Comments on: Whole language

By: Moa

Moa — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 17:15:25 +0000

When I see un unfamiliar word and want to know what it means, I look it up in a wordbook. I don’t need to know how it is pronounced to read it. Often I have never heard the unfamiliar word, so it does not help me to know how it is pronounced. If it is an english word, I often read how to pronounce it also, because I want to be able to recognise it in speech. To know how the word is pronounced, I read the IPA transcription in the [ ], located to the left of the explanation of the word. Of course, this has very little to do with how children learn to read.

By: Stuart Buck

Stuart Buck — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 16:00:15 +0000

I misspoke: What is obviously the only way for the beginning reader to figure out new words? By knowing how to sound them out. Memorization is useless for figuring out new words. By definition, you can’t have memorized an unfamiliar word, or it wouldn’t be unfamiliar any longer. What beginning readers need—more than anything—is to be able to figure out how to sound out printed words, especially words that they already know how to speak. To refuse to teach them that ability is criminal.

By: Stuart Buck

Stuart Buck — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:55:07 +0000

CC —so what? What do we adults do when we see an unfamiliar word and have to pronounce it? If you’ve never seen the word “sesquipedalian” before, do you just give up and move on? Perhaps, if you’re illiterate. But if you’re a literate person, you start by sounding out the components. Now. To a beginning reader, 100% of all words are going to be unfamiliar. So think about it: what is obviously the best way for the beginning reader to figure out new words?

By: cc

cc — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 18:30:35 +0000

You realize that as adults we read via whole language. You see a word, even a long one, and recognize it. Reading would take an incredibly long time if you sounded out every word, phoneme by phoneme.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 18:26:39 +0000

Do the better schools that middle class kids go to also use Direct Instruction? Is that the reason for their superiority?

By: Stuart Buck

Stuart Buck — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 16:22:53 +0000

Sorry for the multiple posting, but the page didn’t seem to show it the first two times, even after hitting “refresh.”

By: Stuart Buck

Stuart Buck — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 16:16:17 +0000

Not to belabor the obvious, but to quote the education professor's post for the third time:

Disadvantaged children taught with Direct Instruction moved from the 20th percentile on nationally- standardized tests to the 50th percentile. In other words, Direct Instruction made them regular students in achievement.

As the professor says, that result was the finding of Follow Through, the massive study that examined 75,000 children per year from 1967 to 1995. Is there any valid reason to believe that this finding was incorrect? In addition, consider the schools discussed in this report (PDF). If the statistics are accurate, those schools demonstrate that it is most certainly possible to achieve good results with poor minorities.

By: Stuart Buck

Stuart Buck — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 16:12:37 +0000

Not to belabor the obvious, but to quote the education professor's post for the third time:

Disadvantaged children taught with Direct Instruction moved from the 20th percentile on nationally- standardized tests to the 50th percentile. In other words, Direct Instruction made them regular students in achievement.

By: Stuart Buck

Stuart Buck — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 16:08:52 +0000

Not to belabor the obvious, but to quote the education professor's post for the third time:

Disadvantaged children taught with Direct Instruction moved from the 20th percentile on nationally- standardized tests to the 50th percentile. In other words, Direct Instruction made them regular students in achievement.

By: harry

harry — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 14:48:28 +0000

And there are tons of good data showing that well designed curricula and logically clear instruction can override the effects of social class, minority group status, and family background. This goes against just about everything I have read. And I have read a lot. Can you cite the studies? Or am I reading the claim wrong? (the way I am reading it may be too strong, as something like this: ‘with the right curriculum taught the rihgt way children will achieve just as much regardelss of social, ethnic, or racial background, but not regardless of IQ’)

By: Stuart Buck

Stuart Buck — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 13:59:41 +0000

Dsquared: To repeat something I quoted above:

Reformers almost never consider the obvious. What is closest to student learning is not race, social class, culture, school size, and all the other factors the reformers tout, but communication with the teacher — organized as instruction within a curriculum. The reason poor kids don’t learn much in school is that they come to school less prepared and because most schools use curricula that are horrible (superficial coverage, illogical sequences, little built-in practice) and teaching methods that miscommunicate information. And there are tons of good data showing that well designed curricula and logically clear instruction can override the effects of social class, minority group status, and family background. * * * 2. Disadvantaged children taught with Direct Instruction moved from the 20th percentile on nationally- standardized tests to the 50th percentile. In other words, Direct Instruction made them regular students in achievement. However, the standing of disadvantaged children receiving some of the other (still used) non-DI curricula decreased relative to the rest of the country. * * * 4. Follow-up studies showed that children (predominantly Black or Hispanic) who had been taught reading and math using Direct Instruction in elementary school were, at the end of the 9th grade, still one year ahead of children who had been in control (non-Direct Instruction) schools in reading, and 7 months ahead of control children in math.

