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