Vocabulary Reduction, a Deliberate Dumbing Down

In Dolch's 1948 book, "Problems in Reading," he states on page 255:

Give children books suited to their abilities and most reading difficulties will be solved.

In Dolch's 1945 "A Manual for Remedial Reading," p. 428,

There is nowadays an evergrowing demand in all fields for textbooks that are easier to read. Teachers especially are making themselves heard in this demand. Publishing companies are rising to the occasion and are revising old books or issuing new books which have simpler reading matter. As soon as an easier book is adopted, many children become satisfactory readers who were classed as unsatisfactory before. Children who were serious remedial cases become less serious.

In my recent post about Dolch and the 4th grade slump, Mark Roulo had an excellent link to this article:

Schoolbook Simplification and Its Relation to the Decline in SAT-Verbal Scores by Donald P. Hayes, Loreen T. Wolfer, Michael F. Wolfe Cornell University

I saw a great table years ago in one of the books I read showing exact numbers of unique words in schoolbooks over the years that correlated with the introduction of whole language, but cannot find it. The above link has better graphs, though, the source I had was just numbers!

Geralding E. Rodgers in her book “The History of Beginning Reading” (e-version available from Author House) has an entire chapter in this book called: "The Reduction of Vocabulary, Oversimplification of Syntax, And Banishing of True Phonics." The whole chapter (her whole book, actually) is worth reading, here are a few good quotes from pages 1047 - 1048:

The record of reading texts which were published after 1925 confirms that the push after 1925 was emphatically on first grade and primary reading, and on the enormous reduction of vocabulary in primary- grade reading books. Of the seventeen series Smith listed as post-1925 series, eight covered only the first three grades. As Smith was not the slightest bit embarrassed to make very clear, the size of the vocabulary lists in those books had dropped sharply after 1925. It is an astonishing fact that, by 1934 when her book first appeared in print, the reduction of vocabulary in primary-grade books of which she boasted had actually been sold to gullible government school administrators as an “improvement."

After 1921, the reduction of vocabulary had been largely based on Thorndike’s The Teacher’s Word Book, Teachers College Press, published in 1921, which provided the first guide to the ten thousand highest-frequency words. For the first time, with the use of that book, it was possible to reduce vocabulary systematically in reading texts through the third or fourth grades.

Complex syntax was also removed from materials, but very deliberately in the 1920’s, in the name of reducing “readability” levels. Without exposure to such complex syntax in reading materials to provide necessary practice in its use, the ability of American students to handle complex syntax has dropped. This is demonstrated by their weak written compositions.

On page 216, Smith referred to the sharp reduction of words in primers and first readers between 1922 and 1928, and the even greater reduction by 1931. In 1922, nine of twelve had vocabularies ranging from 377 up to 630. In 1931, none ranged that high. Instead, the highest of the seven was 333, and the lowest 274.

Palisadesk also had some excellent comments on my first Dolch post where she explained all the things that need to be taught explicitly for reading.

Webster's Speller followed by Parker's readers taught all of these steps. Phonics and spelling were explicitly taught, syllables were explicitly taught, and the readers had pronunciations and definitions of difficult words. His First Reader also breaks words up by syllables. On my Webster page, I explain how to use Webster's Speller and have links to Parker's Readers.

First use of the phrase "4th grade hump?"

In the earliest mention of the phrase that I have yet found, it is called instead the “4^th grade hump.” For a few years after that, it is called a hump, then it appears as the phrase “4^th grade slump.” If you search Google books for the two phrases for various time periods, you find a number of interesting links. Also, over time, there are more and more hits for the phrase.

Here are the phrases, from Edward Dolch, the creater of the Dolch sight words, in his 1948 book, “Problems in Reading.” The first is on p. 56:

There is the famous 'fourth-grade hump,' the sudden difficulty of reading matter that strikes the children without warning. The difficulty keeps on climbing through grades V and VI.

This mention on page 251 also has a very interesting table:

Every word not on the list of 1,000 [most frequent words] was underlined and counted every time it appeared. Therefore a percentage of hard words means a percentage of the running words, that is, the total words read. We are aware that if a word appears a second time it is not now a hard word if it were learned the first time, but there was no way of allowing for this factor.....

