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- Can you read this sentence?
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You've probably seen something like this
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on the internet before.
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The letters of the words
are all jumbled up,
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but supposedly, as long as the first
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and sometimes last letters
of each word stay the same,
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somehow we can read it.
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This quirky language game seems to suggest
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that reading is a pretty inexact process.
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Our eyes skim the print,
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we notice the length of the
word and maybe the first letter;
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then our brains use context clues
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to deduce what the word should be.
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But is that really how reading works?
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Believe it or not, this question
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is at the heart of a decades-long battle
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in the English-speaking world,
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a battle that's been raging
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amongst educators,
politicians, and scientists
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about what is the best way
to teach children to read?
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Even as I speak, school
districts across the US
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are facing the possibility
that the whole theory
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they've been using to teach
kids to read is totally wrong.
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Whether or not this means
the wars are truly over,
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digging into the history
can teach us a lot
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about how our brains work,
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and offer a new appreciation
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for one of mankind's greatest
inventions: the written word.
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I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky,
and this is "Otherwords."
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(bright whimsical music)
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- [Announcer] "Otherwords."
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(crowd cheering)
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- The '60s and '70s were times
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of great social upheaval in the West;
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longstanding conventions
were being challenged,
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and society was being reimagined
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to give individuals more
freedom and autonomy.
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Against this backdrop,
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a novel theory of how
children learn to read
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was introduced by language
professor Ken Goodman.
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Up until this time,
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most children learned
to read through phonics,
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which taught the correlation
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of alphabetic symbols to vocal sounds.
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But Goodman's whole language theory
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asserted that children
didn't learn to read
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by sounding out words;
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instead, the process was much
more natural and intuitive.
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Give a kid enough freedom
and access to books,
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and they'll discover how
to read on their own,
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much like babies learn to walk and talk.
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New Zealand literacy researcher Marie Clay
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developed a teaching program
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based on whole language theory,
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which incorporated a strategy
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known as cueing or three cueing.
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The idea is that when confronted
with an unfamiliar word,
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the natural solution
is not to sound it out
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but to guess it using context clues.
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These clues were grouped
into three categories,
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hence three cueing:
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visual, which meant the shape
of the word or its spelling;
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syntactic, which is the
sentence structure and grammar;
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and semantic, the meaning of the passage,
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which would even include illustrations.
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For instance, if the child
doesn't know this word,
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they could use the sentence structure
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to guess that it's a noun,
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the illustration to guess its meaning,
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and the first letter to
triangulate to a solution
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that fits all three categories.
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Clay's program was adopted
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by all New Zealand schools by 1983,
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and then imported to America,
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where versions of it were popularized
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by education professors like Lucy Calkins,
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Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell.
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An important component of the
method, proponents claimed,
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was that reading always be perceived
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as a pleasurable, self-guided activity.
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Lessons were brief, and
students were encouraged
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to spend lots of time reading alone.
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Phonics should be limited
or avoided altogether,
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because it could make reading
feel tedious and dull.
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If you instill a love and
enthusiasm for reading early on,
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the thinking went,
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kids will become skilled
readers on their own.
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It was a philosophy that resonated
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with a lot of people at the time.
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And by the 1990s,
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cueing had come to
dominate reading curricula
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in school districts across the country.
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And yet since its implementation,
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America has experienced a
crisis in early literacy,
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with less than a third of fourth graders
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being able to read at a proficient level.
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Why?
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Cognitive scientists were
making new discoveries
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that were casting serious doubts
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on the foundations of
whole language theory.
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Eye-tracking devices showed
that skilled readers,
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even when reading quickly,
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are still observing
every letter in a word,
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not just the first one.
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MRIs revealed that even when a word
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has been orthographically mapped,
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it still lights up the
speech and listening centers
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of our brains.
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This means that even when
we know a word so well
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as to recognize its meaning instantly,
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our brains are still on some level
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connecting it with its sound.
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Similarly, studies were
showing that skilled readers
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were more likely to sound
out unfamiliar words.
