Reading Wars: How many times does phonics have to win?
The anti-phonics folks are in retreat – but they’ve risen from the ashes a couple of times before.
It seems like a week doesn’t go by these days without another story about the “Reading Wars”, the new “Science of Reading”, and the benefits of phonics instruction for children who are beginning to learn to read. A small sampling:
From the New York Times, several stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curriculum-phonics.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/science-of-reading-literacy-parents.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/opinion/reading-kids-phonics.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/01/opinion/us-school-reading.html
The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-yorks-literacy-flip
In Nellie Bowles’ always entertaining TGIF column in The Free Press
The L.A. Times
AP News
A popular, and highly influential, podcast series focusing on the topic:
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
A documentary about efforts to convince educators in Oakland to teach phonics
https://www.therighttoreadfilm.org/about
It would be easy for the casual consumer of this recent “Reading Wars” news to think that it has only been very recently that there has even been a “Science of Reading” and that evidence regarding the benefits of phonics instruction is equally recent. After all – if that were not the case, then why on earth would there be any controversy about teaching phonics and why would so many children have been taught to read during the past several decades without the children receiving the benefits of direct instruction in phonics? If there has been evidence for at least half a century that children learn to read more quickly and easily if they are taught phonics, then it would not make any sense that it has only been very recently (during the past year or two) that school districts all over the country have switched to teaching phonics. Well – maybe it makes no sense – but such is the nonsensical history of the promotion by Schools of Education of non-phonics-based reading instruction pedagogies.
Reading Wars I: Whole word vs Phonics
In 1966, Rudolf Flesch published his classic analysis of reading instruction failures: “Why Johnny Can’t Read and what you can do about it.” At the time, reading instruction was dominated by the “whole word” method (which had first been proposed by the influential educator Horace Mann in the mid 1800’s). According to this theory of reading, skilled readers do not sound out printed words, but instead visually recognize “whole words” (almost as if they were not based on an alphabetic writing system), thereby bypassing any sound-based analysis of printed words at all. Therefore, according to those offering workshops to reading teachers and to those teaching reading teachers in schools of education, teaching children phonics and teaching them to sound out words will only slow the children’s process of becoming skilled readers and ultimately leave them reading at a slow pace.
There are two problems with this argument. First, even if that characterization of what skilled readers do were correct, it would not mean that phonics instruction would not be helpful with beginning readers. Second, there was no good evidence at the time that even skilled readers read by the “visual memorization of whole words, bypassing word sounds entirely” method.
Thanks to Flesch’s book, there was some movement back towards phonics instruction in public schools – but even that partial victory was short-lived.
Reading Wars II: Whole Language vs Phonics
My wife and I are both cognitive developmental psychologists, and I did research in the early 1980's on word processing by beginning readers. Accordingly, my wife and I were familiar with the research literature that, since the time of Flesch’s book, had consistently supported the benefits to most children of explicit instruction in phonics. And so, when our two oldest children went through their early grades, we were pleased that their school spent a lot of time on phonics. But then came ... 1990. At that time, our youngest was in kindergarten, and to our dismay, the principal of his school announced that, starting that year, phonics instruction was out and was being replaced by the newest shining object in the world of reading instruction – Whole Language.
As the Wikipedia entry on Whole Language correctly notes, this method “became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness. It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally.”
I still find it hard to believe that anyone who has had any reasonable amount of experience observing children learning language on the one hand and learning reading on the other could possibly think that they develop in the same way. What we know about language acquisition is that, barring very significant cognitive impairment, all children raised in a language using environment (that includes language being used in interactions with the infant/child) will acquire the ability to communicate through the use of language. In other words, all that is required is “mere exposure”. According to “whole language” proponents, the same is true for reading. That is – they claim that as long as children are exposed to a lot of experience with print, they will learn to read. Following from this theory, teachers were instructed to avoid any instruction in phonics at all, but instead to simply read a lot to children and to give them interesting books to read themselves. At some point, according to the whole language experts, the magic would happen and children would become able to read.
It’s a nutty theory, and it’s wrong, but one can understand why a lot of teachers would like the idea. Instead of drilling the children on letter sounds, all that teachers were told they had to do was to … immerse their children in a rich reading environment. That does sound a lot more pleasant, and easier, than teaching phonics.
What did my wife and I do about the adoption of whole language instruction in our youngest’s school? First, my wife brought the principal (someone we knew quite well because our older children had been at the same school) a tall stack of research articles that supported the benefits of phonics instruction and discredited whole language instruction. The principal had no interest in reading the articles. He was the educator. He knew best. So – we bought some flash cards and every night for a month or two we held a phonics class with our youngest. He learned quickly – and became a skilled reader at a relatively early age. The same proved not to be true for many of his classmates who did not have the advantage of being taught phonics.
Over time, as the harm being inflicted on children by whole language instruction became increasingly difficult to ignore, phonics instruction again was brought back to many schools. My wife and I certainly thought the wars were over. We were wrong.
Reading Wars III: Balanced Literacy
It seems that a lot of teachers of children in the early grades are not fond of teaching phonics. It seems intuitively like an outmoded method of teaching reading – the kind that was popular in the 1800's but that we shouldn’t still be using in today’s modern world. It’s derided as the ultimate example of “drill and kill” teaching, something that modern teachers are taught to abhor (a catchy phrase I’ve heard many times in reference to teaching phonics). And so, in the early 2000's, the education world was ready for another new kid on the reading instruction block: Balanced Literacy.
Unquestionably, the leading and most influential and effective proponent of Balanced Literacy in the U.S. has been Lucy Calkins of the Columbia School of Education. Although Calkins has long claimed that her approach includes just the right balance of phonics instruction with instruction in other methods of teaching word recognition, in fact, those who use the approach typically include very little explicit phonics instruction in their reading lessons. Instead, children are taught, when they come upon an unfamiliar word in text, that they should NOT try to sound out the word. Instead, they should guess what the word is likely to be, based up other kinds of cues on the page, in the book, or based upon their knowledge of the general topic discussed by the sentence (called the “three cueing method” of word recognition).
There are two problems with this approach. First, that is simply not how we read when we read accurately. Second, children taught this method of word recognition end up reading more poorly than children taught phonics. The evidence is clear, and overwhelming. And THAT is why – finally, even the New York City school system has abandoned blanaced literacy and gone back to the very old (but also tried and true and effective) method of teaching beginning reading: explicit instruction in phonics.
Of course, some teachers still resist using such an old-fashioned method, and I wouldn’t be shocked if in 20 years or so we have Reading Wars IV – but for now, it does seem like the one really effective method of teaching young children to read has vanquished its latest foe.