The percentages of hard words for the books of each grade were averaged, and then the figures were rounded to the nearest whole number. The result shows the following:

TABLE V

Word Difficulty, According to Appearance on First 1,000 Words for

Children’s Reading as Found in Ten Series Of Readers

Grade

I II III IV V VI

Hard Words (Not on List)

4% 6% 8% 12% 14% 16%

These figures show the well-known “fourth grade hump,” a difference between the third grade books and fourth grade books that is twice the difference between the other grades.

There were several interesting links to later use of the phrase “4^th grade slump,” I’ll link to two of them:

1. The Trouble With Boys by Peg Tyre, p. 142-143

(The whole thing is interesting, here’s an excerpt:)

Around fourth and fifth grade, another factor comes into play as well. Good readers take a leap forward as they move from learning to read to reading to learn. The curriculum demands it. It’s no longer enough to be able to “sound out” words. Children have to comprehend sentences and paragraphs from history and science books and make inferences from those texts. Kids who don’t make that jump fall into what experts have dubbed the “fourth-grade slump.” They are stuck trying to figure out how to decode the word everglades, for instance, while other kids are learning about the kinds of animals that live in those Florida swamps. It’s an important cognitive leap.

By every measure, the fourth-grade slump hits boys harder than it hits girls.

2. The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind by Chall, Jacobs, and Baldwin, p. 143

As predicted by the theoretical model of reading used for our study (see Chapter 1), the students’ scores started to slump at about grade 4. For the below-average readers, the slump began early (in grade 4) and was intense. By grades 6 and 7, they were reading almost two years below grade level on all the reading tests. For the above-average readers, the slump began later (around grade 6) and was less intense. Many of the above-average readers were still reading on grade level or above in the sixth and seventh grades on some of the reading tests.The slump started earlier on some tests than on others.

The first to slip was vocabulary.

If you teach properly, with a good phonics method and less than a dozen sight words, there are few "hard words;" disadvantaged elementary children (including several 1st graders) taught with Webster's Speller were able to sound out what Dolch called "hard words," but Webster called "easy words of X syllables."

Here are some "easy words of 3 syllables, accented on the first and third"

O-VER-TAKE, IN-COR-RECT, IN-TER-MIX

and "easy words of 4 syllables, full accent on the first, and the half accent on the third"

MIS-CEL-LA-NY, OB-DU-RA-CY, PUR-GA-TO-RY

New Phonics Movies!

I've been busy lately making new movies.

My sight word movie, must watching for anyone who has children learning sight words at school, is finally finished and is online at YouTube. (It was hard to find a YouTube name--almost everything I tried was taken, probably by those millions of people uploading cat videos. Isobella was my Spanish name in Spanish Class in High School.)

And, I've updated a few more of my phonics lessons. When they're all done updating, they'll have good enough audio and video quality to start mass producing DVDs and CDs for churches or other groups that want to teach with them. If you want a good overview of the difference between short and long vowel sounds and when words will have each sound, lesson 14 is a good resource. The lightbulb goes on for many of my students after watching this lesson. I've updated 15 of 32 lessons so far.

The math people are evidently more geeky, there is a lot of good stuff out there on YouTube. There are not as many phonics people that are technically oriented, it seems.

My movies are actually pretty low tech and boring, but they get the point across. If people want flashy and songs, they can pay hundreds of dollars. They can get boring for free.

However, I may need to throw in some cats to up my YouTube views and get some stars.

Help edit my sight word movie, please!

I am working on a sight word movie for YouTube. (I'll also post at my website with a link from my sight word page.)

The YouTube time limit is 10 minutes. I've gotten it down from about 18 minutes to 12 minutes and 7 seconds, with 31 seconds of blank space I've reclaimed that will come off the end when I finish editing. (It's hard to move things around, it's easier to get a group of cuts done at once and then re-arrange en mass.) So, I have about a minute and a half of excess babbling I need help cutting out. I've watched it so many times I can't see the forest for the trees anymore. Also, I could go on for hours about sight words, they really are a huge part of the reading problem, every time I watch it I just thing of things to add, not things to subtract!

Thanks!

