On Surprises in Reading

[Educators] have devised thousands of ingenious exercises to train children in this insane method of reading. They make them complete such sentences as "There are fish in the l_____", "The package was tied up with str____", or "I went to the zoo and saw a kangaroo j_____". The child is praised if he obligingly reads, "There are fish in the lake", "The package was tied up with string", and "I went to the zoo and saw a kangaroo jump."

Unfortunately — or fortunately — life is not as simple and dull as all that. Real-life sentences are apt to read "There are fish in the lagoon", "The package was tied up with straps", and "I went to the zoo and saw a kangaroo just as tall as you are."

A child taught by look-and-say will go through life and miss all the interesting and unexpected stuff in print. He's been trained to assume that what comes next is always the expected word and therefore never discovers the fact that, as often as not, printed matter takes surprising turns. — Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Still Can't Read: A New Look at the Scandal of Our Schools

The previous principal of our Upper Tax Bracket elementary school once told an assembly of parents that she always reads the ending of a book first, "so I know where it's going." This was my first clue that we would not see eye to eye. Why would anyone do such a crazy thing? Authors go to a great deal of trouble to make their stories unfold at a particular pace and in a particular sequence. Why would you wreck that? If the principal goes to see a movie, does she first catch the end of the previous showing?

I used to be utterly baffled that teachers are always telling kids to try to predict what happens next in the story, or to guess the story after looking at the jacket cover, but now that I've been researching the pedagogy of reading, I get it. Whole-language types actually believe that reading "comprehension" PRECEDES the reading of the words on the page! As Alfie Kohn says, it’s easier to decode a word when you already know what it means. This is the exact opposite of the way anyone who actually cares about reading would approach it, but why should that slow them down?

I even resent the very widespread practice of describing the opening of a book on the jacket blurb. This is especially bad news with mystery stories. "When the body of Mr. Allington is discovered in the garden shed, impaled on his own swordfish ..." Yeah, thanks for that. Now the first 20 pages of the book, which were a subtle lead-in to the discovery of Mr. Allington's body in the garden shed, have been ruined for me.

A Pox on "Progressive" Whole Language

To hear [educators] talk, the word method is the only method of teaching reading that fits into the whole of modern educational theory.  It's all part and parcel, they say, of modern, enlightened education.  

I say it isn't so ... The fact is, I am on the whole on the side of progressive education.  I have a Ph.D. degree from Teachers College, Columbia, and I am a sincere admirer of John Dewey.  I think education should be democratic, free of senseless formalism and drill, based on interest and meaningful experience, and inseparably joined to the real life that goes on around the child.  — Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can't Read.

What really distinguishes Whole Language teachers, though, is not just a broader array of strategies for helping children learn to decode text, but the belief that reading is more than decoding text.  A child filled full of phonics rules may be able to pronounce a word flawlessly without having any idea what it means, much less what its relation is to the words sitting next to it.  (Some critics refer to the process of getting kids to call out the words in front of them as “barking at the page.”)  Whole Language teachers insist that reading is first and foremost about meaning.  — Alfie Kohn, On Teaching Reading, Spelling and Related Subjects

Frankly, I'd rather watch Younger Daughter "bark at the page", correctly,  than guess wildly without even looking at the page, as she was taught at her "progressive" private school.  As Rudolf Flesch says of a struggling whole-word student, "Characteristically, he doesn't look at the word in the book, but stares into space."

According to Alfie Kohn, "Once they can recognize the first letter of the word, that, along with other clues from the context, can help them predict the rest."  Thanks, Alfie.  That's why I've got a kid who, confronted with the word "on", guesses "octopus".

A Whole Language teacher would rather spend her classroom budget on the kind of children’s stories that can be found in bookstores and libraries.  The underlying assumption isn’t just that reading material doesn’t need to contain controlled vocabulary, where new phonemes or skills are introduced on a specific schedule.  Rather, it’s that such texts ought to be actively avoided.  Better to have a child read a well-written story about an interesting subject.  — Alfie Kohn.

Well, sure, that's the theory, but in practice schools teach whole-word reading using "leveled readers", coded from A to Z, that are just as boring as Dick and Jane.  A typical "leveled reader" book would be something like "Kate Gets Dressed".  Each page of the book has a sentence beginning "Kate puts on her ...", with a big picture on top.  Under the picture of Kate putting on her socks, what do you think the text is?  This enables kids like my daughter to fake reading, without ever actually learning to read the words the book allegedly teaches, like "socks" and "mittens".

As Rudolf Flesch points out, once they've learned phonics, kids can read anything they want.  It's the concept of whole-word learning that dooms kids to boring books.

Alfie Kohn claims that Whole Language actually teaches decoding better, "Because it’s easier to decode a word when you already know what it means."  That's ridiculous, and a terrible way to teach reading.  What if the author wrote something unexpected?  And why should we ask small children, with their limited life experience, to correctly predict what the author wants to say?

... a child may be temporarily stumped by a tricky word.  In that case, the Whole Language teacher might invite him to speculate about what the word could be.  Or she might say, “Skip that word; we’ll come back to it later.”  And if he tries and makes a mistake?  Suppose a child is slowly reading aloud from a story that includes the sentence I think my car needs new tires.  He gets through the first six words and then pauses before blurting out, “Trees.”  A skills-oriented teacher would likely say, “No.  Look at the letters again.  What comes after the t?”  But a Whole Language teacher is more likely to respond, “My car needs new trees??”  Does that make sense to you?”  Then, once he gets the word right, she’d probably call his attention to the way it’s spelled.  — Alfie Kohn.

