Ten
Myths About Learning to Read
SEDL: Dec 2002 by Sebastian Wren
Learning to read is a natural process
It
has long been argued that learning to read, like learning to understand spoken
language, is a natural phenomenon. It has often been suggested that children
will learn to read if they are simply immersed in a literacy-rich environment
and allowed to develop literacy skills in their own way. This belief that
learning to read is a natural process that comes from rich text experiences is
surprisingly prevalent in education despite the fact that learning to read is
about as natural as learning to juggle blindfolded while riding a unicycle
backwards. Simply put, learning to read is not only unnatural, it is just about
the most unnatural thing humans do.
Literacy Skills
Children will eventually learn to read if given enough time
This
is arguably the second most pernicious myth, and it is closely related to the
first.
Research has revealed an extremely dangerous phenomenon that has been dubbed the "Matthew Effect." [Children of the Code] The term comes from the line in the Bible that essentially says that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That certainly describes what happens as children enter school and begin learning literacy skills. Over time, the gap between children who have well developed literacy skills and those who do not gets wider and wider.
Reading programs are "successful"
It
is extremely common for schools to buy a reading program to address their
reading instruction needs, and trust that the program will solve their school's
literacy issues. Typically these programs require a great deal of commitment
from the school, both in terms of time and money.
However,
while reading programs can be "useful," no reading program has ever
been shown to be truly "successful" — not with all children, all
teachers, and all cultures. And no reading program has been shown to accelerate
all children to advanced levels of performance.
We used to do a better job of teaching children to read
As
the song goes, "The good old days weren't always so good." We have,
in fact, never done a better job of teaching children to read than we do today.
The bad news is, we've never really done a worse job either. We are basically
just as successful today as we have always been (which is to say, not very
successful).
Nothing
illustrates this better than the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (the NAEP). This assessment has been given to children
across the country aged nine, thirteen, and seventeen since 1970. Student
performance at those three age levels has not changed substantially in over 30
years — consistently, depending on the age tested, between 24% and 39% of
students have scored in the "below basic" category, and between three
and seven percent have scored in the "advanced" category. Other
investigations have found that literacy rates have not really changed in this
country since World War II, and some studies suggest that literacy rates were
actually worse before the war
Skilled reading involves using syntactic and semantic cues to "guess" words, and good readers make many "mistakes" as they read authentic text
Research
indicates that both of these claims are quite wrong, but both are surprisingly
pervasive in reading instruction. The idea that good readers use contextual
cues to guess words in running text comes from a method of assessment developed
by Ken Goodman
that he called "miscue analysis." For his dissertation, Goodman
examined the types of mistakes that young readers make and drew inferences
about the strategies they employ as they read. He noticed that the children in
his studies very often made errors as they read, but many of these errors did
not change the meaning of the text (like misreading "rabbit" as
"bunny"). He surmised the reason must be that good readers depend on
context to predict upcoming words in passages of text. He further suggested
that for good readers, these contextual cues are so important that the reader
needs only occasionally to "sample" from the text—that is, look at a
few of the words on the page—to confirm the predictions. Children who struggle
to sound out words, Goodman says, are overdependant on letter and word cues and
should learn to pay more attention to the semantic and syntactic cues.
Goodman's
model, which eventually gave rise to the "Three
Cueing Systems" [literacyspace] model of word recognition, is
extremely influential in reading instruction, but has never been supported by
research evidence. READ
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