This point is a sharp one because what they were saying is that we can’t teach such a cipher directly. We can’t just hand a kid the codebook.

So when I saw a reference recently to another Gough paper called Reading, spelling, and the orthographic cipher, co-written in 1992 with Connie Juel and Priscilla Griffith, I knew I needed to read this one, too.

This later paper makes many of the same points that the 1980 paper does, but with added depth and empirical studies to back it up. In this post, I’m going to pull out a few quotes from the paper that I found interesting to ruminate a little further on this idea of a cipher and implications for instruction.

“The orthographic cipher of English (in short, the cipher) is very complex. A simple cipher would map each letter onto a single phoneme and each phoneme onto a single letter. But English has only 26 letters to map onto more than three dozen phonemes, so it could not be simple; either a letter must represent more than one phoneme, or some phonemes must be represented by more than one letter. Moreover, English orthography was woven by history (Scragg, 1974), and like most such fabrics the basic pattern has been stitched and darned, and altered and augmented many times.”

This is the challenge of the English cipher. 26 letters map ~44 phonemes in a quasi-regular manner, with spellings and morphemes amalgamated from Anglo Saxon, Latin, and Greek origins.

“Words that are predictable tend to be short and common, whereas words that are unpredictable tend to be long and uncommon. Thus context will fail children exactly where they most need help.”

And context is not enough to determine most unfamiliar words, despite what three-cueing may tell you. Readers must be able to recognize words, and nearly instantaneously.

“This is not to equate literacy with word recognition; there is much more to reading than recognizing words. After recognizing the word letter, readers must decide whether it means a character or a missive; they must disambiguate it. After deciding on the meaning of each word in the sentence Juan showed her baby pictures, readers must decide whether baby or pictures is the direct object; they must parse the sentence. After understanding each sentence in a discourse, readers must assemble them into a larger framework; they must build a discourse structure. And after understanding the discourse, readers must integrate it with what they already know; they must assimilate the text.

But readers must also do these things when they listen. These are linguistic skills, not just of reading, but of comprehension in general. So we equate literacy not with word recognition, but rather with the product of that skill and com prehension (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Tunmer & Hoover, this volume). Reading “R” equals the product of decoding “D” and comprehension “C”, or RD X C.”

I’d add a wrinkle to this: the linguistic skills required for comprehending the language of written text require more effort (at least initially, most especially within a discipline of study), as decoding does. The more exposure to this written form of language, the better. This is why read-alouds from the earliest ages are so important.

But there is evidence suggesting that indeed, listening comprehension and reading comprehension are more or less equivalent, when decoding is taken out of the equation. I don’t know how to resolve this, but it doesn’t make sense to me that we could equate listening to a story or informational read-aloud as equivalent to listening to a friend tell us about something that happened to them earlier. The language of written text is decontextualized, it is abstract. Rarer words and sentences are used. We have to make more inferences to fill in the blanks. More on this in future posts — I’m on a big kick around the power of interactive read-alouds, most especially for students newer to the English language. Back to Gough et al.:

“What children need is a way to recognize novel words on the basis of their form. We should remember that the vast majority of these words are already known to children in their phonological form, for in the early grades almost all of the words that readers encounter are already part of the child's vocabulary. So if there was a way to convert the printed form into a phonological form, children could readily recognize them.

Fortunately, an alphabetic language like English affords a mechanism that works for many of its words. An alphabetic orthography is based on a system of rules that map letter strings onto phonological forms; the letters of printed words represent the phonemes of spoken ones. If children could internalize this system, they would have a way of transforming the novel into the familiar, and they could decode the message.”

This made me think about students new to the English language, and how they do not necessarily have that unfamiliar word as a firm part of their lexicon, either in its phonological form nor in its semantic meaning. This means a teacher must ensure that instruction on a word’s coded form must also be conducted in direct association with its meaning. Furthermore, a teacher can make connections between the English word form and meaning to the potentially more familiar forms and meaning in a student’s home language.

