Mary Damer on masked deficits & poor spelling in high-performing students

At least 30 - 40% of readers who have learned to read with balanced literacy or whole language will learn the code for themselves through natural reading and a bit of haphazard phonics thrown in, but that doesn't always mean that those students will necessarily be fluent readers. I've been having discussions with young campaign workers in their mid to late 20's, almost all of whom have gone through whole language/balanced literacy. These days I don't mince words anymore and am blunt: "Your generation was screwed." They readily agree. One English professor at OSU told me that she no longer can teach Dickens because the sentences are too long (i.e. readability level too high). If any group of college students were immersed in whole language, it's in Ohio where sight word reading is still the predominant method of instruction and often taught as the "literacy collaborative."

The 20-year olds want to talk about their reading experiences, and those who struggled always start by saying, "I'm not stupid, but........." Basically they fall into four camps.

1. The "I can learn to read naturally" readers (among the lucky 30 - 40% of all students) who broke the code for themselves or had parents who as they read to them did some sounding out as they went along: These adults don't understand what the big deal about reading instruction is because it was so easy to learn to read (unfortunately, this is the group of people that I suspect usually become general education literacy professors.) Because these individuals had no systematic phonics, some of them never learned the more difficult phonetic spelling letter-sound associations and have had to rely on memory for spelling rather than automatically writing an e when a word has that sound as a regular spelling pattern. As an adult, having to rely on visual memory of words leads to poor spelling. Thus for a portion of these folks, their poor spelling as adults reflects the lack of adequate phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.

2. The "I can learn to read naturally" readers (among the lucky 30 - 40% of all students) who broke the code enough to be successful until they hit law school or medical school where the words were so "big." The kids I talk to made it through school often with high grades, but it was painful and remains so. They talk about having to use rulers under the sentences and sounding out loud. When I remark that reading so slowly must make it difficult to comprehend the text, they look at me as if I’m a sage. How did I know that? Everything takes twice as long for them. These were the WL/balanced literacy kids who needed the fluency and advanced word reading (advanced phonics skills) practice when they were younger.

3. Another group of readers we can refer to as the "minimal strugglers" (approx. 30 - 50% of all students) will start to struggle by the middle of first grade in reading if they do not have systematic phonics that is well taught, but their parents of means get them early phonics tutoring. Because of the tutoring, they eventually read at grade level. It's interesting that these individuals still feel like failures in reading because they had to have this additional help. We can't forget that the trauma of failure starts young. In high poverty areas, group 2 can be as large as 50% of the school population and unfortunately, those children usually don't get the outside phonics tutoring and so do not develop grade level reading skills. If they haven't had outside phonics tutoring, these readers will look more like the following group by grade 4 when their test scores start to plummet.

4. For a final 20 - 30% of readers, learning to read is the most difficult task they will ever have and only well-taught systematic and explicit phonics in the early grades (usually until the student reaches 3rd grade level reading) will get them past a fourth grade reading level as adults. These readers who are always reading way below grade level by fourth grade if they received WL or balanced literacy reading instruction didn't make it as far as the kids I was talking to. They are already filling up the prisons in disproportionate amounts; they are working menial jobs; the brightest are entrepreneurs where they can hide their lack of reading. Out of this group, only 5 - 10% have true dyslexia. The rest have dysteachia.

Thus when you give that nonsense word test to whole language readers, those in the first group and some in the second will be able to meet the test benchmarks although there will usually be some errors for a few letter-sound combinations. Group 3 may do fine with the easier nonsense words and then start to slow down and make more errors as the multi-syllable ones are introduced. Depending on age, group 4 will struggle from the first nonsense word.

Mary Damer

Mary's books:
Reading Instruction for Students Who Are At Risk or Have Disabilities
Managing Unmanageable Children: Practical Solutions for Administrators (coauthor: Elaine McEwan)

Why Johnny Doesn't Like to Read by Elizabeth Brown
Who Needs Phonics?

reading tests explained - Wrightslaw
free reading tests & instructions - Hepplewhite (scroll down)
DIBELS explanation of nonsense word fluency (all DIBELS tests are free)
On Phonics (The Phonics Page)
Phonics Page reading tests (including a test for high school reading)
Don Potter's Education Page (very rich; contains programs long out of print; phonics, reading, lessons, articles, etc.)
Computer Assisted Learning