• Liberman, A. M. (1992). Chapter 9 The Relation of Speech to Reading and Writing. In R. Frost & L. Katz (Eds.), Advances in Psychology (Vol. 94, pp. 167–178). North-Holland. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166-4115(08)62794-6 Liberman comes strong out the gate with seven claims on why speech* is “more natural” than written language:

1. Speech is universal. Many languages don’t even have a written form.
2. Speech has been around far longer than written language.
3. For each of us individually, speech develops far earlier than reading and writing (if we are fortunate to even develop reading and writing).
4. Speech does not need to be taught; it is pre-cognitive, like seeing and hearing. Literacy is rather an intellectual achievement.
   • I paused on the first part of this claim. For students with a developmental language disorder, language does need to be taught more intentionally and supported more intensively. And for the type of language that is not just everyday social language—disciplinary, academic written language—such language also needs to be taught explicitly, most especially for multilingual learners, and its acquisition certainly represents an intellectual achievement!
5. Parts of our brain have evolved to be utilized specifically for language, while reading and writing must both exploit those innate aspects along repurposing other (originally) nonlinguistic parts. This is the “bootstrapping” notion many more current reading researchers speak to based on brain scans (Wolf, Dehaene, etc).
6. This one is kinda hard to summarize, but it’s basically centered around the idea that writing systems are both constrained by the oral language they are based on, and more variable. Scripts cannot be purely sound based, as speech is — instead, they are “pitched at the more abstract phonological and morphophonological levels” and this greater abstraction requires greater conscious awareness, at least initially, on the part of the learner.
7. “Speech is the product of biological evolution, while writing systems are artifacts” — “part discovery, part invention.” Here, Liberman echoes an important point also made by Gough and Hillinger:

“The discovery—surely one of the most momentous of all time—was that words do not differ from one another holistically, but rather by the particular arrangement of a small inventory of the meaningless units they comprise. The invention was simply the notion that if each of these units were to be represented by a distinctive optical shape, then everyone could read and write, provided he knew the language and was conscious of the internal phonological structure of its words.” [bold added]

Here’s the similar quote from G&H:

“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.” [bold added]

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

This point, made both by G&H and Liberman, is worth pausing on and amplifying in more depth, because it’s not only a key point of departure from the argument of the Goodmans, but furthermore a key point that underlays debates about phonics even today. For the Goodmans, as with many phonics critics since, the point of reading instruction should be that it is facilitated by learning focused on meaning. According to the Goodmans, when a teacher explicitly and sequentially teaches the meaningless, artificial components of phonemes and graphemes, they create a barrier to natural learning:

“With the focus on learning, the teacher must understand and deal with language and language learning. . . . The learners keep their minds on meaning. . . The crucial relationships of language with meaning and with the context that makes language meaningful is also vital. . . .We must focus more and more attention on how written language is used in society because it is through the relevant use of language that children will learn it. They will learn it because it will have meaning and purpose to them.

With the focus on teaching both teachers and learners are dealing with language often in abstract bits and pieces. . . . it’s a serious mistake to create curricula based on artificial skill sequences and hierarchies derived from such studies.

Our research has convinced us that the skills displayed by the proficient reader derive from the meaningful use of written language and that sequential instruction in those skills is as pointless and fruitless as instruction in the skills of a proficient listener would be to teach infants to comprehend speech.”

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

For the Goodmans and many proponents of balanced literacy today, a focus on meaningless, unnatural components is an impediment to the naturally motivated learning of children. And hey, they aren’t wrong — learning these abstract aspects of oral and written language is a barrier to all too many.

But we should be absolutely clear that Gough, Hillinger, Liberman, and many researchers focused on literacy fully acknowledge that these components are difficult and a tremendous potential barrier to learning—in fact, they fully agree with the Goodmans that learning sublexical units (phonemes and their haphazard letter sequences) is unnatural! The key difference is that they also argue that these artificial units are essential to reading and therefore must be tackled head on and overcome by children in order for reading to truly be successful.