What you see as an effect of income might just be the greater ability of richer people to buy their kids' way into schools (whether private or suburban) that actually have good teachers that use good curricula.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 12:17:19 +0000

Aware of how popular the stochastic approach was to modelling vote shares, I nevertheless tentatively and nervously raise this question; do you people realise that you are arguing over a statistics (US literacy rates) which looks incredibly like white noise around a trend determined by income?

By: JimM

JimM — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 12:10:57 +0000

Some observations: When I went to primary (elementary) school (in Scotland, in the ‘50s) we were all taught the good old “Three Rs”, which is to say, “reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic”. I cannot now recall what method of reading and writing teaching was employed, but it seemed to work, except that in my case I was not good at spelling. We were taught arithmetic, which is not the same thing as mathematics. Meanwhile we learned our multiplication tables by rote. I still know them as if by instinct, and they are still useful in these days of calculators and computers; for instance, they can often deliver answers faster than computers can, once data entry time is taken into account. Also, knowledge of the “times tables” allows a reasonableness check against machine-delivered answers. In senior (high) school we were taught English grammar in some painful detail. English literature was much more interesting. By the time I had completed my senior school curriculum we had progressed (not necessarily in chronological order) from the beginnings of modern English with Chaucer, and then on through the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare all the way to flashy modern authors like Dickens and poets like Wordsworth. An interesting aside: I hated Shakespeare as school but now I love him. I’m far from alone in this, but why is it so? An attempt was made to teach me French in the traditional academic manner, with an emphasis on grammar and so forth. It was a dismal failure. Rightly or wrongly, I blamed this on the French teacher; although she was quite young and pretty, we had a mutual loathing that grew over the years. I knew almost from the start that I wanted to pursue a scientific career, so was pleased to start schooling in mathematics (not arithmetic!) chemistry and physics at the senior school. It was a well-known fact in these days that if your bent was scientific, German was a much more useful modern language to learn than French. So very soon I asked to be allowed to drop French in favour of German. The answer came swiftly, “No! No-one can start German until they have proved their linguistic ability with good results in French, because German is a much harder language to learn than French. And anyway, the German class is at the same time as the Physics class, so there!” Some years later, after I had graduated from university and become a professional engineer, I found myself working in Germany for an extended period. I decided to try learning the language but had difficulties with grammar and the three genders. (das Mädchen = the girl, neutral gender; die Mädchen = the girls, female gender; das Haus = the house, neutral gender; die Häuser = the houses, female gender. And then it starts to get complex.) However a fellow I was working alongside, who was German but had lived in the States long enough to have well-nigh perfect English, assured me that most Germans got the grammar and the genders wrong too. Somehow this worked; I went out and spoke German without giving too much care to these niceties, and before so very long I was speaking and understanding spoken and written German well enough to be able to attend German-only business meetings and to understand what was going on and to make my own contributions. The key moment came after about three or four months of this immersion in real colloquial German when I realised I was thinking in German. Not having to translate back and forth between the two languages makes a vast difference. And German is much easier to learn than French. At least it was for me!

By: Zizka

Zizka — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 05:44:36 +0000

I agree with several people above on education vs. discipline. In the US we’ve created a system where general humanistic knowledge has actually become a detriment in life. A PhD in English can’t necessarily either teach HS English or work in journalism. Because supposedly there are trained experts in Journalism and Education to do those jobs. A friend of mine with a PhD in Anthropology, a lot of linguistics, and fluency in two difficult languages entered a MESL (Masters in English as a Second Language) Program. The director was almost hostile. She made it clear that his PhD counted for nothing with her. She had a PhD too, you know.

By: Hypatia Cade

Hypatia Cade — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 02:15:22 +0000

So, while children may need to recieve instruction in one method or another, it’s interesting that much of the evidence seems to come from people who say “I read this way”. I am not convinced that fluent adult readers typically read by sounding things out. If so they must be excessively slow readers. I think most people read by recognizing word shapes (that looks like horse so it must be horse). This is supported by evidence that you can do things like reverse letters in words but preserve the general word shape and people can still decode. I think the word attack strategies are reserved for unfamiliar words. And are important to children (and adults?) because there are large numbers of unfamiliar words at hand. On the other hand, I don’t think that the evidence supports the idea that children will naturally acquire print skills by being exposed to print. Amoung other things: 1) Spoken language has evolved over millions of years. Written language has only been readily accessible to the general population for the last 600 years. 2) Children with speech disorders have a higher incidence of reading disorders than typically developing children do. It is hard to see the relationship between these two things if one does not in part attribute them to failure to connect sound/letter meanings. 3) Knowledge of basic pre-literacy skills (how to hold a book; books tell a consistent story; those squiggles mean something; basic narrative structure) has more impact than other things for most children. Children from low SES households are often lacking in these skills. See an article entitled “What no bedtime story means” (sorry I don’t know the authors off hand) for a nice contrast between two communities. But this isn’t evidence that phonics doesn’t work; rather it is evidence that you need phonics plus something, not phonics by itself.