Again, a terrible way to teach reading (and notice how it's being pushed by the district of Upper Tax Bracket!)  If we can predict beforehand what the author will say, why bother reading at all?  What if the kid is reading science fiction or fantasy, and the sentence is "I think my car needs new wings"?  Notice that Kohn is suggesting kids should read only books that make sense to them, so they can predict what the words should be.  Think how very limiting that is, especially to a small child!  It's the exact opposite of what I want the reading experience to be for my kids.  If reading doesn't communicate something new and surprising, really, what is the point?

You can bet that when I work on reading with Younger Daughter, I do exactly what Kohn says I shouldn't do. I say, "look at the word! What's the next letter after t?" If I used Kohn's method, I would "probably" get around to teaching the phonics, after telling my daughter she should have magically intuited the word from context.

On teaching spelling, Kohn suggests "They might be invited to write a word as many different ways as possible and then to evaluate the different spellings, finally checking out which one is in the dictionary."  How is that less annoying than just telling the kid the correct spelling?  And how likely is it that the kid will even remember the correct spelling after he's just laboriously written out all the possible wrong spellings?

This is the kind of thinking that gives "progressive" education a bad name.

Why Parents Are Told to Read to Their Kids

From Why Johnny Still Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch:  the beginning of Chapter 13, "It's the Parents' Fault":

Once upon a time — around 1908 when Edmund Burke Huey wrote his famous book The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading — there lived a little boy in or around Boston, Massachusetts.  His parents were well-to-do, kept a staff of servants, and had plenty of leisure time on their hands.  The house was large and comfortable and contained a cozy library, with a plentiful collection of favorite children's books on some lower shelves.

One day Dr. Huey came for a visit.  The boy was four years old at the time.

He had never tried to read, but had a new pictured storybook which contained lines from Old Mother Hubbard.  He knew the story already, but had me read it aloud over and over again, following my finger over the lines and also keeping the place by the pictures.  He would then "read" by turns with me, and actually came to keep his fingers "on the place" throughout, at the first sitting.  All that is needed is books of good old jingles and rhymes and folk stories and fairy tales, with illustrative pictures, and a mother or father or friend who cares enough for children to play this way and read aloud to them.  The child will keep it up by the hour and the week and the month, and his natural learning to read is only a question of time.

Huey's recipe for teaching reading is almost exactly what is being followed to this day in most of our schools.  They expect the child to be taught by this miraculous method at home and are sorely disappointed if the parents leave them in the lurch.

... To judge from the look-and-say teacher's manuals of the 1980s, it's perfectly clear that the schools still rely on home teaching just as much as Huey did.  Word-by-word-taught reading is impossible to teach in the few snatches of time the normal modern school gives to the individual child.  There has to be enough time for one-person tutoring, and that person, by necessity, is the mother rather than the schoolteacher with her full classroom and innumerable other chores.

And so the schools assume that the parents play an enormous part in teaching the small child to read, and they're consciously or unconsciously fiercely resentful when parents fall down on that unspoken contract.

... And so the responsibility for Johnny's reading trouble is neatly placed on his parents' shoulders.  There isn't a single piece of advice to parents from the look-and-say people that doesn't recommend lots and lots of time reading aloud to the child, letting him or her see the words on the page.  This will make the child memorize the words and sooner or later the Huey-type miracle is going to happen.

There's no lack of advice on exactly how the mother is supposed to proceed ... 

Here's the advice of Professor James E.  Flood in the May 1977 Reading Teacher ...

1.)  Start the reading with some warmup questions.
2.)  Interrupt the reading often with questions to see whether the child is following the story.
3.)  Interrupt the reading often to repeat what the book says.
4.)  Go over the story again when you're through. 

Word-Calling vs. Comprehension

From Why Johnny Still Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch:  he's quoting from Teaching to Read, by Mitford Mathews:

On page 159 of his delightful book Teaching to Read, Mitford Mathews tells the following story:

A group of educators visited a Chicago parochial school where the Leonard Bloomfield phonic system was taught.

They were taken into a classroom of perhaps 40 first grade children.  On the teacher's desk were elementary books from various grades.  The visitors were invited to select a book and ask any of the children to read from it.  The readiness with which the children read was unusual.  One of the guests happened to pick up a sixth-grade science book and asked one of the boys to read a passage from it.  In doing so the child encountered and read the word "satellite".  Father Stoga (the superintendent) asked him what the word meant and the child said it meant a big object in the sky.  Dean Gray, the man who gave us Dick and Jane, found the answer unsatisfactory, showing that the child was reading, that is pronouncing, quite beyond the vocabulary appropriate to his age, and not getting the sense of what he read.  He explained to the other visitors that what the children were doing was in no sense remarkable.  He said that reading experts had long known that children could rather quickly be taught to pronounce words with remarkable glibness but that real understanding of what was read was another matter entirely.  He pointed out that these children were mere word-callers, that they were pronouncing well beyond their mental ages, and that they were heading straight for serious trouble later in their reading development.

Why My Kid Can't Read

Memorizing or guessing the meaning of whole words is not reading; on the contrary, it is an acquired bad habit that stands in the way of your child's ever learning to read properly. Therefore, the problem of improving your child's reading cannot be solved by giving him a more concentrated dose of what he has been getting since first grade. It can only be solved by making him drop the habit of word guessing and teaching him to read -- from scratch.

from Why Johnny Can't Read, by Rudolf Flesch (copyright 1955!)