But I’m taking us away from Liberman, and he’s only getting started. He takes some time to outline what he calls “the conventional view of speech.” According to Liberman, this is a view that assumes that speech is governed by general motor and perceptual systems, rather than ones specialized for language. This means that the processing of speech must therefore be cognitive in nature, as it requires translation–similar to learning the written form, it requires attaching a phonetic label to the sounds of what is heard. In this sense, then, learning language can be perceived as biologically secondary.

The reason Liberman takes time laying this out is because if we are to take this view seriously, it means we must see written language as “equally natural” to speech because it is essentially a similar process of coding that requires cognition, with the only difference being one of mode.

This is pretty much exactly what the Goodmans argued: “. . . if written language can perform the functions of language it must be language.”

The other big issue with the “conventional” view, according to Liberman, is that it means “the elements of a writing system can only be defined as optical shapes. . . [and] makes it hard to avoid the assumption that the trouble with the dyslexic must be in the visual system.” This mistaken assumption is indeed a continuing confusion for many about learning to read, as witnessed by some who attempt to teach kids to read by noticing the shapes of words (a quick aside for some nuance: some with dyslexia may have visual-spatial issues, which may become more apparent when learning non-alphabetic written languages, such as Chinese).

Here Liberman makes a key distinction: the evolution of oral language is biological, while written language is cultural. I find myself both deeply compelled by this claim, as it is useful, and also a little resistant. I resist because language is also clearly cultural. But I get that the point here is that the mechanism for learning language is baked into our brains, developing rapidly even as we are in the womb, while acquiring literacy is more dependent on cultural transmission and a significant amount of work.

“In the development of writing systems, the answer is simple and beyond dispute: parity was established by agreement. Thus, all who use an alphabet are parties to a compact that prescribes just which optical shapes are to be taken as symbols for which phonological units, the association of the one with the other having been determined *arbitrarily. Indeed, this is what it means to say that writing systems are artifacts, and that the child’s learning the linguistic significance of the characters of the script is a cognitive activity.” [bold added]

This leads Liberman to propose what he calls the “unconventional view of speech.” I’m going to do some heavy paraphrasing here, but if you’re into speech pathology or like to geek out about the articulatory dimensions of speech, you may find this section of the paper interesting, as he lays out why “co-articulation” is a fundamental aspect of speech. Essentially, he lays out some principles that allows for the claim that “There is no need . . . for a cognitive translation from an initial auditory representation, simply because there is no initial auditory representation,” meaning that speech is processed rapidly and naturally.

And now Liberman turns to the Goodmans directly to take their full argument head on, so it’s worth reproducing this section in full:

HOW CAN READING/WRITING BE MADE TO EXPLOIT THE MORE

NATURAL PROCESSES OF SPEECH?

“The conventional view of speech provides no basis for asking this question, since there exists, on this view, no difference in naturalness. It is perhaps for this reason that the (probably) most widely held theory of reading in the United States explicitly takes as its premise that reading and writing are, or at least can be, as natural and easy as speech (Goodman & Goodman, 1979). According to this theory, called ‘whole language,’ reading and writing prove to be difficult only because teachers burden children with what the theorists call bite-size abstract chunks of language such as words, syllables, and phonemes’ (Goodman, 1986). If teachers were to teach children to read and write the way they were (presumably) taught to speak, then there would be no problem.

But if we adopt the “unconventional view ” of speech, then we don’t view spoken and written language, one auditory and the other visual, as equivalents. Instead, this view allows us to see that speech is processed completely differently, and much more swiftly, and we don’t need to become aware of nor think of the sub units of sounds within a word: “there is nothing in the ordinary use of language that requires the speaker/listener to put his attention on them.”

