October 10, 2024
Reading Instruction & Charlotte Mason (3/8)
Transcript
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Intro
We thank you for joining us for this series with reading specialist and Mason educator Donna Johnson. Let’s listen to her experience and advice.
What about Phonics?
Danielle: So I heard you say, and I remember reading in the report, that phonics is important, but it's also not the only thing. So if you had to name off, when you are looking at or if you're evaluating a reading curriculum, what are the components you're looking for? Phonics, obviously, would be one.
Donna: Right. I think I'm coming up to my... I probably dug deeper into some things than I should have, but to me it's so interesting. And there are quite a few number of components to reading instruction. And I want to talk a little bit about my dissertation because that came at an interesting time. I went back to school to become a reading specialist and kind of to get back into what was happening in public education because my kids were on to college and we'd been homeschooling, but that doesn't mean you don't care about the kids in the public schools.
So, I decided to write about narration, but of course you can't call it that. It's called retelling in what they do in school, in our public schools, and in research. But I was able to study that in a sixth grade class by having two different groups and one doing the regular thing they did for comprehension and the other group that did different narration, and retelling things. And Mason's narration, of course, was around years earlier and the value of it was well known, to people that are Mason educators, for years. But before the 1980s, what I found out when I started researching, education researchers in the US used retelling but only to assess comprehension, not to build it.
"But before the 1980s...education researchers in the US use retelling but only to assess comprehension, not to build it."
And all of a sudden they realized, wait a minute, this would also work to build students' ability to comprehend. I should use it for more than just assessing and a number of researchers started to do that. And there were quite a few studies during that time.
And so a lot of the rationale for my research was based on the positive results that they were finding then for how much value there was to retelling and narration. In the early 2000s, though, once George Bush came along with what was good in many ways, with emphasizing the instruction of reading in grades one through three, the emphasis on narration just kind of dwindled away. Those education researchers in the states that were using mostly that as a strategy, it just kind of dwindled away and became just one of many ways to teach comprehension. Now there's a whole boatload of comprehension strategies that retelling is still part of. And when the Common Core came in in 2010 - it just isn't, at least I haven't checked lately, I guess, to see how much narration/retelling is tested or researched, just that particular way of building comprehension. But it had been for a few years, which was helpful to me because I could find enough of a database of articles to have a literature review on it when I was working on that.
I want to talk about Charlotte Mason just a little bit because we know that she kept up with whatever was happening in many different areas during her time, and she would still be doing that now and would want us to. So some of what she writes makes total - and mostly Volume 1 is what I was looking at - makes total sense, but some of it really doesn't with what we can do and find out now.
"Charlotte Mason kept up with whatever was happening in many different areas during her time, and she would still be doing that now and would want us to."
But she says, and she's talking in Volume 1 mostly about kids that are being educated at home, not in a group school. Just a few things that she said,
"The child in kindergarten is set to such tasks only as he is competent to perform and then whatever he has to do, he's expected to do it perfectly."
So the idea of guessing at words, if you didn't know, wouldn't have gone down too well with Charlotte Mason. She talks about the time of teaching to read and calls it an open question:
"Reading presents itself first among the lessons to be used as instruments of education, although it's open to discussion whether the child should acquire that unconsciously from his infancy upwards or whether the effort should be deferred until he is, say, six or seven, and then made with vigour.."
~ Home Education p.199
That sounds like whole language and that - we know now - is not true, although there are a few children that are able to crack the code just by being read to. So Mason says maybe it should be deferred until he is, say, "six or seven and then made with vigor." And she talks about Charles Wesley, Susanna Wesley and how she at age five, she took a child, put him on her lap for a day, taught him the alphabet, and they started reading the Bible. So I guess it worked.
On page 200 in volume one,
"Many persons consider what to learn, that to learn to read a language is, our language is so full of anomalies and difficulties."
And that statement we would now not agree with because even though teachers still say, "English is crazy, I don't know why it's spelled this way, just memorize it," - if we examine morphology and etymology along with phonology, we can find out why just about every word is spelled the way it is. And spelling is about meaning. It's not about just the letters that it takes to spell it. It's about the meaning of it. And why is there a B-Y, a B-U-Y, and a B-Y-E. There's real good reasons for that. And when we see that word, we know which one it means, even if we don't know how it got to be spelled that way, which we can find out.
She talks about mothers of educated classes not even knowing how their children learned to read. "Oh, he taught himself." Well, he didn't. He cracked the code some because he was read to a lot. And she also said there would be no little books entitled Reading Without Tears if tears were not sometimes shed over the reading lesson, but really, when that is the case, the fault rests with the teacher. And I just always want parents to know if they have a struggling reader and the child is in tears, probably the mother is too, and it is not the fault of the mother.
"And I just always want parents to know if they have a struggling reader and the child is in tears, probably the mother is too, and it is not the fault of the mother."
She also has really good [advice]. On page 201 of that book, she talks about the alphabet and having a little box of letters and writing the letter B in the air and tracing things in sand. That is just so up to date, having a multi-sensory structured literacy introduction to the letters and sounds going on. And she also, if you really are thinking about it, she doesn't say they need to know the names of the letters, but the sounds. And that is very true. Some letters, B, there's a "buh" in it, but not all letters have the sound in it when you say the name of it. So the sound is more important than the name of the letter. She gives some instruction on how to teach CVC words, long vowel- silent E words, words that end with NG, and TH. And then there isn't much more in her writing about phonics instruction.
She does say, though, that reading is not spelling, nor is it necessary to spell in order to read well, this is on pages 203 and 204, I think, in volume 1. A good speller is a child whose eye is quick enough to take in the letters which compose it. There's a habit to be acquired from the visual appearance of the word, but there is more to it than that. Because again, spelling is about meaning. So it's important for very young children even to know the story of a word and why it's spelled that way, and they love those stories. And if you teach enough phonics and morphology, almost everything that we call a sight word becomes not a sight word. There's a reason it's spelled that way. Even the word "the" is always a kindergarten sight word because kids can't sound it out, but it is phonetic. There is a sound of TH and the E has a schwa sound. Well, you probably aren't going to be, I don't know, I guess you could explain schwa sounds to kindergarten kids if you wanted to, but almost anywhere that they learn as a sight word eventually is a word you could sound out when you get further along in phonics.
Okay. So, I'm not going to quote anymore directly here from her writing, but she does encourage teaching children to read with words by sight rather than phonics on pages 206 and 215 of volume one. It becomes clear now that what we have learned since her time from the science of the brain and learning to read has changed, so that we have to follow the science of reading, what we know as structured literacy. Ten to fifteen percent of children will not learn to read by memorizing the words by sight or learn to spell. And other tools and technology are available today that were unheard of back then. So a Mason teacher should include her principles along with current science evidence best practices and integration of developmentally age-appropriate skills. And there are a couple quotes later on in volume one where she makes clear how important it is to bring a child to the point where they can read and they're in the world of reading. And I know that she would be following the science of reading and doing whatever she could that we know that she didn't. She overlapped a little bit with like Samuel Orton. He was older and some of the people that started to identify dyslexia, but not to the point where she would have been aware of it at that time.
"[Mason] makes clear how important it is to bring a child to the point where they can read and they're in the world of reading."
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