September 26, 2024
A Brief History of Reading Instruction with Dr. Donna Johnson
Transcript
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Intro
We thank you for joining us for this series with reading specialist and Mason educator Donna Johnson. Dr. Johnson is recently retired from her years of guiding young teachers at Dakota Wesleyan University. But retirement has a way of making its own work and Dr. Johnson keeps busy as a private tutor, a seasoned Charlotte Mason conference presenter, and as an active committee member with the International Dyslexia Association in the Upper Midwest among other activities. Let's listen to her experience and advice.
Let's Talk About Reading
Danielle: Okay, so there is always a lot of concern about reading and one of the pivotal reports that came out that we hear about all the time to introduce us to this idea of the science of reading is from the National Reading Panel. So Donna, let's talk about some of the key ideas in that report. What jumps out to you as a reading specialist, a dyslexia specialist, a Mason educator? What are your thoughts?
Donna: Well, I'm actually going to talk about one thing before I get to that because when I started looking into it, there's a lot of history about how reading was taught in our country. And this is just the last latest government publication.
19th Century
And what sort of came out of this is, when I started looking into it, is that it's all been out there earlier and people just haven't paid attention to it. So I went way back to the McGuffey readers and I have a collection of old books. So that's from, the first one of those was written in 1826 and it was really America's schoolbook for 100 years before there were government organized schools.
And as that became more a part of what was happening in our country. And I found out they were actually developed because people were starting to move west and they wanted to have, the one room school houses popped up along with people moving and they needed something to teach reading. So these McGuffey readers weren't just for reading, they were for writing, spelling, even speaking. And I have one here that actually is a speller. And when I opened them up, which I don't do very often, and some of them are very old, there's phonics in here, no question about that. The handwriting is very different.
"Our brain is wired so that it can deal with oral language, but when it comes to print, you have to learn that."
But in, I don't know if people are able to see this, and it's the very first one. You can see that those letters that are going to be phonetic are marked phonetic. And the is just the, so that dog and ran have short vowel markings over them. And the doesn’t because it was a sight word even back then. And there's a cat on a mat on the next page, which we've seen for years in readers.
Rise of Whole Language
And the same with the spelling, it's all really based on phonics. So that took care of 100 years basically. Then 1930 is the next date I put down. By that time, explicitly teaching - the code had been abandoned in most classrooms, even though they'd been doing it for years. And there's other things in there, some of it was whole words also. But the look-say method became dominant in the beginning of the 1900s and words were viewed as a single unit. And that's how I learned to read from Dick and Jane books. I remember the words were just taught to you as a whole word. Well, this isn't the very first book and there's coloring in it, but the first the first book said, see spot run, and it'd be like three words. And the back of each of these books has a list of the new sight words that you, the teacher would be teaching. For this one, I actually have the teachers edition because it wasn’t, they were considered basal readers and there’s, you taught all kinds of stuff. So the front of this one is all the teacher’s lesson plans. And you went over vocabulary, introduced the story, it told you how to divide the students into groups. And then everybody that wasn't working with you had a workbook that we called seat work. It was busy work to keep you busy when the other groups were reading. But there was a lot of information in those. But what was missing, I didn't even really look at the content of the McGuffey readers, these stories weren't that interesting because it all depended on the words you were teaching and it had to fit and it had to fit your little families and neighborhood, but it wasn't children's literature. So that became something that people wanted to change.
Also, about that time, in 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote a book called Why Johnny Can't Read and it became a best seller to American parents. And about that same time, Jeanne Chall, who was at Harvard, wrote a book called Learning to Read: the Great Debate, because she knew that phonics is the best thing to do.
And here we were skipping that and thinking we needed just really good stories. Whole language was starting to emerge. But she concluded that code evidence, which is what she called synthetic phonics, produced better results than the look-say method, which had been going on for quite a few years. She said we needed to make a correction, how we were teaching reading. She updated her book in 1983 then and examined more reading research. Her books were written on actual studies in education. And so she updated that one time. And she concluded again that whole word was not the way to go. Synthetic phonics, what we would call phonics or structured literacy now, is a better way to lead the students being able to comprehend.
