Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert - Phonics :: Whole Language

Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert

Sage Journals: 6.11.2018 by Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle, Kate Nation

Abstract

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There is intense public interest in questions surrounding how children learn to read and how they can best be taught. Research in psychological science has provided answers to many of these questions but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of “reading wars.” Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. The aim of this article is to fill this gap. We present a comprehensive tutorial review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children’s earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. We explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But we also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. We call for an end to the reading wars and recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.

Learning to read transforms lives. Reading is the basis for the acquisition of knowledge, for cultural engagement, for democracy, and for success in the workplace. Illiteracy costs the global economy more than $1 trillion (U.S. dollars) annually in direct costs alone (WorldLiteracy Foundation, 2015). The indirect costs are far greater because the failure to attain satisfactory literacy blocks people from acquiring basic knowledge, such as understanding information about hygiene, diet, or safety. Consequently, low literacy is a major contributor to inequality and increases the likelihood of poor physical and mental health, workplace accidents, misuse of medication, participation in crime, and welfare dependency, all of which also have substantial additional social and economic costs (WorldLiteracy Foundation, 2015). Low literacy presents a critical and persistent challenge around the world: Even in developed countries, it is estimated that approximately 20% of 15-year-olds do not attain a level of reading performance that allows them to participate effectively in life (Organisationfor Economic Cooperation and Development, 2016).

Not surprisingly, then, there has been intense public interest for decades in how children learn to read. This interest has often been realized in the form of vociferous argument over how children should be taught to read—a period of exchange that has become known as the “reading wars”. Over many years, the pendulum has swung between arguments favoring a phonics approach, in which the sounds that letters make are taught explicitly (Chall,1967;
Flesch,1955), and a whole-language approach, which emphasizes the child’s discovery of meaning through experiences in a literacy-rich environment (Goodman,1967;( F.Smith, 1971). Most famously, Goodman (1967) characterized reading not as an analytic process but as a  “psycholinguistic guessing game” in which readers use their graphic, semantic, and syntactic knowledge to guess the meaning of a printed word. More recently, a three-cueing approach (known as the Searchlight model in the United Kingdom) has become pervasive, in which beginning readers use semantic, syntactic, and “graphophonic” (letter-sound) cues simultaneously to formulate an intelligent hypothesis about a word’s identity (for discussion, see Adams,1998). Debate around these broad approaches has played out across the English-speaking world.  READ MORE >>