Even when you have a program that sequences phonics instruction systematically and explicitly, it needs to be acknowledged that this is only a small part of what is on most teachers’ plates each day. Kindergarten – 2nd grade teachers usually teach most core subjects, and may be drawing upon a panoply of programs they are supposed to be experts in, while managing a bunch of young homo sapiens who have not yet fully developed a prefrontal cortex and the ability to regulate their emotions and behavior. It’s exhausting, to say the least. Another important thing to bear in mind is that delivery of foundational literacy is what we could call high density. There is a fair amount that needs to be packed into that 30 minutes, if it’s being done right. So it’s unsurprising that if a teacher has not been directly trained on the program itself, or does not have any previous background on foundational literacy and the importance of skills like phonemic and morphological awareness and spelling and handwriting that phonics is most likely delivered haphazardly.

And this is all without mentioning what I discussed in the previous post–that even when there is a phonics program in place, if it is then directly contradicted by the core ELA program used (e.g. Really Great Reading followed by TCRWP and F&P), it can be a confusing experience for teachers and students alike. Thankfully, it seems our field is moving away from that kind of disconnected and shallow instruction.

While from afar you may think that teaching foundational literacy skills should be basic, in actuality, it can be even more challenging to know how to teach because it is the kind of knowledge that becomes automatic and subconscious once acquired. As a fluent reader, you don’t consciously think about what it took to learn to read words in print. But can you explain the distinction between digraphs and diphthongs? Can you provide examples of derivational and inflectional morphemes? Heck, why don’t you just give me a refresh on the difference between open and closed syllables, then? See, it’s actually quite technical and non-intuitive the closer you get to it. There are ongoing debates between literacy nerds about speech-to-print vs print-to-speech methods, or between teaching patterns vs syllable types. This is not as simple as one might think given that it is “foundational.”

With all that said about the importance of a high quality 30 minutes of foundational literacy, let’s return to the equal importance of that daily core ELA block, which is where I had landed in the last post:

A strong, high quality ELA block should include the writing, shared reading, and read-alouds so important to gaining fluency, building language and knowledge, and peer interaction to explore multiple perspectives.

What does that look like?

It looks like daily textual feasts for engaging young intellects in topics that get them interested and curious, while building their vocabulary, language, and literacy. A high volume of texts at multiple levels read, listened to, written, discussed, and savored each and every day, across subjects.

Here’s my stab at outlining what this means in the form of spiffy looking table:

A large volume and wide reading of texts at multiple levels: dialogic, interactive read-alouds of texts well above grade-level to build knowledge and language; shared readings of texts aligned to phonics scope and sequences and at grade-level to practice and build oral reading fluency at the word and sentence-levels; small group interactive readings at grade and instructional levels; and opportunities for independent reading at a variety of levels based on interest and ability. This is what engaging students in daily textual feasts is all about!

Various current curricula do this to varying degrees. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, and overall, our field has advanced remarkably in the availability of a high quality ELA curriculum in the last decade. One I have looked at that arguably best demonstrates what I just described, IMHO, is Bookworms. You can view it and download it for free and decide for yourself. There’s even some empirical evidence of its efficacy.

I’ve done some of my own curriculum work along these lines when I worked with a small team during the pandemic to draw upon freely available ReadWorks.org texts and resources to develop lessons (available on TeachHub if you work in NYC Public Schools) for “Stand-alone ENL” instruction (small group instruction for students newer to the English language). We took what ReadWorks calls “Article-A-Day” texts, which are short read-alouds, then paired them by topic with grade-level texts. We engineered the texts digitally to be more accessible with chunking, visuals, targeted prompts, and other scaffolds, and the same grade-level texts were to be read over multiple days, digging deeper into the meaning at the sentence and paragraph-level while practicing oral reading fluency–and while pairing with different aligned Article-A-Day read-alouds each day. Over the course of a week, students heard, read, spoke, and wrote words and sentences aligned to rich and interesting content but in varying forms.

Reading and re-reading the same short passages might be useful to a degree, as with paired reading fluency practice, but wide reading with listening and fluency practice, in which different short texts are read that share common language, exposes children to greater variation of language, while repeating similar vocabulary and concepts.

This balance of explicit instruction and practice, alongside implicit and cumulative exposure, is the holy grail of literacy and language. It’s why so many people have been stressing the importance of “text sets” for years now. Reading, talking, and writing about shared topics that are thoughtfully spaced and sequenced builds knowledge and language. Yes, genre knowledge is important, too, but it’s been oversold and overplayed.