A Variety of Approaches
In 1975, then, that look-say method was abandoned and - basal readers were still used (the more modern ones, not the McGuffey readers anymore, because in a sense they were basal readers), but phonics isn't what took the place of what had been going on. Instead, the whole word, top-down method was reaffirmed under what was then called whole language. And that's what was in fashion, I guess you would say, when my girls were in school and one of the reasons that we homeschooled. What was better about that though, they used actual children's books. At first, I think, if you went by what Kenneth Goodman, who promoted this, wanted you to do, you just had actual children's books, just picture books. But then, eventually again, readers came out, but they were made up of collections of stories with the real pictures and whatever the artist and author had done. And that was what was being used to teach reading when my children were younger. When they went off to college and I went back to school, I looked more into Kenneth Goodman, because that was the height of the reading wars. The International Reading Association was going one way, I think they went with him, and other people were still saying, no, no, no, whole language is still, look-say, whole word is not going to work. And that was what was called the Reading Wars, which really, in a sense, have gone on to this day.
But I looked Kenneth Goodman up, and his wife was also a researcher. I can't remember. They were at the University of Arizona. And he came up with this mostly because they had one daughter, I think, and she learned to read because they read to her all the time and she just picked it up. And a certain small percentage of children will do that. They don't even need any kind of formal instruction. And I'm not sorry that his daughter learned to read that way, but it really did influence him and the work that followed and he was just determined that phonics was going to hurt kids learning to read. And he's been, he was around until, I wrote down 2020. Could that be right? That could be. And he stuck with it that whole time.
Another author that wrote then was Frank Smith, and he wrote, the two of them, their books really influenced reading instruction in the United States. So he wanted to reject the boring, boring Dick and Jane stories, which is not a bad idea, but he also got rid of phonics, totally rejected it. He said, matching letters with sounds is the flat earth view of the world since it emphasizes the earliest stages of learning to read, even though it used invented spelling. Learning to read is easy and as natural as learning to speak is what he said. And that is absolutely not true. Speaking has been around for a long time. Every baby learns to speak their language without any instruction. It depends on interaction with people, obviously. It depends on what video you watch. Some will say evolution evolved so that your brain could learn speech. God is what gave us that ability as babies to have a part of our brain that could deal with oral language and remember words. The problem is that happens naturally in every culture and for every child that's able to hear, I guess, and understand and is spoken to. Reading doesn't work that way. You have to learn that. Our brain is wired so that it can deal with oral language.
But when it comes to print, whether that's Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, our letter system, whatever print system you're working with, you have to learn to match the individual sounds and the letter representation to the oral word, eventually the word, or sound that's already in your brain. And that is not a natural phenomenon for most children. Some do just by exposure, but that's a small number.
Whole Language
So, whole language pretty much took over until 1995. And children were expected to just discover those relationships of letter and sound and instead of guessing then when you came to a word you didn't know, instead of sounding it out, you were supposed to guess somehow from the context or from similar words or go ask somebody, I guess.
That was an interesting time period because we homeschooled, but for every third year our children went to the public school and they let us do that and we did that. And one of those years when Alison and Bethany were in third, Marilyn was in sixth, I was hired as a teacher, a compensatory teacher for children who had been in first, kindergarten, first, second, third using whole language. Got to fourth. Words were too long. They couldn't, they didn't know what to do. And so for that whole year I taught fourth graders, fourth or fifth graders, to read. And it's the easiest job I ever had because they weren’t children with a disability. No one had helped them crack the code. And as soon as you could do that - there was a game that was sold at that time and a lot of times we were playing this game and off they went. They could read. It was easy teaching, but it was just the result of not teaching phonics.
I will say all through the years that basal readers, the whole word method was going on, there were always really good teachers that knew what you had to do. And I had one of those in first grade in Minnesota, Mrs. Olson. I don't think it was just her. Every class had a phonics book. It was like a separate subject. It wasn't coordinated with our basal reader, but I can remember that phonics book and learning the sounds of the individual letters. So there were good teachers, there's always good teachers that do what they need to do for their kids and that's always been true. Anyway, whole language is just really another top-down approach for teaching reading. It's spread throughout the whole U.S., even though there was no research ever, ever done that it was effective.
"There are always good teachers that do what they need to do for their kids."
Part 1 | A Blue Orchard Bee Resource
