Reading just clicked for our almost-6yo, and this article really resonates with what I see with her. She still reads “pal” with a touch of uncertainty, because it’s not a word anyone around her really uses for “friend,” even though she knows she’s executed the phonics correctly. But it’s been crazy watching her work successfully through words like “nocturnal” because she recognizes it, as Kelsey wrote, once her pronunciation is in the ballpark. “Nocturnal! Like owls and bats. And you, Mama.”
One thing you can do is lower those sensitivity barriers a bit. Give kids Roald Dahl, unexpurgated. Give them books about explorers and soldiers. Give them the original Nancy Drew books; the ones where Nancy packed heat.
I gave that as an example because their have been recent rewrites to make him less offensive. Which strike me as being counterproductive, as the rough edges are part of the charm. Oddly enough, he wasn’t a huge part of my own childhood. My reading comprehension took off pretty quickly, and so by the time I hit his work it felt “young” to me. By that point I was on to science fiction and fantasy — L’Engle, CS Lewis, Asimov, Andre Norton and the Heinlein juveniles.
I suspect my parents would have freaked out had they known how weird some of the stuff I was reading by the time I was twelve or thirteen was. But it seems not to have done permanent damage — at,least I’ve shown no propensity toward polyamory or nudism.
Dahl is beloved I do a Matilda book study every year and it's a favorite of every class. High kids, low kids whatever. Something with more modern sensibilities but still gets a lot of this is the I survived books. I survived the Battle of Gettysburg is one of my popular 3rd grade units. We just read Wrinkle In Time which was a bit polarizing.
Basal curricula are just an ugly mess of bad stories. Our school has HMH into Reading and it's just terrible. Everyone hates it and I'm not sure why they bought it. Of the 40ish stories they present maybe 9-12 per grade level are enjoyable for most kids.
I finished it with a book review project and it was only like 13-8 in favor of reading Wrinkle in Time. It wasn't the kind of clean sweep that I usually get for these books. They found the characters hard to relate to and the lack of pictures for a world involving so much imagination a little hard to get behind. Also I'm in a gifted 3rd grade class so their reading level is there but it's right to the edge for some of them. They comprehended the book but it was definitely the hardest thing they've read in school.
I remember having a Dr Seuss book with the word Zucchini (zoo-key-knee) and being very confused despite knowing what the vegetable was. Then one day it clicked.
So, not the revenge of whole language but, perhaps, the revenge of balanced literacy? New Balanced Literacy: decoding + comprehension + knowledge building? Or isn't that what the NRP recommended back in 2000?
Excellent points about the importance of text-rich, knowledge-rich instruction and the need to get more than just phonics right!
The knowledge-building part matters–a lot. So does selecting adequately complex texts for each grade. So does introducing grammar. Also, connecting writing instruction to what kids are reading as they are learning to write. Curriculum needs to get a lot of things right, and the Balanced Literacy curricula (Teachers College Reading Workshop, Fountas and Pinnell) broadly missed on all of these points. I’m always thrilled to see journalists peeling back these onions, so HUGE thanks to Kelsey for her continued attention to this topic.
I agree with Kunjan that this moment doesn’t vindicate Whole Language, exactly, because Whole Language proponents were quite anti-phonics, and I don’t know that phonics proponents were ever anti-book.
Instead, I would say that the Reading Wars were always an odd battle between two camps, and the right answer for instruction needed to take the best ideas from both “sides.”
I regret to share that today, many “Science of Reading” advocates have not embraced knowledge-building, book-rich curricula, so we are still working our way through disagreement and even tribalism about the nature of the ideal reading curriculum. I call this our Implementation Wars era. Practically everyone agrees on the need for systematic phonics, but they don’t agree on the right amount of it, nor the nuances of how best to teach it (there are varieties), and those debates consume a lot of the airtime, as the comprehension side of the equation gets short shrift.
Hopefully, pieces like this one will help us accelerate our path beyond those debates.
Like, I’m going to call bullshit here. Yes, phonics education is not sufficient for complete literacy. It is also necessary. You can’t skip it.
Just like you can’t teach critical thinking without teaching reasoning. And you can’t reliably teach higher mathematics without the foundations. I think overall, we’ve been trying (for 40-50 years) to skip steps in the chain, with predictably unsatisfactory results most of the time, and then doubling down on the failed approaches.
I believe most studies of any skill suggest doing more of it you get better (free throws, Russian math, violin etc). Of course no one expects someone with no aptitude to become a concert violinist or a 5'2" 3 point specialist makes the NBA. But you get better. So teaching kids phonics without them ever learning to enjoy reading (which I think is the other camp) such that they never choose to read more on their own should theoretically hamper development.