Now we get to really interesting part about internalizing the cipher, the cryptanalysis that a new reader must undertake:

“In making this assertion, we are trying to make three points. First, we argue that learning is distinct from teaching, that whatever or however they might be taught, what will determine how children read is what they internalize. Second, we argue that if they are to read with any degree of skill, they must internalize the cipher. That is, we argue that there is only one way to read well and that is with the aid of the cipher. Thus however children are taught, whether by phonics, whole language, or some eclectic method, they must master the cipher, or they will read poorly if at all. Third, we argue that even when the attempt is made to teach the cipher directly, as in synthetic phonics, the rules that children are taught are not the rules that they must internalize.”

As I pointed out in another post, this appears to be an interesting point of convergence between Ken Goodman and Phillip Gough: they both claim that learning to read can’t be taught directly. Here Gough et al. claim that even in the case of synthetic phonics, the most direct and explicit form of teaching grapheme-phoneme correspondences, it’s still not necessarily enough to get an individual child all the way there. Each individual child needs to internalize the algorithm of the code.

“As we have pointed out elsewhere (Gough & Hillinger, 1980), the rules of phonics are explicit, few in number, and slow. In contrast, the rules of the cipher are implicit, very numerous, and very fast. Our assumption is that the two are distinct. Indeed, we are intrigued by the suggestion that what the child has internalized are not rules at all but might instead be a system of analogy (Goswami, 1986) or even a connectionist system (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989; Seidenberg, this volume). Whatever the form of the cipher, whether it consists of rules, analogies, or connections, we contend that it does not consist of the rules taught consciously in phonics.”

Should we teach rules? What rules should we teach, and when? There is no consensus on an exact scope and sequence for phonics instruction, only that it must be structured and systematic. Most sequences are organized around the general principle of easier to harder.

Gough et al. make an interesting conjecture regarding what it is that is being internalized. This also connects to a wider debate about what must be taught explicitly via direct instruction vs. gained implicitly via adequate opportunity to hear and see patterns of spoken and written forms and meaning. There’s also some debate about the teaching of “rules.”

There’s more interesting items in this paper to consider, but I’ll leave it there, as I think we’ve got some good food for thought. How do we get an individual child to internalize the cipher in the most effective way based on that individual child’s experiences with spoken and written language?

Is a synthetic phonics approach maximally effective and efficient for all children? Is it possible that students new to the English language may benefit from a flexible approach that brings in analytic and embedded phonics methods to ensure words are understood in their phonological and morphological forms and meaning while learning to deconstruct and reconstruct them? Is it possible some kids may need far more explicit phonics instruction, while some may need far less?

Some more reading along these lines:

• Tim Shanahan’s post, Which is best? Analytic or synthetic phonics?
• Mark Seidenberg, Matt Borgenhagen, and Devin Kearn’s, Lost in Translation? Challenges in Connecting Reading Science and Educational Practice
• Donald Compton, Have We Forsaken Reading Theory in the Name of “Quick Fix” Interventions for Children With Reading Disability?

#reading #implicit #explicit #rules #internalize #phonics #cipher #cryptanalysis

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In our last post in this series exploring the question, “What is (un)natural about learning to read and write?,” we looked at a paper from 1976 by Ken and Yetta Goodman that argued that written language is a form of oral language and thus, learned naturally in a literate society through exposure and use in the environment.

In this post, we’ll explore a direct counter to that argument made by Phillip Gough and Michael Hillinger in 1980.

• Gough, P. B., & Hillinger, M. L. (1980). Learning to read: An unnatural act. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 30, 179–196. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02653717

Gough and Hillinger start off by laying out data that show:

“the statistically average child, normally endowed and normally taught, learns to read only with considerable difficulty. He does not learn to read naturally.”

Like the Goodmans, Gough and Hillinger (let’s call them G&H hereafter) lay out how learning to read progresses, starting with “Paired-associate Learning.” In case you haven’t come across this term before, paired-associate learning, in simplest terms, is like a set of flashcards, in which two distinct items, or stimuli, become associated in memory through repeated exposure. This could be implicit (e.g. hearing the bell means it’s time to eat) or explicit; this is the type of learning most commonly associated with learning “tricky words,” or words in English with highly irregular spellings.