“The consequence is that experience with speech is normally not sufficient to make one consciously aware of the phonological structure of its words, yet it is exactly this awareness that is required of all who would enjoy the advantages of an alphabetic scheme for reading and writing.”

And the specialized properties of speech, such as co-articulation, which allow us to wield and process them so efficiently, actually present us with a greater barrier in conversion to written language. Co-articulation, which is when we merge sounds together in the speech stream, “has the disadvantage from the would-be reader/writer’s point of view that it destroys any simple correspondence between the acoustic segments and phonological segments they convey.”

Thus and therefore, learning to read and write requires cognitive work, at least initially, that is not required for spoken language (Note that though I’ve taken this paper at face value with the word speech and we’re focused on those aspects specific to spoken language, many of these characteristics can apply just as readily to sign language).

Whew! This paper was a bit harder to unpack than the others, but I think it’s a very good capstone to our investigation in the series. So are we convinced that learning to read, at least initially, is unnatural?

I’ll pursue some final thoughts to wrap up some loose ends in the next post.

#natural #unnatural #reading #spokenlanguage #writtenlanguage #language #literacy #speech #meaning #Liberman

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

In this presentation/paper, the Goodmans make the argument that in a literate society, learning written language is as natural as oral language because it is part of their functional environment.

“Language learning whether oral or written is motivated by the need to communicate, to understand and be understood.”

The Goodmans compare and contrast oral and written language, and I found this the most interesting section, as even today there is an unnecessary chasm between the two domains of research and practice, and I think they do make some important points about the connections between the two:

“It’s unfortunate that many linguists began to equate speech with language to such an extent that written language can to be treated as something other than language. . . . if written language can perform the functions of language it must be language. . . . Written language in use is also meaningful, contextualized and social.”

“For literate users of language, linguistic effectiveness is expanded and extended. They have alternate language forms, oral and written, which overlap in functions but which have characteristics which suit each for some functions better than the other.”

“Speech lends itself easily to here-and-now, face-to-face uses. Writing is best suited for use over time and space.”

“As language functions are extended beyond the immediate concerns, needs, and interactions of children to exploration of the real world, the world of ideas, and the world of what might be, language expands, takes on new textures and begins to transcend the immediate contexts in which it occurs.”

“The language of children expands to serve their needs as they become fully interactive with their communities. . . . We must focus more and more attention on how written language is used in society because it is through the relevant use of language that children will learn it. They will learn it because it will have meaning and purpose to them.”

Essentially, their argument that just like oral language, written language is functional within a literate society, and in this way learning it is natural. For a society that is not literate, there is little use beyond that of what might be taught briefly in a classroom, and so written language would not be functional there in the same way, and so not acquired.

They then go on to describe how a child in a literate society becomes aware of print simply by being in an environment with signage, symbols, print media, etc. “Just as oral language meanings are developed and used in ongoing everyday experiences so written language is learned through functional use.”

So what does this mean for instruction, according to the Goodmans?

Since learning language is natural, the role of the teacher is act as “guides, moniters, environmental arrangers, and stimulators to help the process happen.” Ah yes, the old “sage on stage vs. guide on the side” debate so ubiquitous in our field.

The Goodmans do hasten to caution that their position is “not Rousseauian. . . Teaching children to read is not putting them into a garden of print and leaving them unmolested.”

Yet they then go on to boldly state, “Instruction does not teach children to read. Children are in no more need of being taught to read than they are of being taught to listen.” In their estimation, since learning language is about function and meaning, a teacher needs to provide a context for children to respond to written language that is motivating and meaningful to them.

In fact, they argue that directly teaching the form of written language at the expense of function can be detrimental. They state that “it’s a serious mistake to create curricula based on artificial skill sequences and hierarchies” based on studies of proficient readers. . . ” and that sequential instruction in those skills is as pointless and fruitless as instruction in the skills of a proficient listener would be to teach infants to comprehend speech.”