One thing that I didn't appreciate as a kid was my parents bought me a lot of children's encyclopedias about science and history and the world, so I was working with a much broader base of knowledge than most of my peers.
I'd be bored at home and randomly pull one out and read through it which left me extremely well-prepared for anything in school.
E.D. Hirsch of the University of Virginia created the Core Knowledge series of guide books in the '90s in response to the crisis of whole language and the "constructivist" fad in elementary schools. Henry Louis Gates was a co-author. I don't know if they are still in print, but they were extraordinary for their time.
My argument has been that it isn't that drilling phonics is important. The important part is interacting with the text! And for words, you have to learn how to decompose the word into parts. Sometimes for pronunciation. Sometimes for understanding. Common word roots. Recognizing word origins. Seeing how things relate.
And, as I have said before, this will be directly applicable to later education such as math. You even use the same ideas on whole text reading. You ask the same basic questions. Instead of "what are the components of this word" it is, "what are the components of this text?" Or equation. Or puzzle. Or whatever.
Teaching and practising phonics is very important. Parent of a mildly dyslexic kid speaking - dyslexic kids are approx. 15% of the population and they will only learn to read with explicit phonics instruction and practice. Skipping this step for diving into the fun parts is the biggest error in education for the last 20 years.
Right, apologies if my point seemed to be that we should just skip to fun of whole text analysis.
I was aiming that seeing the way letters work in words can, itself, be a fun exercise. Same for guessing at how some words can be pronounced. So long as you don't have people making fun of you for getting it "wrong", the process of trying to sound out something can be very fun. (as a silly example, just looking for letters in car rides is already a fun activity. My kids love finding things up then down the alphabet.)
More, my argument is that "whole word" focus on vocabulary words is far too easy for kids to bounce off and assume that they just aren't "readers." In the same way that kids that don't learn to take apart a math equation can assume they just aren't good at math.
Yes, analyzing a text involves analyzing the full document. But the process is very recursive in nature.
Reading just clicked for our almost-6yo, and this article really resonates with what I see with her. She still reads “pal” with a touch of uncertainty, because it’s not a word anyone around her really uses for “friend,” even though she knows she’s executed the phonics correctly. But it’s been crazy watching her work successfully through words like “nocturnal” because she recognizes it, as Kelsey wrote, once her pronunciation is in the ballpark. “Nocturnal! Like owls and bats. And you, Mama.”
One thing you can do is lower those sensitivity barriers a bit. Give kids Roald Dahl, unexpurgated. Give them books about explorers and soldiers. Give them the original Nancy Drew books; the ones where Nancy packed heat.
And drove a powder-blue convertible or a sporty maroon roadster. I had no idea what a roadster was, but it was sporty and maroon, so I was on board!
Yes we have the entire Dahl set.
My daughter read all of them multiple times
I gave that as an example because their have been recent rewrites to make him less offensive. Which strike me as being counterproductive, as the rough edges are part of the charm. Oddly enough, he wasn’t a huge part of my own childhood. My reading comprehension took off pretty quickly, and so by the time I hit his work it felt “young” to me. By that point I was on to science fiction and fantasy — L’Engle, CS Lewis, Asimov, Andre Norton and the Heinlein juveniles.
I suspect my parents would have freaked out had they known how weird some of the stuff I was reading by the time I was twelve or thirteen was. But it seems not to have done permanent damage — at,least I’ve shown no propensity toward polyamory or nudism.
Dahl is beloved I do a Matilda book study every year and it's a favorite of every class. High kids, low kids whatever. Something with more modern sensibilities but still gets a lot of this is the I survived books. I survived the Battle of Gettysburg is one of my popular 3rd grade units. We just read Wrinkle In Time which was a bit polarizing.
Basal curricula are just an ugly mess of bad stories. Our school has HMH into Reading and it's just terrible. Everyone hates it and I'm not sure why they bought it. Of the 40ish stories they present maybe 9-12 per grade level are enjoyable for most kids.
How was Wrinkle in Time polarizing? It was a little sentimental for my taste (I liked bloodier fights) but as a child I found it charming.
I finished it with a book review project and it was only like 13-8 in favor of reading Wrinkle in Time. It wasn't the kind of clean sweep that I usually get for these books. They found the characters hard to relate to and the lack of pictures for a world involving so much imagination a little hard to get behind. Also I'm in a gifted 3rd grade class so their reading level is there but it's right to the edge for some of them. They comprehended the book but it was definitely the hardest thing they've read in school.
