Teaching kids to read isn't just about phonics
Is this the revenge of Whole Language Theory?
When teachers embraced “Whole Language” reading education, they often did so out of a simple conviction: Doing nothing but drilling letter sounds and decoding rules won’t instill a deep love of reading or the ability to make sense of books.
Though I’m firmly in the “phonics has been criminally underrated leading to widespread unforced pedagogical errors” camp, I do have to be clear about one thing: Teaching children to read is indeed more complicated than just teaching them phonics.
I clarify this because every news story gets rounded to the simplest available gloss, and for the story of Mississippi’s remarkable progress on reading, or the grave and alarming nationwide declines in literacy, the simplest available gloss is this: It’s just phonics, idiots. Teach children how to actually sound out the words.
Don’t get me wrong, it is critically important to teach children to sound out words. But my best guess is that if we try to make state policy off that simplistic gloss, we’ll be very disappointed with the results, on two different levels.
The first is that “just teach phonics” is not a law you can pass, and states passing laws that require “the science of reading” are mostly not going to see the remarkable gains that Louisiana and Mississippi did.
For lots of policies, it’s very simple to specify the outcome you want, and the difficulty is in figuring out which law you can pass that actually brings that outcome about. As I’ve written, in order to copy the Mississippi Miracle, you need all of the high-quality curricula as well as teacher training focused specifically on making the best use of those curricula, and external checks for whether it’s working and the kids are learning. Without all of those components, you won’t get good results just from telling schools to do phonics.
The second is that phonics is only one of two key skills that go into developing literacy, and it is possible to overcorrect and excessively emphasize it (which I worry some school programs are now doing).
“We’re good at pendulum swinging,” Kunjan Narechania, who spent over eight years working with the Louisiana Department of Education on Louisiana school reforms, told me. “The narrative now is that kids need phonics, which is great, but they need both parts — they need to understand what the words say and they need to understand how to read the words.”
The other skill, which I think is often overlooked because it’s almost too obvious to write about, is knowing what the words that you are sounding out actually mean.
Comprehension matters
Sit down and read a book with a five-year-old — even one who is very good at decoding every word on the page — and it will quickly become apparent that their comprehension is constrained because they simply don’t know anything.
Reading a fairy tale with a king? They don’t know what a king is. They don’t know what a law is, or a tax. They may or may not know what sports are, or be familiar with the concept of scoring a point or winning a game.
Knowledge can be a constraint at a much earlier level of learning to read, too. Some early phonics books, trying to constrain themselves to the letters that students have mastered, use words like “tin” or “tan” or “set” or “bet,” but that only works if the student has heard of those words, and they often haven’t.
A story about a mouse fearing a cat only makes sense if you know that cats eat mice. In one PBS story about the Mississippi Miracle, students struggled in a decoding lesson because the word was “bedbug,” a word none of them knew.
It is very, very important that kids learn the skill of sounding things out, of converting letters on the page into spoken words. But it’s also critical that in the early elementary years, we are growing their vocabulary, growing their general knowledge of the world, and growing their familiarity with books and stories. When they read something, they should have good odds of being familiar with most of the words in it and have enough background on the world to figure out the rest.
Even in states that have logged huge improvements in reading — like Mississippi — the latter is often missing.
Phonics helps you figure out how to pronounce a word aloud, but it’s wildly more useful when students have a wide, expressive vocabulary — when haltingly saying the word mostly correctly aloud is sufficient to let them actually recognize it because it’s a word with which they are previously familiar. And being able to read words is only really useful when those words are attached to meanings.
This means that — especially if you want to move past good fourth-grade test scores and see students continue to gain in literacy — you want to be teaching them, well, everything about the world. You want them to have an expansive vocabulary and to have been exposed to enough books that they can reason about books in general. Knowledge about science and social studies is often particularly valuable: it gives kids valuable general context on how the world works, which they can then employ in other domains.
One randomized study of 30 elementary schools and several thousand students found that teaching science in first grade produced modest gains in overall reading, not just in science. If the world makes more sense, books make more sense; if books make more sense, students get more out of reading.
Unfortunately, “we have eliminated science and social studies in elementary school,” Narechania told me. “It happened because NCLB required literacy and math and didn’t require science and social studies. So if you ask most elementary teachers, ‘What time do you devote to science and social studies?’ It’s none.” (No Child Left Behind did require some science assessment, but this varied by state, and assessments certainly prioritized reading and math.)
A 2018 national survey found that only 18% of elementary school classrooms study science most days (42% study it “some weeks, but not every week”), and that the average elementary schooler gets 17 minutes of science education and 15 minutes of social studies education a day.
The return of Whole Language?
Is this the revenge of Whole Language Theory? Was it unjustly villainized? Proponents of Whole Language education will often emphasize (correctly!) that there’s much more to reading than sounding words out, and that Whole Language curricula were often adopted with the hopes of teaching children to love reading, read whole books, enjoy stories, and make inferences from text.
The now-justly maligned “Three-cueing” technique, which encouraged kids to guess an unfamiliar word from the pictures, was intended as a way to help kids learn the skill of inferring new words from context — a skill that all of us use whenever we read in an unfamiliar subject area.
Nonetheless, Narechania rejected the frame that Whole Language theory is in any way vindicated: “In the Whole Language world, we weren’t doing either thing [sounding out words or building content knowledge] well.” Three-cueing, sometimes implemented by literally covering up the word and inviting students to guess it without even looking at it, encouraged students to replace the step where a word is decoded with a habit of guessing it, which is often extremely damaging to students.
What you want to teach instead is to decode the word and then guess its meaning only if it is unfamiliar — applying text-based inference skills to a word that children have successfully decoded.
But a move toward so-called knowledge-rich curricula — book-heavy ones that expose children to a lot of information about the world, a cornerstone of Louisiana’s reforms — will mean a return to many of the things that teachers initially hoped to get out of Whole Language education: a focus on reading whole books, on reading to children, and on getting kids books that they are motivated to read.
Teachers were never wrong to emphasize those things, but without a solid background in phonics, students weren’t going to be in a position to benefit from them. Having lots of time in class to read deep, knowledge-building books is great if kids have the basic decoding skills to actually read the books, and it is a complete waste of time if the kids haven’t learned to read at all. Those key priorities for literacy should not be tossed out alongside bad instructional practices like Three-cueing — they should be reworked to serve alongside systemic phonics instruction.
So, yes, we should teach phonics. But we can’t stop there.
And while there’s a ton to learn from the states with successful reading reforms, we also shouldn’t be approaching this purely as a “back to basics” situation where we just need to remove the new reforms from the classroom and practice our letter sounds to get back on track. We need high-quality literacy programs.
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