In the Goodmans’ explication of reading development, they didn’t call it paired-associate learning, but they describe a somewhat similar phenomena—that children raised in a literate society start to “read” their environment and gain a functional understanding of written language. G&H agree that the initial steps of learning to read involves this “natural” process:

“The selectional paired-associate technique, the child’s natural strategy, for learning arbitrary associations will work well enough for any and every child, in the beginning.”

But for anyone who has tried to memorize many items knows, we quickly hit a limit in our capacity: “With each new word, the difficulty of finding a unique cue to distinguish it will increase,” and a child “must come to recognize that he has been trying the wrong thing, that his natural strategy will not work” for too many words.

It is here that “the child who has been treating the written language as if it were a code must confront the fact that it is a cipher.”

A Code vs. A Cipher

What?!

This is a distinction I hadn’t heard before, and it seems worth unpacking since it represents a key pivot for G&H from the notion that learning to read is “natural.”

In fact, let’s return to our friend Ken Goodman for a second. After the Goodman paper (as discussed in my last post), there’s a short transcription of attendees who heard the paper presented asking Goodman questions, and there’s an interesting discussion around the meaning of the word “decoding” and its relation to language that goes back and forth between a few of the researchers.

At the close of the transcription, Goodman states:

“Now, the problem and the confusion is that people have only treated written language as a code, but oral language is a code, too. . . Matching letters to sounds is a kind of recoding operation, because I still come out with code. That is not decoding.”

Goodman, K. S., & Goodman, Y. M. (1976). Learning to Read is Natural. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED155621

G&H seem to agree with Goodman’s account of “oral language as a code,” which they furthermore agree is learned naturally via associative learning (i.e. paired-associate learning). But where written language departs, according to them, is that it is not only a code: it is a cipher.

In our everyday use of the words code and cipher, there is little distinction between these words. But in cryptography, there is an important, if subtle, distinction.

I’ll admit I reread G&H’s illustration a few times, and found it slippery. I then looked around online, as one does these days, and found this Khan Academy explanation:

A code is stored as a mapping in a codebook, while ciphers transform individual symbols according to an algorithm.

G&H take the analogy of calling written language a cipher seriously, because according to them, the problem is that in order to learn to read, a child has to perform cryptanalysis and we can’t just hand them a codebook.

The problem is that the systematic relationship of the plaintext (oral language) to the ciphertext (written language) is highly complex. One of the interesting tidbits shared by G&H is that in 60s and 70s, there were attempts to build “reading machines for the blind,” which incorporated “as many as 577 rules” to try to map graphemes to phonemes — and even all those rules still “lead to mispronunciations of many of the most common words in English.”

One impulse, as per the Goodmans, would be to say there’s too many rules to learn to decode such mappings, so decoding should not be taught. But G&H aren’t having that:

“We cannot accept this argument. The argument that English spelling is frequently irregular overlooks the fact that the irregularities are not arbitrary. . .”

“We conclude, then, that if the child is to become a fluent reader, he must learn to decode, more precisely, to decipher. He must internalize the orthographic cipher of English.”

But we can’t simply give kids a codebook of 577 rules and we’re done. Instead, kids need their brains to become equipped with the algorithm of the cipher. They must internalize all of those systematic mappings.

But if this is the case, then the child is confronted with a serious problem, for there is no way we can give him that cipher. . . . In phonics, we try. . . But we believe that the rules of phonics bear only a superficial resemblance to the rules which the fluent reader has internalized.

… the rules of phonics are conscious and explicit — we state them in English — while the rules which the reader uses are unconscious and implicit. . . . the implicit cipher is too fast for phonics.

This is where the terminology orthographic mapping, which G&H weren’t equipped with yet, comes in handy!