I remember having a Dr Seuss book with the word Zucchini (zoo-key-knee) and being very confused despite knowing what the vegetable was. Then one day it clicked.
So, not the revenge of whole language but, perhaps, the revenge of balanced literacy? New Balanced Literacy: decoding + comprehension + knowledge building? Or isn't that what the NRP recommended back in 2000?
Excellent points about the importance of text-rich, knowledge-rich instruction and the need to get more than just phonics right!
The knowledge-building part matters–a lot. So does selecting adequately complex texts for each grade. So does introducing grammar. Also, connecting writing instruction to what kids are reading as they are learning to write. Curriculum needs to get a lot of things right, and the Balanced Literacy curricula (Teachers College Reading Workshop, Fountas and Pinnell) broadly missed on all of these points. I’m always thrilled to see journalists peeling back these onions, so HUGE thanks to Kelsey for her continued attention to this topic.
I agree with Kunjan that this moment doesn’t vindicate Whole Language, exactly, because Whole Language proponents were quite anti-phonics, and I don’t know that phonics proponents were ever anti-book.
Instead, I would say that the Reading Wars were always an odd battle between two camps, and the right answer for instruction needed to take the best ideas from both “sides.”
I regret to share that today, many “Science of Reading” advocates have not embraced knowledge-building, book-rich curricula, so we are still working our way through disagreement and even tribalism about the nature of the ideal reading curriculum. I call this our Implementation Wars era. Practically everyone agrees on the need for systematic phonics, but they don’t agree on the right amount of it, nor the nuances of how best to teach it (there are varieties), and those debates consume a lot of the airtime, as the comprehension side of the equation gets short shrift.
Hopefully, pieces like this one will help us accelerate our path beyond those debates.
Like, I’m going to call bullshit here. Yes, phonics education is not sufficient for complete literacy. It is also necessary. You can’t skip it.
Just like you can’t teach critical thinking without teaching reasoning. And you can’t reliably teach higher mathematics without the foundations. I think overall, we’ve been trying (for 40-50 years) to skip steps in the chain, with predictably unsatisfactory results most of the time, and then doubling down on the failed approaches.
I believe most studies of any skill suggest doing more of it you get better (free throws, Russian math, violin etc). Of course no one expects someone with no aptitude to become a concert violinist or a 5'2" 3 point specialist makes the NBA. But you get better. So teaching kids phonics without them ever learning to enjoy reading (which I think is the other camp) such that they never choose to read more on their own should theoretically hamper development.
One thing that I didn't appreciate as a kid was my parents bought me a lot of children's encyclopedias about science and history and the world, so I was working with a much broader base of knowledge than most of my peers.
I'd be bored at home and randomly pull one out and read through it which left me extremely well-prepared for anything in school.
(The boredom was also key!)
E.D. Hirsch of the University of Virginia created the Core Knowledge series of guide books in the '90s in response to the crisis of whole language and the "constructivist" fad in elementary schools. Henry Louis Gates was a co-author. I don't know if they are still in print, but they were extraordinary for their time.
My argument has been that it isn't that drilling phonics is important. The important part is interacting with the text! And for words, you have to learn how to decompose the word into parts. Sometimes for pronunciation. Sometimes for understanding. Common word roots. Recognizing word origins. Seeing how things relate.
And, as I have said before, this will be directly applicable to later education such as math. You even use the same ideas on whole text reading. You ask the same basic questions. Instead of "what are the components of this word" it is, "what are the components of this text?" Or equation. Or puzzle. Or whatever.
Teaching and practising phonics is very important. Parent of a mildly dyslexic kid speaking - dyslexic kids are approx. 15% of the population and they will only learn to read with explicit phonics instruction and practice. Skipping this step for diving into the fun parts is the biggest error in education for the last 20 years.
Right, apologies if my point seemed to be that we should just skip to fun of whole text analysis.
I was aiming that seeing the way letters work in words can, itself, be a fun exercise. Same for guessing at how some words can be pronounced. So long as you don't have people making fun of you for getting it "wrong", the process of trying to sound out something can be very fun. (as a silly example, just looking for letters in car rides is already a fun activity. My kids love finding things up then down the alphabet.)
More, my argument is that "whole word" focus on vocabulary words is far too easy for kids to bounce off and assume that they just aren't "readers." In the same way that kids that don't learn to take apart a math equation can assume they just aren't good at math.
Yes, analyzing a text involves analyzing the full document. But the process is very recursive in nature.