Why Kids Aren't Accurate Readers

 

            Q. We've all noticed how poorly many kids spell today, despite the huge increases in spending per pupil that we thought was providing higher-quality instruction than in yesteryear. Another puzzler is how poorly so many kids read. When you listen to a child read aloud today, it is shocking how many relatively "easy" words he will mispronounce or not be able to read at all. Surely that means the child habitually misreads and therefore misunderstands words when reading silently, and can't possibly be comprehending text accurately. How did this happen?

 

            About 75 years ago, a few education theorists began to campaign for "whole-word recognition" reading instruction instead of the tried-and-true, traditional, alphabetic phonics approach.

            They reasoned that, since mature adults scan text at very high speeds with very high accuracy, that must be the way to teach children to read. The idea was to teach them to scan over words and sentences and catch on to what they must mean, based on the pattern of the letters, the context, the illustrations and so forth. It would be OK to guess at words the child doesn't know, and to skip those that cause problems, because if the child can understand most of the words, he or she can glean the main point of the sentence.

            The problem is, that is pure moonshine. It is not correct to say that mature adult readers who read quickly and accurately are just glossing over words and thoughtlessly scanning a block of text, extracting just a few ideas. In point of fact, a good reader reads every letter of every word in every sentence. They are simply very good at processing the alphabetic letters so well that it LOOKS like they are scanning, when in fact they are deliberately and systematically translating written symbols into mental meaning.

            As far back as 1918, experimental evidence showed that skilled readers could read long words (12-15 letters) written in block capitals on exposures of 1/10 of a second. But they read every letter - they don't skip any, and they don't "guess," the way children are now being taught to do with "whole-word" or "balanced" reading instruction in our schools.

            No matter kids get words wrong, if they're taught that it's OK to just "scan" instead of actually read, and to guess and skip instead of concentrating on getting words right.

            Researcher Linnea Ehri has shown that even the so-called "sight words" that appear a lot in English but aren't typical for phonics purposes - words such as "the" - are still retained in memory by beginning readers through primitive phonological encoding, NOT by memorizing them.

            Yet in the vast majority of schools in this country, kids are not being taught to read by phonological encoding. They are being taught using "whole-word strategies," "guess and skip techniques" and memorization of the patterns of letters in words.

            And then, when they can't read accurately, THEY get the blame, instead of the failed methods that simply can't work, and never have.

            The easiest, cheapest and best way to teach reading to the K-2 pupil is systematic, explicit, intensive phonics. You can do it with a $20 set of phonogram cards, a spelling notebook, some chalk and a chalkboard, and a few primers to make a child a highly accurate, fast, independent reader.

            Why don't schools understand this? That's a good question. Maybe you should ask THEM.