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Guessing words through context
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was a strategy more often
used by poor readers,
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and it led to more mistakes
than sounding them out.
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Proponents of the science of reading,
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as it came to be called,
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claimed that Marie Clay and her disciples
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had it exactly backwards.
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Instead of decoding words to
reveal the meaning of the text,
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they were asking students
to use the meaning of a text
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to decode the words.
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Let's revisit that sentence
at the beginning of the video.
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You can technically guess the words
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using context, syntax,
and initial letters,
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but I can guarantee reading this sentence
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would be much, much faster.
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Furthermore, if we start
to increase the complexity
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and obscurity of the words,
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your accuracy rates will start to plummet.
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Could you read a whole book like this?
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Maybe, but it wouldn't be fun.
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It would take forever.
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You'd make a lot of mistakes,
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and your mind would be so taxed
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from trying to decipher the words
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you wouldn't have much mental energy left
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to ponder the content.
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As clear as the science seemed to be,
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cueing was too firmly
established by this time
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to be dislodged easily.
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Most teachers had been thoroughly
trained in the approach,
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and didn't like scientists telling them
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how to run their classrooms.
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The gurus of the movement,
Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell
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had become celebrities
of the educational world,
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making millions of dollars
selling their curricula
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to schools across the country.
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The only concession
they made to the science
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was to include a bit more
phonics in their lessons
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and repackage it as balanced literacy.
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But scientists countered
that any amount of cueing
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cultivated bad reading habits
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that could last into adulthood.
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According to education
journalist Emily Hanford,
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it wasn't until COVID hit
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that things really began to change.
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Suddenly, millions of parents
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were sitting right next to their kids
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during their reading classes over Zoom,
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and a lot of them didn't
like what they were hearing.
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Despite being told that their child
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was reading at the appropriate level,
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it was obvious that some had
just memorized the lesson.
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And when confronted with
a truly unfamiliar word,
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they lacked the skills to decode it.
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Hanford's six-part
podcast, "Sold a Story,"
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which chronicles the failures of cueing
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as a teaching method,
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spread quickly amongst
outraged parents and educators.
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Around the same time, school districts
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that reinstated systematic
explicit phonics instruction
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saw dramatic rises in proficiency scores.
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Although cueing is still
used in many classrooms,
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more and more cities and
states are reverting back
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to what was essentially the system
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for teaching reading prior to 1960,
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and getting promising results.
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Even Lucy Calkins admitted
that her curriculum
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had failed to keep pace with
the scientific evidence.
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Does this mean that the era
of cueing is finally ending?
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Has science won the reading wars?
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Only time will tell.
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But it does seem clear
that the theory of reading
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that originated half a century ago
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with Ken Goodman and Marie
Clay had two fundamental flaws.
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First, it assumed that
acquisition of literacy
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works the same way as
acquisition of speech,
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but our brains and vocal
chords evolved for speech:
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a baby is hardwired to learn how to talk
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without any formal instruction;
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writing was only invented
about 5,000 years ago.
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Sure, there are a small number of kids
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who can unravel the code on their own,
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but the vast majority
of us need to be taught.
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Second, it minimized the
importance of sound in literacy.
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Connecting those squiggles
on the page to phonemes
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allows us to leverage
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the powerful speech and
listening centers of our brains.
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It makes reading feel as
natural and effortless
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as listening to someone talk.
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It's weird that it took
all these advancements
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in science and technology to
bring us back to the method
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that had been the standard
for hundreds of years.
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But perhaps reading was a
victim of its own success.
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Literacy rates skyrocketed
in the 20th century;
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from newspapers to
advertisements to the internet,
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the written word has
become such a ubiquitous,
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ever-present part of our environment.
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It's easy to forget that it's
actually a human invention;
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one we've become so good at
you'd think it came naturally.
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The gurus of the moment,
movement, movement.
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The gurus of the moment, movement...
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Phonics is dull. Yeah.