Our tendency is always to simplify things for kids, thinking that we are overwhelming them. But we aren’t overwhelming them if we build knowledge and language coherently across multiple texts on the same topic using consistent routines and practices. As we read and listen to and talk and write about these shared texts and topics, we are focusing our kids’ attention on what knowledge is important, and on specific recurring patterns and constructions of language at the word, sentence, and text and discourse-levels. We analyze how authors choose their words and craft their sentences and texts, and provide practice with those words, patterns, and constructions. We see, listen to, speak, and write the words and sentences that hone our understanding into greater depth and precision. We consider, critique, and consume multiple perspectives. We talk about how we are talking about the texts, building our metalinguistic and metacognitive awareness.

This rich literary and language work must happen simultaneous to foundational work in the earliest grades, and it continues and deepens through to college. Read-alouds and shared reading do not only need to live in elementary school, either – there is always a place for them in any subject.

In K-2 grades (really we should be thinking preK-3) a strong ELA block lives alongside that high quality, high density 30 minutes of foundational literacy instruction. Bring the reading rope together!

#curriculum #ELA #literacy #literature #texts #reading #phonics #knowledge #language #AlfredTatum #textualfeasts

Teaching decoding and encoding of written words in English shouldn’t be much more than 30 minutes a day for most kids at a K-2 level. So what’s the big deal, right?

Here’s my “why”: First of all, until perhaps very recently due to a growing outcry from parents, journalists, and other advocates, there are still schools out there not teaching any phonics systematically at all, aside from whatever teachers may have taken on themselves.

Second of all, a school may be using a phonics program or teaching phonics, but just having a program doesn’t mean doing it well.

I have witnessed elementary schools that claim to be “doing Fundations,” yet when you dig below that statement, teachers are actually using bespoke and scattered materials gathered online they feel more comfortable with, cutting out or modifying essential components (such as phonemic awareness!) or otherwise planning and delivering the program haphazardly, scheduling it at the last period of the day when kids are packing up to leave, or newer teachers haven’t been adequately—or ever—supported in using it.

In other words, phonics instruction is all too often missing that whole explicit, systematic aspect that makes it effective according to decades of research.

Furthermore – and this is the most pervasive and fundamental part that seems to be getting lost in the mix again – many of those very same schools that are “doing Fundations,” have ALSO been heavily invested in using F&P BAS and guided leveled reading, and/or the non-updated version of TCRWP Units of Study, and have been actively confusing kids who may be struggling to internalize and apply decoding and encoding skills. Such schools lean more heavily into practicing “sight words” and guessing based on context clues (i.e. “three cueing”) rather than providing direct and explicit instruction at the age and time when kids most need it. This is the “phonics patch.”

Is it hard to put numbers on this? Definitely. We barely know what curriculum is being used in most schools. But the numbers we do have across the U.S. point to a substantial number of elementary schools that fits this kind of profile.

Who loses? The students who need that explicit and systematic instruction the most. The students for whom the effort required to gain automaticity goes unrecognized and unsupported, and so they give up.

Some phonics patch schools may have overall numbers that can look pretty good from afar on outcomes-based measures, like ELA state tests. But I ask you to think about that 10, 20, or 30% of children in those schools who are NOT achieving basic proficiency. And all the other students in so many other schools who are not achieving the decoding thresholds required for deeper reading comprehension. They are for whom it matters the most.

So let’s go back to that 30 minutes a day of explicit, systematic phonics instruction. It may only be 30 minutes, but this kind of instruction requires automaticity in planning and delivery that only comes with deeper knowledge and experience. That same teacher who is delivering that 30 minutes is also teaching nearly every other subject, aside from one period, every single day. So let’s not pretend it’s easy to get this right.

Teachers need district and school leaders who provide the systems and structures needed to plan and deliver that high density instruction well.

And please, let’s also not overcorrect and feed the trolls and do phonics instruction for an hour a day. A strong, high quality ELA block should include the writing, shared reading, and read-alouds so important to gaining fluency, building language and knowledge, and peer interaction to explore multiple perspectives.

Furthermore, for students new to the English language, the critical importance of oracy and connecting decoding and encoding of words to their morphology and meaning can’t be lost. And just because an older student is new to the U.S. and learning English does not mean they need phonics instruction — and when they do, they also need all the other components of the English language.

But don’t sleep on that 30 minutes of high quality, well-delivered, direct, explicit, and systematic daily phonics instruction in the earliest grades.

I’ve also experienced this difference firsthand. My son was going to a school that fit the phonics patch profile I described above. They were supposedly “doing Fundations” alongside TCRWP, but the only evidence of instruction I could see was related to sight words and print-outs from random websites. He was not making the growth I expected, given what I knew he was capable of. I began gearing up to teach him phonics myself, but by the time I got home each day it was hard to manage.

