memories.
It happened when I was in first grade, and it involved the word mosquito.
Although this word is spelled in a way that is not entirely unrelated to its pronunciation, there are a couple of notable irregularities.
- First, the “qu” makes a “k” sound, as opposed to its usual “kw” sound.
- Second, there’s no obvious information about which syllable should be stressed.
So when I encountered this word in print at the age of six, I initially read it as MOSS-kwih-toe.
“Huh?” I remember thinking. “What the heck is a MOSSkwitoe?”
I knew that didn’t make sense, and I knew I wasn’t reading the word correctly, but I couldn’t fathom what it might actually be.
So I kept on plugging along, and a couple of minutes later, I suddenly had a lightbulb moment.
“Oh!” I thought. “Of course. The word is pronounced muskeetoe!”
I was really quite astonished to have figured it out. I had a huge vocabulary but was by no means an exceptional decoder. You know those kids who teach themselves to read at three? Well, I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t even in the top reading group! But the incident made such an extraordinary impression on me that I still remember my thought process with almost total clarity more than 30 years later.
So let’s review what I did:
1) I used the specific sequence of letters and my knowledge of the sounds they made to take me as far as I could possibly go toward identifying the word.
2) Once I realized the story involved some sort of insect that flew and buzzed around during the summer, I drew the logical conclusion about the word’s pronunciation.
3) I got a lesson in the fact the “qu” can make a “k” sound in certain circumstances—an alternate phonetic pattern that helped me identify other challenging words quickly in the future (and eventually facilitated my ability to grasp French pronunciation).
4) The sound-spelling correspondence of the whole word was from then on etched into my mind in metaphorical granite (i.e., orthographically mapped).
5) I learned that even if words weren’t straightforwardly phonetic, I could combine my sound-spelling knowledge with my other skills and figure things out. That was an immensely powerful realization.
The interesting part is that technically speaking, my process was a stellar example of the three-cueing model. It involved the construction of (literal) meaning using the interplay among clues based on orthography (sequence of letters), syntax (the word had to be a noun based on its position in the sentence), and semantics (the story must have involved a tiny, buzzing insect).
The key piece, however, is that my close attention to sound-spelling correspondences underlay my ability to engage the other systems effectively. I did not look at the first letter(s) and make a semi-random guess based on context (the way I later saw many of my own, much older students do). If I had, in the absence of any solid contextual information at that point, I might have come up with something like mouse.
Rather, I paid close attention to all the letters in the word—beginning, middle, and end—in an attempt to sound it out, and only when that wasn’t enough did I move to thinking about the larger context of the story to in order to make the leap from that baffling collection of letters to certainty about a real word.
That leads me to my next point, namely that the episode was also consistent with the finding that children who learn to read phonetically are able to produce nonsense words/pronunciations—something that children who are taught via whole language do not do (Barr, 1974-5; click here for a discussion of the findings). Had I jumped to plug in a word I already knew how to read, I would have missed out on a significant learning opportunity. And even if I had managed to correctly guess mosquito, I would have missed out on an important phonetic lesson and would not have been able to carry that new knowledge forward into other words.
As Ehri points out, children who exhibit this type of phonetic non-word decoding in first grade move more quickly into the full alphabetic phase, in which “beginners become able to form connections between all of the graphemes in spellings and the phonemes in pronunciations to remember how to read words.” Indeed, by second grade, I was basically a totally fluent reader. Once things clicked, I never looked back.
About the Three-Cueing System…
Let me conclude by saying that writing (and re-writing) this piece has actually been a rather enlightening process for me, not least because it allowed me to revisit a memorable childhood experience from an adult perspective and—entirely to my surprise—be able to analyze it in light of theories with which I’ve become acquainted only relatively recently. When I first began to write about the episode, I was unaware of just how clearly it embodied key findings about how children learn to read; it was only as I began to really probe it that I realized how illustrative it actually was.
It also made me develop a more nuanced understanding of the three-cueing system, as well as a better understanding of how things went so badly awry. What I’ve described here certainly isn’t the “look at the first letter and the picture and think about what would make sense” approach, but it also isn’t quite the mature use of textual cues employed by skilled readers to, say, determine correct definitions of multi-meaning words. Instead, it’s somewhere in the middle.
It’s precisely that in-between place that makes things so tricky, and I think it points to the overwhelming importance of precise language when discussing techniques for reading instruction. Indeed, so many conversations about this topic devolve into free-for-alls simply because various parties cannot agree on what central terms mean. (E.g., for researchers, the term “sight word” refers to a word that has been orthographically mapped and can be read instantaneously, whereas for teachers it generally refers to the high-frequency words on the Dolch/Fry lists that beginning readers are expected to memorize more or less by rote.)
It’s very easy to imagine how a cautious assertion like, “In some instances, children can use context clues to help them identify unknown words” could get transformed into, “Let’s look at the first letter and the picture and ask ourselves what the word might be.” Those two statements might not seem terribly different on the surface, but in fact they’re worlds apart.
The cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has warned that inconclusive (or, I would add, poorly understood) theoretical models can easily get translated into ineffective classrooms practices, and I think the three-cueing system is the poster child for that. It’s not enough to say, for example, that skilled reading involves a complex interplay of systems; inevitably, given the history of reading instruction in the United States, that will be used to promote harmful ideas about the unimportance of phonetic decoding. When the devil is in the details, every word counts.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 6, 2020 | Phonics
Attention! This post has moved.
It can now be found at: https://www.breakingthecode.com/10-reasons-three-cueing-system-msv-is-ineffective/
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 29, 2020 | Blog, Issues in Education, Phonics
As I alluded to my previous post, the U. Wisconsin-Madison cognitive psychologist and reading specialist Mark Seidenberg has posted a rebuttal to Lucy Calkins’s manifesto “No One Gets to Own the Term ‘Science of Reading’” on his blog. For anyone interested in understanding the most recent front in the reading wars, I strongly recommend both pieces.
What I’d like to focus on here, however, are the ways in which Calkins’s discussion of phonics reveal a startlingly compromised understanding of the subject for someone of her influence and stature.
In recent years, and largely—as Seidenberg explains—in response to threats to her personal reading-instruction empire, Calkins has insisted that she really believes in the importance of systematic phonics, a claim that comes off as somewhat dubious given the obvious emphasis she places on alternate decoding methods, e.g., covering up letters, using context clues, etc. (Claude Goldenberg, the emeritus Stanford Ed School professor who helped author the recent report on Units of Study, also does a good job of showing how Calkins attempts to play to both sides of the reading debate while clearly holding tight to three-cueing methods.)
That’s obviously a problem, but I think the real question is even more fundamental: not just whether Calkins truly supports the teaching of phonics, but whether she understands what phonics is. (more…)