Later in the open discussion section after the paper, which captures the comments of various reading researchers discussing the presentation and Ken Goodman’s responses, Goodman goes even further and says, “such instruction may actually interfere with the development of literacy, because not only does it not build on function, it actually distracts the child at an age where, according to Piaget and others, the child is likely to have trouble dealing with abstraction; it makes learning to read dependent on the ability to deal with abstraction.”

Since the Goodmans wrote this, research has demonstrated quite convincingly the important role that systematic beginning reading instruction plays for many children. So this next passage is all the more damning:

“Here we will focus on instruction for children growing up in a highly literate society. But in passing we must reiterate our premise that literacy will not be acquired if the community and society do not use literacy to any significant degree for any significant purpose [bold added].” In other words, if a child is not so fortunate enough to be raised in an environment immersed in written language all around him, then . . . well, good luck learning to read, buddy!

They then go on to give some advice to teachers to build initial literacy, such as:

• “Take children for a walk around the school, the neighborhood, or a supermarket to get quick insights into literacy kids have already attained.”

• “there must be lots of written language pupils will need and want to read.” Helpfully, they add, “It does not mean that every chair, table or window should be labeled.”

• “Dictating a set of “Rules for Taking Care of Our Hamster”

• “create a classroom post office which delivers letters and notes between class members”

Seriously, though, I found these two pretty good:

• “Literacy development, therefore, must be integrated with the science, social, studies, math, arts, and other concerns of the classroom.”
• “Reading needs to be kept in constant relationship to writing. Wherever possible composition in written language should be related to reading activities.”

Reading Researchers of the Time Respond to Ken Goodman

The “open discussion” following the paper is fascinating to read, as various researchers either praised his argument or began pressing Goodman on some of the misconceptions he had about learning to decode.

In response to a comment from Jeanne Chall, Goodman again reiterates that “I don’t believe you can” teach people to read, and “I think all we can do with instruction is facilitate learning.”

He goes on to say many teachers “have intuitively understood the things that I have been talking about. They have intuitively understood that if reading doesn’t matter to kids, if it isn’t functional for them, they are not going to learn. Those teachers have intuitively understood that whenever instruction interferes with development, that’s the time to drop the instruction and to work at facilitating what the kids are doing.”

Or maybe it’s that the instruction isn’t actually teaching kids to read successfully, and we shouldn’t make assumptions that “reading doesn’t matter to kids”?

A couple of researchers start to pin him down on his stance that reading can’t be taught. Posner points out that learning to read signs in the environment is logographic, and that written language in English is reliant on the alphabetic principle, for which “children need additional help.” Venezky then jumps in and pushes Goodman to the ropes: “Every experiment that I am aware of that tried to induce the child to discover these [letter-sound] relationships on his own or her own failed.”

Goodman and Venezky go back and forth on this, with Venezky pushing him around the idea of refusing to actually teach letter-sound correspondences. Finally, Venezky asks: “Are you opposed to the child acquiring the ability to recognize letter correspondences?”

Goodman’s response here is incredibly revealing: “Am I opposed to him acquiring letter correspondences? Not if I believe be does acquire them, and I do believe that. If you are asking if I am opposed to his being shown letter correspondences, you bet, at any point.“

So I think we can stop here. Goodman’s views on how children learn to decode words is clearly problematic and have been well-debunked, and were already being pinned to the wall even as he made such pronouncements. It’s remarkable indeed that yet somehow, his views have remained so pervasive in the field!

Perhaps it is because there is a strong logic to the Goodmans’ overall argument about language, and the strong interrelationship between oral and written language.

After reading this paper, it did get me wondering: Just what is it that is natural and unnatural about language and literacy development?

That brings us to what can be seen as a strong rebuttal from Gough and Hillinger, “Learning to read: An unnatural act.” Stay tuned for our next post in this series.

#reading #natural #unnatural #KenGoodman #research #writtenlanguage #spokenlanguage

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