The movie is here: http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/sightwordmovie.html

Sight Word Movie

I did have an idea about just reading parts of the quotes, but when I tried to explain that I was just quoting part of them, and that the full quotes would be available on my sight word page, that ended up taking longer than just reading the full quotes! I'll work on rephrasing that. Also, some of my viewers may have reading problems themselves, so I'm trying to get the full point across the audio.

4th grade slump, sight words, spelling

There is a new presentation available from Dolores Hiskes. Her book is one of the better phonics books out there.

This presentation includes on page 3 information about the "4th grade slump," on page 20 about teaching spelling, and on page 24 about sight words, including this statement, "Activity in one hemisphere suppresses the activity of the mirror-image region on the other side," [From The Mind And The Brain, Schwartz & Begley] which seems to agree with my theory of sight word overshadowing.

You can download her presentation here, it is titled "The Comprehension Dilema."

There are also interesting tidbits throughout about phonics and math.

Sight Words, silent reading comprehension tests, and Reading First

How easy do you think it is to guess your way through a reading comprehension test up to grade level 3 with just 220 Dolch sight words and 95 Dolch nouns?

Look over these 3rd grade Texas silent reading compehension tests and see what you think before the reading the rest of the post.

Here are the 220 Dolch Sight Words and the 95 Dolch Sight Nouns (scroll to bottom for list).

Now, here are all the words in the first paragraph of the first story that are included in these 2 lists above:

They, had, cows, horses, and pigs, a, dog, cat, bird, were, the, chickens, she, eggs, from, but, to, eggs, by, her---- [her is a sight word, actual word is herself], ?henhouse [hen and house are sight words, you may or may not be able to figure that out]

Here are all the above sight words in the answer for question #1:

where, does, live, by, a, in, the, on, farm

Coincidentially (or not?), the only answer that consists of all sight words is the correct answer.

The second story, all the connecting words are sight words, and the nouns that are sight words are: horse, dog, car. While this selection has a slightly lower percentage of sight words overall, a smart student can figure out the entire story from the picture.

The third story, the noun sight words are: kitty, dog, bird, house, box, ?parties [sight word is party, you may or may not be able to figure this out], ?sunflower [sun and flower are sight words], song, seeds, girl. There is also a picture that tells most of the story.

There are also elements of an IQ test in several of the questions.

This is why Geraldine Rodgers, in her book "The Case for the Prosecution, Charged with the Destruction of America's Schools," says,

“All those silent reading comprehension tests are a massive fraud. Back before 1911, when Binet of France originated the FIRST real intelligence tests, he used oral reading comprehension to test native intelligence, which is itself un-teachable. Binet’s reading comprehension paragraphs are STILL used to test intelligence. So reading comprehension scores are really IQ scores!”

You can read more about her book and the link between reading comprehension tests and IQ in this post.

On my webpage, I describe how poor sight word taught readers guess their way through texts and have more quotes from Rodgers, and explain how this is hurting vocabulary acquisition. I also link to a comparison of Romans 12 in the KJV to the vocabulary dumbed down NIV and show how it looks to a reader taught with sight words. Here is the first paragraph of each below (KJV first), black words are in the first 2,000, so could be read by most adults taught with whole word methods, red words are 2,000 - 5,000, readable for most but more difficult for someone with a poor visual memory, purple for 5,000 - 10,000, and the first and last letter only of words outside the most common 10,000 words--you would have to guess the word from the first and last letter and the context. (Those with poor visual memories would have to also guess varying portions of the red and purple words, as well.)

I b_____h you therefore, b______n, by the mercies of God, that y_ present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, a________e unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not c_______d to this world: but be y_ transformed by the renewing of your mind, that y_ may prove what is that good, and a________e, and perfect, will of God.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not c_____m any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is–his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Now, the Reading First connection.

A spelling test or a phonics skills test is a better measure of reading ability up to grade 3 (and even after, but especially up to grade 3 when it is so easy to pass a reading comprehension test by guessing.)

The Reading First Impact Study Interim Report, page 28, states,

"The RFIS had initially planned to use a battery of individually-administered tests to assess students across the specific components of reading instruction targeted by the legislation: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (No Child Left Behind Act, 2001). When the study’s design shifted to a RDD, with a quadrupled number of schools and students in the study sample, the individualized student assessment data collection was no longer practical."

