I am currently enrolled in the Department of Education at my local university to get my Reading Endorsement and Master's Degree in Reading. I'm pretty much taking only one class a term and this term's class is Linguistics.
The book we are using for linguistics was written by two teachers. I'd be much happier if my textbook on linguistics had been written by linguists or cognitive psychologists. Either the authors of this book are trying to intentionally misinstruct teachers in raining, or they know just enough to be dangerous.
Actually, the chapter on orthography wasn't too bad, with an emphasis on spelling rules and why it's good to teach them. But then, amazingly, the authors throw that orientation out the window and go Ken Goodman all the way in the chapter titled, "A Linguistic Perspective on Phonics." If they are going to look at phonics from a linguistic perspective, maybe they could have talked to a linguist or two first, instead of using Ken Goodman as their linguistics expert. If you don't know Ken Goodman, he's the father of whole language and the one who called reading a psycholinguistic guessing game. Martin Kozloff has a good write up on Ken Goodman and whole language. http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/goodman.html
When I read the chapter on phonics in the textbook I was amazed, appalled, and disheartened. It's hard to think that in 2008, eight years after the National Reading Panel Report on teaching reading, this kind of claptrap is still being taught in university classes.
Here's a list of various reasons why, according to the textbook, teaching phonics doesn't work, with my responses.
There are 166 letter-sound correspondences, which are too many to learn.
My comment: 166 is a lot, I agree, but it's far, far less than the 10,00 or so words that make up normal discourse, and that children learning by whole language are expected to learn one by one.
Every phonics rule has exceptions.
Rules that don't work 100% of the time are useless to teach.
My comment: While it's true that there are exceptions to phonics rules, it's also true that the more rules you teach, the fewer exceptions there are. For example, the word "water" is not an exception to the rule that short 'a' sounds as in 'cat.' It's an example of the rule that when 'a' follows 'w' it often makes a short 'o' sound as in 'dot.' This comes back to the issue of how many rules there are to teach. While it's true it takes a student two or three years to learn most of the phonics rules, it takes a lifetime (if it happens at all) to learn to read one word at a time.
Basal readers introduce correspondences in different sequences, therefore phonics teaching is not systematic.
My comment: Saying that teaching phonics is not a reasonable thing to do because it isn't systematic, and it isn't systematic because it's taught in different sequences in different basal programs is just silly. Systematic, as used in the National Reading Panel Report means that the program has a plan, a scope and sequence, to insure coverage of the letter-sound correspondences and the rules of reading and spelling. It doesn't mean every program has to use the same sequence. That's like saying that every baseball, soccer, or swim coach has to teach the same skills in the same order.
Eye movement studies show readers only fixate of 60% to 80% of words proving reader sample text and guess what it says.
My comment: I don't know if it's true that we only fixate on 60% to 80% of words on a page, but I can easily see how this could be so. When I read, I don't stare at the word "the" every time I come to it. I see it with peripheral vision when I'm looking a word or two to either side of it. Because it is so short and so common, it takes almost no cognitive power for me to recognize it and I can spend my time fixating on words like "onomatopoeia" instead.
One teacher commented that she was struggling to get her 2nd graders to read for meaning and she was sorry she'd taught them phonics in kindergarten and 1st grades (she looped with them).
My comment: This one teacher's comments were taken as proof that phonics skills shouldn't be taught. The linguistics textbook never questions how she taught the students phonics, why she didn't talk about what happened in stories with them from the start, or how she is trying to teach to "read for meaning" now.
Students can read words in context that they can't read in isolation.
My comment: Context can help, but it can also cause problems. This is where students read "pony" for "horse." Of course, that doesn't bother whole language people at all. But what if a student reads "hope" for "hopeless"? It would change the whole meaning of the sentence and maybe the paragraph and story. Quite honestly, I want the pilot of an plane I'm on to be able to tell "altitude" from "attitude" and not just randomly guess because there is no context.
The linguistics book talks about miscue analysis and Stanovich's research as if they were equally valid.
Stonovich says struggling readers are the ones that rely heavily on context, not good readers.
Miscue analysis says struggling readers rely too heavily on phonics, and need to rely more on syntactic (part of speech) and semantic (does it make sense) clues.
My comment: Keith Stanovich is a well known and well respected researcher on the process of reading. One of his best known works is the book "Progress in Understanding Reading." To compare his scientific research with the pseudoscience of miscue analysis is to compare apples and oranges. They are not in the same league at all.
There is no standard for what constitutes a decodable book.
My comment: Decodable is operationally defined as a book that contains code the students ahs already learned, with very few, or preferably no, words the student doesn't yet know how to sound out. De-code-able. De - indicates reversal or removal. Code - the symbols that stand for sounds. Able - can be done. The definition is in the word itself.
The last point isn't given as a reason not to use phonics, but it's interesting, nonetheless.
When 277 readers (unknown age) were asked what they do when they come to an unknown word, 41% said "sound it out," (this was made to sound like a bad thing in the textbook), and an additional 62% (sic) would ask the teacher.