So I pulled him out in the middle of the year and put him in another school that was also “doing Fundations,” but here’s the difference: I could immediately see the impact of it, literally after one day. As he was doing his homework after his first day in that new classroom, he was segmenting words using his fingers to figure out their spelling. He had not been doing that before. All it took was a little dose of explicit instruction, and consistent structure and routines. Now for homework, instead of random worksheets with sight words and patterned sentences for which I felt like the burden of teaching was on me, he is applying the skills he is learning in class.

Are we still also doing flashcards of “tricky words”? Of course! That’s part of the equation when learning to read in an orthography where there aren’t always direct correspondences between sounds and symbols. The difference is that the balance in practice has shifted towards gaining automaticity and accuracy with decoding and encoding, rather than putting most or all of the weight on memorizing and guessing.

My son doesn’t suffer from a language-based disability, and I am fortunate to be able to have options. But what about all the kids who aren’t so lucky? This is why I keep harping on about foundational literacy.

Let’s get that 30 minutes a day right. And let’s get that ELA block right with a high quality knowledge building curriculum. Until we do, please stop pretending that sprinkling in a little phonics into a balanced literacy mix is enough.

For more on why 30 minutes a day, see this Tim Shanahan piece: How Much Phonics Should I Teach?

#literacy #reading #sightwords #phonics #curriculum #knowledge

This is how the sight word overview began:

Dear Families,

Did you know about 75% of words we read are sight words?

Sight word are words that do not follow the rules of spelling and therefore must be recognized by sight. The more sight words a student can recognize, the more fluent of a reader they will become.

The contrast between this information, and the printout from the Fundations program (an explicit, systematic, sequential Orton Gillingham based phonics program) was stark, and caused a strong reaction in me, as I knew that this information was inaccurate. Yet the reality is that most people—including all too many kindergarten teachers—are not aware of how this can be problematic, most especially for students who may struggle with word-level reading. So I write this post to try to clarify why this definition of sight words and the associated belief that they all must be memorized is a problem.

Locating the Source of the Problem

First of all, let me be clear that I do not blame my son’s kindergarten teacher for this misunderstanding. She has provided clarity on what the expectations are for my son’s reading based on her experience and materials that are available to her, and provides resources for us to work with my son at home in alignment to these expectations.

This misinformation about “sight words” is rather perpetuated by education publishers, self-proclaimed gurus, and consultants large and small. As one example, you can see echoes of the question “Did you know about 75% of words we read are sight words?” on this Scholastic page: “Sight Words 101.” Yes, that Scholastic, one of the most well known publishers of educational materials. They explain the distinction between “sight words” and “high frequency words,” and mention the Dolch high frequency word list, which “are a list of 220 words that are used so often in print that together they make up an estimated 75% of all words used in books.“

They then go on to state what is most problematic in how we talk about these words, whether we term them “sight words” or “high frequency words”:

“You might think that these words are so common that kids would just learn them organically through reading and other everyday print. But many of the words also defy standard phonetic conventions, meaning they are impossible to sound out.”

Not all the information on this Scholastic page is problematic. They helpfully explain that in fact, ALL words that a child can read with automaticity are actually sight words. They also explain that high frequency words, such as Dolch words, are often the ones most often referred to as sight words. All useful!

But you can see how most people would read something like this and say, “OK, so the words that make up to 75% of the words used in books are impossible to sound out. Therefore, these words must be memorized by sight!”

Except that it’s simply not true. Because most words in English, as “opaque” as our orthography may be, are still phonetically decodable. And that includes high frequency words on the Dolch list.

Most Words in Written English Are Phonetically Decodable

It is blatantly false information to state that most high frequency words are impossible to sound out. It is quite the other way around: most high frequency words are either entirely decodable, or at the very least, have a good portion of letter patterns that regularly match phonemes. A good example of the latter that is often used is “said.” The /s/ and the /d/ are regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences, whereas the /eh/ paired to the “ai” spelling is irregular and must simply be memorized. But by anchoring that irregularity alongside the regular pairings, it still is grounded in a phonetic approach rather than blanket memorization.

So the question thus becomes: how do we teach high frequency words that follow phonetic patterns and those that are less regular more strategically, and when? And what about those words that are just completely irregular?