For various reasons described on pages 28 - 29, they selected the SAT 10 Reading Comprehension test.

Many of the students at the schools in the Reading First study are also, unfortunately, the type of students especially vulnerable to doing poorly on a test that includes IQ as an element of the test. These are also the students that benefit the most from explicit, systematic phonics.

Guess what grade levels were testing with these silent reading comprehension tests for the Reading First study?

Grades 1 - 3.

Teaching Phonics is NOT Rocket Science

When I worked in the Air Force as a scientist and a statistician, I met plenty of very smart rocket scientists, and they made me feel stupid in comparison.

A recent informative post about Reading First stated "Louisa Moats' comment that "Teaching Reading is Rocket Science" is not to be ignored."

Having met actual rocket scientists and seen what actual rocket scientists really do, I can tell you that teaching reading with phonics is definitely NOT rocket science. I have also tutored students in Algebra and Trig, and tutoring with phonics is easier!

However, it is hard for teachers who have not learned about the phonetic structure of the English language and have only been taught whole language and sight words techniques which not only contradict basic phonics principles, I believe they make it harder for the brain to learn phonics because of sight word picture overshadowing.

I have posted before, here and here, about sight words and guessing. You really have to see the guessing to believe it for yourself. Without nonsense words and teaching words in isolation, it is hard to break the habit. In Rudolf Flesch's 1955 (and republished in 1985!) "Why Johnny Can't Read," he has an entire chapter titled "Word Guessing--its Cause and Cure." He states on page 114 of this chapter,

"To begin with, let's try to isolate Johnny from his word-guessing environment....Let him stop all reading--all attempts to read. Explain to him that now he is going to learn how to read, and that for the time being, books are out. All he'll get for several months are lessons in phonics."

(There are easy to use phonics lessons in the back of this book.) One warning about Flesch--he is very sarcastic, he fought unsuccessfully for years with schools and teachers and it shows in his writing.

Guessing and its cure is discussed in this RRF thread.

Now, this might seem to make it sound like teaching phonics is a hard thing, as well as facts like "There are 166 letter-sound correspondences, which are too many to learn." promoted in whole-word oriented linguistics texts.

However, it really is not, if you start with an open mind, have no whole word teaching practices to overcome, and use a good phonics book that is designed to take the rocket science out of teaching reading.

I can't find the quote, but either Adams or Chall in their review of different reading methods found that when teachers made the switch from phonics to whole word or vice versa, they retained much of their old teaching methods. This seems to be happening in many Reading First classrooms.

Toe-by-Toe, a good remedial phonics program used in the UK that uses syllable division and nonsense words (but too many sight words, they need to read my sight word page to find out how to teach them phonetically!) has this tidbit:

Q: Is this book solely for the use of teachers or other professionals?
A: No! Teachers are often restricted by classroom procedures. Parents have no such procedures to inhibit them; they start with a 'clean slate'.

With my first student, I made several mistakes and taught her some sounds incorrectly at first, but she still made amazing progress--just learning that all the letters had sounds and that all words could be sounded out if broken up into syllables was a revelation and a motivation for her, she learned rapidly despite my initial errors--in fact, she was relieved that I made mistakes--it actually gave her more confidence that she could learn to read.

I had started with whole word teaching for a month, and was very excited about it after hearing its praises sung by the literacy organization I was tutoring with. However, she only learned 3 words in the 3 months I worked with her using whole word methods. In her first phonics lesson, she learned to sound out around 30 words she had never seen before, including three 3-syllable words.

When teachers used phonics in one room schoolhouses, there were not many problems learning to read, and the teachers were often girls as young as 16 (Laura Ingalls Wilder was 15, but she's obviously an exceptional person) and they taught everyone the 3R's while keeping order with boys often bigger and older than them in the classrooms.

In 2003 and 2004, I visited a nursing home with my daughter and met a then 94-year-old woman who had taught for a while (11 years?) in a one-room-schoolhouse in Texas. She said she used phonics and ALL of her students learned to read. She also said she never had any discipline problems. (She was a small lady, too!) She didn't think it was any big deal what she did, and changed the subject rapidly when I tried to get her to go into more detail. Two of her 4 brothers died fighting for our country, and all 4 went to war. She didn't think she had done much in comparison, and thought nothing of the fact that all her students learned to read.