The Cipher Must be Internalized

This leads to a conundrum. A child needs to be able to “break the code” but internalizing the cipher is implicit. As G&H state:

Here, then, is the crux of the child’s problem as he enters the second stage of reading acquisition: he must acquire the orthographic cipher, but he cannot get it from his teacher. [bold added]

There’s an interesting parallel here to the Goodmans’ claim that “Instruction does not teach children to read.” The Goodmans’ ALSO state: “Our contention is that we can explain both acquisition and lack of acquisition of literacy in terms of the internalization of the functions of written language by children.”

But G&H diverge substantially in what they mean. While Ken Goodman said in no uncertain terms that he would NOT teach letter-sound correspondences (as he believed it would be detrimental and inhibit natural learning), G&H, instead, are pointing out that the process of breaking the code is so difficult that a whole lot of explicit instruction will be needed to get kids to the point where they can step off on their own.

For G&H this is when things get unnatural. The process of cryptanalysis entails that a child can:

• Recognize that the printed message is an encoded version of a spoken one (‘cryptanalytic intent’)
• Recognize that the ciphertext is composed of letters
• Note each and every letter of every word
• Recognize that written words are composed of a sequence of phonemes
• Recognize that spoken words are, in turn, composed of phonemes
• Decompose a spoken word into its constituent phonemes (‘metaphonological awareness’)
• Sufficient exposure to paired spoken and written messages (plaintext and ciphertext)

According to G&H, because these four factors are unnatural, many children will require explicit teaching of them:

“These things must be explained to him, or he must figure it out for himself. . . And please note this is not a natural thing for the child to do. We confess that we cannot think of another instance in the child’s experience where the child must recognize some visual stimulus as composed of a particular configuration of commutable, permutable, elements. (This is not true of faces, or houses, or animals, or anything else we can think of.)

I think this is an important point to highlight in relation to another recent paper we investigated on language learning, in which author Michael Ramscar challenged the notion that language is learned by its parts, or compositionality, and instead is learned via computing probabilities. I think he’s right, and this echoes the “natural” argument of the Goodmans. But what G&H draw out here is that having to notice each letter and letter sequence in a written word is completely different than the type of learning that we engage with in learning language or paying attention to our environment. Furthermore, phonemic awareness (not yet terminology at the time this was written, apparently, they call it ‘metaphonological awareness’) requires an unnatural recognition and ability to decompose the parts of sounds in a spoken word.

“Whether recognition of individual letters causes difficulty or not, the recognition that each ciphertext word is composed of a sequence of meaningless elements must be hard for the child to achieve. The requirement that he note the same fact about the plaintext, that he recognize that each spoken word is composed of a sequence of meaningless elements, may be even more unnatural.”

So despite the fact that a teacher cannot just hand over a codebook, and phonics may be an artificial vehicle, G&H stress that children will need all the help they can get to be able to internalize and automate the cryptanalysis required to decipher written language.

“. . . we do not believe that phonics teaches the child the rules of the cipher which he must master. But it does provide the child a virtually indispensable tool for collecting data on his own, for discovering what spoken word goes with an unfamiliar written word.

We would note, though, that in our view, phonics is theoretically dispensable. It gives the child artificial rules by which to get the data he needs to learn the real rules.”

The field has come a long way since this 1980 paper, which is to me what makes it all the more remarkable how clear-eyed this account remains, given that G&H were riffing off an analogy to cryptography.

But this analogy gave Gough and Hillinger a firm and testable basis to counter the Goodmans’–and whole language’s–unempirical belief that learning to read could be achieved without a systematic approach to teaching letter-sound correspondences.

So in our exploration thus far in this series, we’ve looked at the argument that learning to read is natural, now countered that it is not. Gough and Hillinger have helped us to see that while the Goodmans may be right about those aspects of the written language that are most similar to spoken language, learning and applying the alphabetic principle to decipher letter-sound sequences and decompose and recode spoken words is no easy feat.

I am still left wondering: Is it that gaining an overlay of a writing system is unnatural? Or is it that it is more abstract, and thus, presents a higher bar to gain fluency with?

We will continue examining this fundamental argument in our next post, an Interlude, followed by our final paper, The Relation of Speech to Reading and Writing.

#natural #unnatural #reading #literacy #research #phonics #decoding #cipher #crptography #irregularity

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