I’ve been challenged recently to think, really think hard,
about everything I know about how children learn to read. This is something that I have devoted my
professional life to, something I have loved learning about, teaching,
analyzing, and observing for many years.
Language is fascinating. This
code of lines and circles that we’ve developed to communicate without speaking
is fascinating. What I’m now discovering
is that is also basic and human.
I’ve been thinking a lot about reading because my
four-year-old is on the brink of it. A
lot of parents put a lot of pressure on themselves and on their children to
learn letters, numbers, and words very early.
If your kid can identify the letters of the alphabet before age 3, you
have some serious bragging rights on the playground. I certainly don’t have that bragging
right. My daughter can spell her name
and the word “stop”, and can identify maybe half of the letters by name, but
none of the sounds. But she loves books.
She loves to be read to. She loves books on CD.
I’ve seen her pick up just about anything with print on it, move her
finger under a line of text (left to right and top to bottom), and speak
nonsense. She spends anywhere between
half and hour and 2 hours looking at books in bed all by herself before she
goes to sleep. Now I’m not saying that
she’s any smarter or better than those kids who know the alphabet already, but
this is one thing I’m not worried about (and those of you who know me well
understand what I’m saying). As I read
more and observe more I’m beginning to decide that I want my kids to love books
and love reading more than I want them to possess reading as a skill.
This passage from Brief Intervals
of Horrible Sanity by Elizabeth Gold really spoke to me:
I have not even
begin to talk about the American confusion about the intellectual life, and how
that confusion has been exacerbated by our adoration of new technology and the
computer, which is seen not as a tool, but somehow, as a cure. Now don’t get be wrong: computer knowledge is
a useful and practical thing to possess.
But to replace the culture of the book—the concept that anything worth
learning is both difficult and time-consuming, but pays the learner back with
all kids of contradictory pleasures—with the concept that in our busy,
multitasking world, knowledge is something that should be broken down in to
easily digested nuggets and “skills” is a mistake. Efficient such a way of learning might
be. Better it is not. And if you don’t believe me, check our
country’s reading scores. The more
guaranteed-to-work computers and magic programs they drag in the worse a lot of
students do. As for me, I believe not in
“reading skills” but in literature….
I see so many children parked in
front of “educational” TV programs or iphone apps; programs that will teach children letters, shapes,
numbers, I don’t dispute that. But do
they teach children that reading is worth while? That reading can be frustrating and
interesting and fun? That books
themselves are communication devices? My
mother told me recently that she has often thought that anyone who lives near a
good library is not poor. In a time
when we think so much about the “achievement gap” and the inequality and
injustice in the American school system, I think this is truly wise. Schools focus more and more on teaching
students reading “skills” that are completely divorced from actual books, which is sadly ironic when you think about how much these reading curricula cost.
I spent countless hours in graduate school
and in teaching trying to deconstruct this mental process we call “reading,”
which most adults do as effortlessly as speaking, in order to identify and
teach the component skills. Most
teachers are familiar with the assessment tool known as “running records” or
“miscue analysis.” As a child is
reading, the teacher follows along and makes a check mark for each word read
correctly. Each word read incorrectly is
notated, with marks for false starts, numerous tries, and appeals for help from
the teacher. When the book or passage is
done, the words read correctly and incorrectly are taken as a percentage of all
the words in the book, and all mistakes are carefully analyzed to find out why
the child is making those mistakes and what skill or phonics sound needs to be
taught. This is truly a science. Now I don’t mean to say that this method is
bad or wrong; I have found it to be incredibly useful in teaching children who
are struggling in reading. But is it
necessary, or, perhaps, should it be necessary?
I’ve just begun John Holt’s Learning
All the Time, and while I certainly don’t agree with everything I’ve read
so far, I’m beginning to understand what I think is his basic premise: learning
to read is natural, and when children are exposed to books and print early and
often, easy. Breaking down this process,
which comes so naturally to adults as to become hard to teach, seems ludicrous when you compare it to learning to
walk, or maybe speak. When a baby is
born, the parents don’t parents don’t
teach her to speak. She picks it up by being spoken to, and by hearing language all around her. Can you imagine having to break each word
into its constituent sounds, manipulating the baby’s mouth and tongue to teach
her how to form those sounds?
When I interview applicants for a
reading tutor position at the tutoring company I work for I like to give them a
little test. I write the vowels on a
piece of paper: a, e, i, o, u, and I ask them to tell me the short sounds of
each of these vowels. Often they start
by saying “A,” as in the name of the letter. I stop them and say, “no, not the
letter name, the sound it makes.” I’d say probably 90% of the applicants can’t
tell me the short sounds of all five vowels.
Go ahead and try it now. Did you
get it? How long did it take you? The answer, in case you’re wondering if
you’re my star pupil, is: a, as in
apple, eh, as in elephant, i as in igloo, ah as in octopus, and uh
as in umbrella. My point is not that
anyone who doesn’t know that is stupid , it’s that it’s hard to come up with
these sounds! Why? Because we don’t use them in isolation like
that. Unless you run into a word you don’t know, you’re never sounding out words. You take them in as a whole, quickly and
without thinking. You have an incredible
vocabulary of these words, what teachers call “sight words” because you know
them on sight.
Now this is a tremendous debate in
education, and my point is that the phonics versus whole language versus
balanced literacy arguments are, perhaps, moot, or at least unimportant to me
right now. Maybe we don't have to break
words into their constituent sounds or give children endless flashcards and
whole words to memorize. Maybe all we
need to do is read. Read an awful
lot. Read to them. Read to ourselves, while children watch and
play. Read novels, brochures, signs,
newspapers, magazines, instructions.
But then again, this is something
I’m still struggling with and my views are still evolving. Is it enough to absorb this code we use to
communicate? Do children need to be able
to identify the short vowel sounds so they can figure out new words, words that
haven’t been memorized, are unfamiliar, and can’t be understood in
context? What about learning to read in
other languages, when the learner hasn’t been steeped in that language they way
they have their native tongue. And how
does a child learn to write? These are questions
I’m still pondering. After seeing so
many children struggling to learn how to read, even children who do live in
a print and book rich environment, I’m not quite ready to give up the idea that
some aspects of reading have to be taught explicitly. But how and when is the best way to do
that? I’d love to know what you think…
