Education
Expert pinpoints what's wrong with nation's reading instruction
By Linda Seebach, The Detroit News, August 8, 2004

LINK

Reading is not natural.

Yes, some children do learn to read simply by being read to (I did), but expecting all of them to do it is rather like expecting children to learn to play the violin by listening to classical music and watching other people play. Maybe Mozart could do that, but we're not all born with Mozart's talents.

Almost everybody gets the violin bit, notably including those who teach the instrument (and exhort their students to practice diligently). But a surprising number of people don't understand that children need to be taught, explicitly and systematically, how to read. And again, they notably include some whose job it is to teach reading.

That's a major reason why two-thirds of American children are less-than-proficient readers - let me say that again - two-thirds, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 30 percent to 40 percent are "below basic" on that scale.

G. Reid Lyon is a psychologist specializing in reading, and head of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the federal National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. In an interview with the reading project, "Children of the Code," he examines what goes wrong with reading instruction, or the lack of it, what we know about how to do it right, and the vast human toll of our failure to teach reading effectively.

All the interviews are must-reads for anyone involved with elementary education, by the way; I just happened on this one first.

Lyon was doing research on vocalization in monkeys, but when he decided to study children instead, he earned a teaching certificate and went off to teach third grade. He was surprised to find out that 30 percent or more of the kids in his class couldn't read well, some of them not at all.

In his education course, Lyon says, he'd been told that reading was natural and all you needed to do was offer kids rich, interesting literature and motivate them.

"I was taught not to deal with specific skills because that in fact would be de-motivating," Lyon says. "I tried that and I didn't help anybody."

Also, he discovered that the kids who couldn't read were deeply ashamed of the fact. They thought they were stupid, that they were failures, and they would do anything to avoid situations where they had to read and they couldn't, and everybody could see that they couldn't.

His research ever since has been on four basic questions: What does it take to learn to read? What goes wrong when you don't? How do you prevent that? How do you remediate it?

And his toughest challenge, he says, is making the answers to those questions part of every teacher's preparation. "The resistance in the educational community, particularly at the higher education level where teachers are trained, is enormous, almost unbelievable."

People "are latching onto their beliefs, their assumptions, their egos and their careers rather than looking very clearly at what works (and) what doesn't."

Whatever professors may believe about teaching other people's children, Lyon has found, with their own they typically start working on reading practically from birth. They read to their kids, they point out letters and sounds, they have magnet letters on the refrigerator. Then they go into class and tell prospective teachers never to do that.

The job of the beginning reader, at least in any alphabetic language, is to sort out the individual sounds of the language, called phonemes, and learn how they correspond with printed letters. The correspondence isn't perfect, of course, but it is regular enough to learn if someone tells you what to look and listen for. But it is irregular enough, in English, that unless someone does tell you, you may never figure it out or even notice that it exists.

That's phonemic awareness, and children who start school without it have little hope of learning to read, and maybe no hope at all if their teachers believe telling them about phonics is bad for them.

Phonics is the application of phonemic awareness to sounding out words, fluency is the ability to do it so rapidly it is not even conscious, and beyond those fundamental skills children need to build vocabulary and learn strategies for comprehension. But if the fundamental skills are missing, or limited, the reading process is so laborious the child essentially forgets where he is in the sentence or the paragraph every time he has to struggle with a difficult or unfamiliar word.

The failure rate does not have to be 30 percent or more. Most of the children who can't read, about 95 percent of them, Lyon says, have never been taught.

"When we do things right," Lyon says, "based on evidence, not philosophy, not belief, not untested assumptions," the percentage of children who cannot learn to read - there are some - can be reduced to somewhere between 2 percent and 6 percent.

What a difference that would make.

Linda Seebach writes for the Rocky Mountain News. Her column is distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, 1090 Vermont Ave. N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005.