I'll post later about the nuts and bolts about teaching phonics and how easy it actually is if you do it right and have the proper tools. In the meantime, if you're interested, you can find good resources for that here:

My free online spelling lessons (2 hours total, teaches all the phonics you need to teach someone to read.)

Don Potter's Education Page (lots of free good phonics programs and instructions on how to teach phonics--including Remedial Reading Drills, the method used to teach Flesch's Johnny how to read.)

My list of good phonics and spelling books

How to teach with Webster's Speller (syllables!)

How to teach a remedial reading student

How to teach a beginning reading student

Picture Overshadowing—are Sight Words overshadowing phonics skills?

Catherine’s Visual Learning Post got me thinking about my “picture overshadowing” theory of sight words.

I have a lot of theories about sight words (theories are at the end of the post.) All of my remedial students had problems with wildly guessing at words. From my survey of hundreds of children in schools which taught with varying emphasis on sight words, I found that the more sight words used and the longer the student was exposed to them, the harder it was to break out of these guessing habits and focus on sounding out words from left to right. I also found that more sight words resulted in more reading problems. In my sight word case study post, I examine the case of a girl who after learning the 220 Dolch sight words (this girl was not one of my students)

The skill of sounding out simple words, that she had been able to do shortly after she turned three, had been completely lost. If she didn't know a word by sight, she was stuck. [snip] ; even if a word was in her spoken vocabulary, she couldn't recognize it on the page if she hadn't seen it before in print, even if it was totally phonetically regular, with all short-vowel sounds. And when she came to these words she didn't recognize, she would try to guess…

While most of my students had not completely lost their ability to sound out words, it was like swimming through molasses to get them to sound out words. And, the more sight words taught, the thicker the molasses.

I had a theory about sight words and picture overshadowing already, but did not have a good explanation for how spelling fit in. I knew that spelling was helpful for my students, but spelling, like sight words, seemed to be dealing with wholes as well, at least on the surface. While I intuitively believed that spelling was different, I was not able to explicitly explain the difference.

Providentially, the article Catherine linked to, Words Get in the Way, provided the missing spelling explanation:

For instance, in a 1995 study, Schooler reported that verbal descriptions disrupted white volunteers' memories for the faces of white but not black individuals. He proposed that thanks to their extensive experience in looking at white faces, white volunteers used rapid, nonverbal perception to evaluate each such face as a unified entity. In contrast, volunteers spent more time studying individual features of the less-familiar black faces. Subsequent written descriptions were more consistent with the features that white participants remembered about the black faces than with the unified images they had stored for the white ones, Schooler concludes.

This led me to see how spelling could fit nicely into the picture overshadowing theory of sight words. While you do examine the whole word to learn it for spelling, you are also studying the individual features (letters) of the word.

Charles Perfetti’s article The role of discourse context in developing word form representations: A paradoxical relation between reading and learning states,

In our experiments, children attempted to read words they could not previously read, during a self-teaching period, either in context or in isolation. Later they were tested on how well they learned the words as a function of self teaching condition (isolation or context). Consistent with previous research, children read more words accurately in context than in isolation during self-teaching; however, children had better retention for words learned in isolation.

In my remedial work, I’ve found that students learn better when taught words in isolation. I try not to introduce any outside reading material until all phonics skills have been over-learned. When teaching my daughter to read, I found that she also did better when taught words in isolation, just like my remedial students. Moreover, she did even better when we switched to Webster’s Speller, learning spelling and syllables in isolation. Don Potter has found that his students (both beginning and remedial students) learn better when taught words in isolation as well. He is sharing a method for teaching phonics words in isolation with his nationwide campaign to get a free copy of Blend Phonics to every elementary teacher in America.

The article Words get in the Way states,

In one study, conducted by Kim Finger of Claremont (Calif.) Graduate University, participants who wrote a description of a man's face after studying the face for 5 minutes suffered no memory loss if they were then nudged back into a perceptual frame of mind. To do this, Finger asked them either to solve a printed maze or to listen to 5 minutes of instrumental music. Both strategies yielded face memory equal to that of volunteers who didn't provide a written description.

