At a Loss for Words :: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers via APM Reports

At a Loss for Words

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

APM Reports: 8.22.2019 by Rachel Sender

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of *struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn't read very well.

"There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost."

Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.

Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."

Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?

Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.

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A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.

The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"

Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."

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The origins

The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.

The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.

In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:

➧ graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)

➧ syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)

➧ semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)

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Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas.

One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole language ." The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images.

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The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics . It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers. 

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Balanced Literacy

People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.

The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument. Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.

Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early 1990s.

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Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."

But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.

Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system.  LISTEN 00:52:31