Rather than pretend to be an expert on this matter, I will point you to some useful resources and guides:

• [A New Model for Teaching High Frequency Words](https://www.readingrockets.org/article/new-model-teaching-high-frequency-words( by Linda Farrell, Michael Hunter, and Tina Osenga
• Reconceptualizing Sight Words: Building an Early Reading Vocabulary by Amanda Rawlins and Marcia Invernezzi
• Teach “Sight Words” As You Would Other Words by Nell Duke and Heidi Mesmer
• Devin Kearns has an updated list of high frequency words based on modern word databases
• Teacher Lindsay Kemeny has a great post explaining how she approaches teaching sight words in “How should I teach sight words?”
• Pam Kastner has a great Wakelet of videos and resources to explore
• Monique Nowers has a insightful perspective from a synthetic phonics lens on her post “Sight Words”
• A video by Marie Rippel, Teaching the Dolch Sight Word List...the Easy Way!
• Also, see this study from Linnea Ehri on “Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning“

What are Sight Words, Then?

Sight words, as even that problematic page by Scholastic referenced earlier acknowledged, are not high frequency words. Sight words are rather any word that a given reader can read with accuracy and automaticity. If we are fluent readers, then most words we encounter in print are sight words, except for those rarer words we haven’t yet encountered frequently. In which case, we then leverage those strategies we have gained as skilled readers: connecting sounds to the letter sequences, or looking for meaningful parts within the word.

Once we’ve encountered the word in print a few times and made the bonds in our mind between the sounds, the spelling, and the meaning of the word, we will thereafter recognize the word at “the speed of sight,” as Mark Seidenberg puts it.

What’s the Problem, Again?

Right, OK. There remains the fact that some high frequency words are highly irregular and must simply be memorized. In fact, when we start learning the alphabet, we do learn via memorization, which is termed paired-associate learning or associative learning in the literature. So what’s the big deal? Kids still need to memorize, right?!

Yes, they do. But when the message is that MOST words in written English are not decodable and thus must be memorized, we set many kids at a great disadvantage. For students struggling to internalize the cipher of the written code, most especially for those who may have dyslexia, teaching them to use everything BUT phonetic decoding strategies robs them of one of the most reliable strategies for gaining fluency with word-level reading.

This problem then gets compounded when schools use an ELA curriculum like TCRWP Reading Units, as my son’s school does and as all too many do, which perpetuates the idea that contextual information like pictures should be used as a FIRST resort to word-level recognition, rather than as a LAST resort. So even when there may be a phonics program used by the school, it’s counteracted by all the sight word memorization and the messages given during the core ELA reading block to use all those cues instead of decoding.

So what does this result in? Too many kids who show up in upper grades who cannot recognize the majority of words in print with any level of the accuracy nor automaticity needed because they have not been taught the phonological, morphological, nor orthographic skills and patterns explicitly enough to become fluent readers.

So yes, a few initial words still need to be memorized via good old flashcard style practice. But the message to our children needs to be clear that most words are not learned this way because we can learn how to read most words by articulating the discrete sounds we can pair to letters (phonemes <–> graphemes) or, as we begin to read more complex and multisyllabic words, by recognizing the meaningful patterns and parts of words (morphemes <–> graphemes).

I invite you to share any further resources you may have encountered on this subject that are useful, or any advice you may have in supporting schools and teachers in making the shift from this approach.

#reading #sightwords #highfrequencywords #research #literacy #teaching #phonics #decoding

Discuss...

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

Discuss...

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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We know that phonological awareness develops in a manner that moves from large grain sizes (syllable, onset-rime) to small grain sizes (phonemes). Furthermore, we also know that phonemes are at a greater level of abstraction — they are harder to hear and speak — then something like a syllable, which is relatively easy to hear. So it certainly makes sense that instruction would follow the same trajectory in order to support that progression towards greater abstraction. It’s a compelling idea that unfortunately does not appear to be backed up by anything other than anecdotal evidence.

I know it’s compelling, because that’s what I believed. There’s a lot of romanticism in our field, and–like many others–I have a tendency to fall for ideas that sound right. One of them is the idea that learning must always progress from concrete to abstract, from easier to harder. Furthermore, like so many others, I am easily taken up by the idea that learning progresses in stages, in which each stage must be mastered in order to progress to the next. These ideas certainly do pan out for learning in some specific concepts or tasks, but are not universal. We can see this point more clearly when we consider phonological awareness instruction.

Instead of teaching first the syllable level, and then the onset-rime level, and then the phonemic awareness level, the instruction that appears to be most effective starts with the smallest grain size, at the phoneme level, and then moves to larger grain sizes from there. Why would this be?? It could be that our priors (learning moves from concrete to abstract and progresses in stages) mislead us. Sometimes, it may be that aiming first for what is more difficult and complex can be what enables us to develop underlying skills.