I’ve found that my students also do better when I get them switched back from “guessing mode” (visual) to “sounding mode” (verbal.) To switch them out of “guessing habits,” and into “sounding out habits,” I found the use of nonsense words helpful, especially if I announced up front that the upcoming words were nonsense words. Some of my students who had been exposed to sight words for years were very hard to break of their guessing habits. They would even try to guess at nonsense words—unless warned that the word was a nonsense word and that there was no way they would ever be able to guess it because it was not a real word. Repeated nonsense words would usually switch them from “guessing mode” to “sounding mode” and allow me to begin phonetic teaching work on regular words.

So, I now have a more complete theory of sight words and “picture overshadowing.” Sight words are processed on the visual side of the brain (pictures). Words taught with phonics are processed on the verbal side of the brain (sounds.) People with dyslexia (organic or induced by sight words) have been shown to improve their reading abilities and have changes in brain activity consistent with this picture overshadowing theory. [See note 2 below] This "picture overshadowing" explains the molasses effect I saw with sight words and my students' impaired ability to sound out words.

I believe that guessing at words from pictures or context can also switch students into this visual “guessing mode,” while reading words in isolation forces students to focus on the letters and sounds of the word, the verbal “sounding mode.”

In my informal survey of hundreds of children, those who read the best were those taught with phonics methods that used very few sight words.

You can determine if someone is suffering "picture overshadowing" from too many sight words by giving the Miller Word Identification Assessment, or MWIA, available for free download from Don Potter. It measures the speed at which a student reads sight words verses less frequent phonetic words. Anyone reading the phonetic words more than 10% slower than the holistic words should consider a good phonics program with no sight words.

Blend Phonics is a good program that uses no sight words, and does not teach words in context, which I also believe leads students to switch over from the verbal to the visual mode. Don Potter also has developed a Blend Phonics Reader which has words of similar configuration (bed, bid, bat, bit, etc.) next to each other to help the student learn to see and overcome visual configuration guessing habits.

Webster’s Speller is another very good phonics program that uses no sight words. Its use of spelling may also help prevent dyslexia by teaching students to sound out and spell words and syllables before they read them in context, making sure that they have a firm letter by letter mental image of the word before they attempt to read them in context. It also teaches using syllables via a syllabary, which may be helpful for preventing dyslexia. Syllables were also a very powerful reading method for my students and for Catherine’s son, resulting in rapid reading grade level improvements.

My free online phonics lessons also use syllables and teach no sight words. The first several lessons have now been switched to all uppercase to prevent guessing from visual configuration.

Richard G. Parker warned of the dangers of reading words you hadn’t yet learned to spell (and sound out, see note 3) in 1851:

I have little doubt will be found true, and that is, that it is scarcely possible to devote too much time to the spelling book. Teachers who are impatient of the slow progress of their pupils are too apt to lay it aside too soon. I have frequently seen the melancholy effects of this impatience. Among the many pupils that I have had under my charge, I have noticed that they who have made the most rapid progress in reading were invariably those who had been most faithfully drilled in the spelling book.

When I taught my daughter to read using a variety of phonics programs and only 2 sight words, I found that she would occasionally guess at words when reading stories. After learning to spell and sound out syllables and words using Webster’s Speller, she no longer guesses at words when reading them in context.

Note 1: all but 2 of the most commonly taught 220 sight words can be taught phonetically.

Note 2: I disagree with Flowers’ statement that this confirms that dyslexia is biologically based. While some forms of dyslexia probably have a genetic component, sight word teaching could be the cause of many of these brain differences, and parents who do not know phonics cannot teach their children to sound out words at home, which could account for the seeming genetic pattern of transmission. I was taught with a bit of phonics, then with whole word methods using sight words. My parents sounded out words for me when I struggled with words at home. A parent who did not know phonics would not be able to provide this kind of help for their children. My dyslexia page has more information about dyslexia, including links to articles and presentations about the brain changes that occur when dyslexic students are taught phontic reading and spelling.

Note 3: Spelling Books in the 1700's and early 1800's were used for both phonics and spelling purposes, and were used to teach children to read. Noah Webster himself explains this in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. The entry for spelling-book reads, "n. A book for teaching children to spell and read."