Can Reading Instruction Enter the 21st Century?
Time magazine, a few months ago, had, as a lead story, How to Build a Student for the 21st Century. It started as follows: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century ...and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls—every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."
The children in those classrooms who spot Rip might well envy him. He is only a century out of synch; by contrast, their life is dominated by a system of reading system that is even more out of date. It stems from the 19th century.
The problem is not simply that the system is antiquated; it is extraordinarily ineffective. Government figures consistently show approximately 40 percent of bright, capable children have trouble in learning to read. Yet, despite its epidemic proportions, this crisis, for the most part, is "off the radar screen."
To the degree that it is recognized, the call has been to "go back to basics." This advice rests on a firm, but unfounded, belief that way back in our history, schools regularly achieved effective literacy and that the current failure is based on having deviated from the practices of those older days.
Admittedly, for a couple of periods in our history, some other forms of reading instructions were briefly attempted. One was whole word teaching (where children were to learn whole words rather than sounds); another was whole language teaching (where children were to read whole books right from the start). These efforts were even more unsuccessful than the phonics instruction they were designed to replace and their tenure was brief. So for almost the entire history of our country, traditional phonics has held sway. Hence, the call to "go back to basics" is essentially a plea to continue doing what we have been doing for generations.
.
The reasons why the instruction doesn't work are easy to identify if you spend some time examining what children are offered. Major holes pervade the system. To take but one example, let's consider a group of words that permeate our language. These are the "little words" such as was, who, he, they, of, what, were, do. For phonics instructors, these words are "renegades" that fail to "obey" the rules. If the words chose to be reasonable, was might be spelled as wuz, who as hoo, he as hee, they as thay, of as uv and so on. So minimal time is spent teaching them.
The lack of attention is justified by telling children that these words have no meaning; indeed, they are often encouraged to skip over them. If we follow that advice, it means that the sentence you just read would be experienced as: lack attention justify tell children words meaning encourage skip. Were your agenda to be a lack of comprehension, you would be well on your way.
Not only are the words deemed to be meaningless, they are also deemed to be rare--that is, their total number is minute relative to the range of all other words. After all, why spend time on things that are so exceptional?
Except not these exceptions. In fact, about 100 of these little words make up 50% or more of any page of print--regardless of whether the book is for a first grader or a college student. This small, seemingly insignificant set of words actually forms the backbone of language. Without them, we simply cannot create meaningful sentences. That’s why they represent practically every other word we read--or write. Failure to provide children with adequate training in this realm seriously compromises their chances for success. Comparable difficulties exist in other essential aspects of reading.
It was understandable that educators a couple of centuries back failed to take account of the many skills underlying literacy. The knowledge base was simply not there. Nowadays, there is no such excuse. The advances in cognitive science, linguistics and related realms provide a gold mine of resources. Yet for the most part, they have been ignored as children continue to be confronted with out-of-date programs that breed unconscionable rates of failure. For the health of our children and our nation, it is time for reading instruction to enter the 21st century.