My comment: The textbook also states that 16% would look at pictures, go back and reread, or read on. Apparently simple math skills are not required for advocates of whole language (41%+ 62% = 103% add in the other 16%, assuming they don't overlap, and you get 119%)
Is this linguistics class actually taught by linguists, or is it taught out of the education department?
ReplyDeleteI wish I could say that I was shocked by this, but I'm rapidly turning unshockable.
It's taught out of the education department.
ReplyDelete>>I wish I could say that I was shocked by this, but I'm rapidly turning unshockable.<<
That's a sad comment on the state of affairs, isn't it?
Is there any reason why kids couldn't be taught IPA? For children of multilingual/ESL backgrounds (in Singapore every child learns at least two languages from the age of six), it seems mighty useful.
ReplyDeleteIt especially helps if you can identify vowels as specific entities of sound, rather than have a sort of "shifting sands" approach where the actual sound doesn't seem to be recognised.
ReplyDeleteI mean, as far as phonics of goes, the impression I got from elementary school was that there were only ten vowels, and those were the vowels of the human language. When children try to pick up foreign languages in middle school (in America), not having this misconception might be advantageous.
The main argument I've heard against something like the IPA or I.T.A. (Initial Teaching Alphabet) is that children then have to unlearn it and learn the regular alphabet in its place.
ReplyDeleteThere are reading programs that try to walk a middle line. For example, 'th' may be written joined to show that it's one sound, vowel digraphs may be underlined to indicate they work together, and/or silent 'e' is shown grayed out or small to indicate it isn't pronounced. There are ways of teaching reading that work: Direct Instruction is one, synthetic phonics as promoted by the Reading Reform Foundation is another. The problem lies in the fact that teachers are being taught to teach reading to children using whole language methods, rather than methods that well designed experiments have shown to be more effective.
"is that children then have to unlearn it and learn the regular alphabet in its place. "
ReplyDeleteWhy does one have to unlearn it? If I had been taught IPA at a young age, I would have probably mastered French much earlier (and with less pain) and also retained with Chinese, because I would have been able to extend what I was learning in English to all my other languages.
How much information is too much information? At a young age I would have loved to have found out that the silent-e did actually used to be pronounce, and that its presence historically shaped the evolution of the vowels that preceded it (in the same word).
I don't know this area -- though English reading wasn't torturous for reading I'm very bitter at losing command of my other languages in elementary school. My monolingualism gave me hell when I moved back to Singapore. (My American accent was the only thing that saved me from being castigated as an "inferior" student.)
A big thing I would have liked to learn is that writing represents the sounds of written language and the written word isn't actually the language concept itself, merely a pointer. As an elementary school student you can easily get the misconception that spoken speech is subservient to the written object, as opposed to the other way round. It would also have been easier to deal with variants of language, allophones, etc. that way. In Singapore we speak a creole language called Singlish, which has syncretic grammatical elements from both Malay and the Chinese dialects on top of a modified English base, with a good substantial portion of loanwords from the Indian languages.
Both phonics and whole language just seem woefully inadequate for multilingual teaching, which is the way most of the world works -- only a minority of the world is monolingual.
If I had been taught IPA at a young age, I would have probably mastered French much earlier (and with less pain) and also retained with Chinese, because I would have been able to extend what I was learning in English to all my other languages.
ReplyDeleteIPA isn't used to teach foreign languages in the United States. Just as grammar and phonics are missing from many language arts classes, grammar and phonics are missing from many foreign language classes as well. The "whole language" version of teaching Spanish is called the "natural approach."
K9Sasha--
ReplyDelete1. I emailed a link to your post to Mark Liberman of Language Log, inviting his comments. I would have cc'd you and made an introduction, but I can't seem to spot your email.
2. I know you've paid for this course, but really you should supplement it with Louisa Cook Moat's Speech to Print and or the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) curriculum from Sopris West.
Linguistics and reading: if the text gets into the "three cueing system" of reading, do read Marilyn Jager Adams' critique of the three-cuing system Three-Cuing System--Down for the Count.
ReplyDeleteI would love to know the title of the text and the ISBN number.
When 277 readers (unknown age) were asked what they do when they come to an unknown word, ... and an additional 62% (sic) would ask the teacher.
ReplyDeleteVery useful if and only if their teacher is ready to follow every single kid they teach around the world throughout their lives, there to answer questions.
K9Sasha, is your text Essential Linguistics: What You Need to Know to Teach Reading, ESL, Spelling, Phonics, and Grammar, by Freeman and Freeman, ISBN-13: 978-0325002743?
ReplyDeleteDavid E. Freeman and Yvonne S. Freeman are professors of bilingual education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education at the University of Texas--Brownsville.
Yes. That's the text.
ReplyDeleteAre you in New York? NY is implementing Response to Intervention, which calls for phonics instruction....just wondering is the ed schools have changed or if they are going to wait until the last minute.
ReplyDeleteMy district has already implemented RtI; it's turning out to be good for the students as they don't have to be so far behind that they qualify for SpEd or Reading Recovery in order to obtain effective instruction.