And there’s yet another facet where I will hereby admit I seem to be mistaken: that phonological awareness practice without graphemes is a valuable activity. I’ve argued that a phonological awareness program, such as Heggerty, could be beneficial, and I argued this because I thought that 1) it won’t do harm, and 2) it may be of potential benefit to students who are struggling to hear and speak the sounds, thus facilitating phonological sensitivity. So in a school that has a large number of students struggling to learn to read, it seemed like a win-win — short amount of instructional time (10-15 minutes daily), an easily deliverable set of routines and lessons that required little planning nor training, and a potentially large payoff for students who need it the most.

But it seems my priors again misled me. I assumed that phonology = important to reading and language, and extra practice = good, so therefore: extra phonological practice is a net positive.

I recently posted this tweet where I made the point that we need to fight our tendency to add more and instead pare down to focus on what is most critical. And as I waded into some of the great phonological awareness debates on social media, I found myself defending the idea that adding more would be the right thing! I was also getting my assumptions about PA challenged by reading stalwarts on Twitter.

I haven’t been the only one having my assumptions challenged as of late– a mini-controversy erupted over a virtual session with researchers Susan Brady, Mark Seidenberg, and Molly Farry-Thorn in which the Heggerty Program and David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success were explicitly challenged based on their promotion of phonological practice without letters. Many took issue with some of the criticisms and on some inaccurate portrayals of Kilpatrick’s program — most especially practitioners in the field who have seen results using guidance from either. The video of the session was not released, and Seidenberg and Farry-Thorn instead released a follow-up discussion as well as a statement apologizing for muddying the waters, (and Seidenberg revealed that he had never heard of Elkonin boxes (!)). Susan Brady also released a statement clarifying some points she made about Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success program.

I agree that online forums may not be the best venue to critique specific programs or sling mud against other people who are dedicated to improving literacy outcomes. What needs to happen is to let the science speak, and gather empirical data to revise inaccurate assertions and theories — and this needs to happen on all sides. I’d posit, for example, that both David Kilpatrick and his critics have some revision of their theories to do.

I recently listened to a podcast interview of Julia Galef, in which she discusses her concept of a “scout mindset” vs. a “soldier mindset.” I found this distinction useful, because we have quite a number of soldier mindsets when it comes to talking about reading, and I find myself falling into that mindset when I am challenged in my own thinking. But by consciously adopting a scout mindset, an attitude of curiosity and an openness to revising my thinking, I can ward off my tendency to dig my heels in.

I realized as I defended some of my positions on phonological awareness recetly that I was taking on a soldier’s mindset.

At some point, we need to look to the evidence and acknowledge when it is substantive enough to challenge the neat theories we hold about learning.

So here’s where I’m revising my thinking: phonological awareness practice without pairing sounds to spelling is inefficient and unsubstantiated by research. Instead, research points to the greater robustness of pairing sounds to print from the beginning of reading instruction. This then, in turn, leads to greater phonological awareness.

The more I have learned, the more I have realized that almost every source of expertise on matters of literacy holds ideas that must be questioned in light of the evidence. That’s all part of the journey of knowledge, man. No one person holds all the pieces of the puzzle.

Phonology is important. It’s important to both language and to literacy. And it’s that reciprocal relationship between print and speech that develops skilled reading.

So let me state my revised thinking as clearly as I can: we should focus our classroom instruction in the earliest grades — and in spaces of intervention in later grades — on supporting students in connecting sounds to letters in print, and core instructional time should not be spent practicing sounds without print.

Time and money will be best spent on enhancing a core school-wide systematic phonics program through training and re-training, and providing ongoing coaching supports and peer feedback, oriented around ensuring that speech sounds are connected to spelling in every lesson, with sufficient opportunities to practice in reading and writing.

I still think there is a place for phonological practice outside of letters, but only when wielded by a knowledgeable practitioner or interventionist, who uses it when it is evident that it would benefit specific students as a bridge back to application with letters. Otherwise, pending any research that shows it is effective as a core instructional move, it appears to be a waste of time.

I admit I was wrong — or at least, I seem to be as of now, pending any further studies. 😉

In terms of the language piece, which I stressed in my last post on phonology — I still think it’s critically important. But what I realized is that the place to do that kind of work is in interactive read-alouds, rather than isolated phonological practice. In other words, as we read text aloud to students, we can pause and amplify the sounds of words and sentences, ask students to repeat them after you like an echo, choral read them together, and savor their sounds, prosody, and meaning. Embedding phonological sensitivity practice in the course of authentic reading experiences will be more powerful — and most importantly — will not take time away from core instruction.

And if any of this is wrong, please tell me where so I can revise my thinking!

Note: This piece has since been updated with research and published on Nomanis:

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#phonology #phonemicawareness #phonics #reading #literacy #research