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Episode: At a Loss for Words: What's Wrong with How Schools Teach Reading

Author: APM Reports
Duration: 00:53:19

Episode Shownotes

Molly Woodworth had a secret: She couldn’t read very well. She fought her way through text by looking at the first letter of a word and thinking of something that made sense. Reading was slow and laborious. Then she learned that her daughter's school was actually teaching kids to read

that way. In this documentary, originally published in August 2019, host Emily Hanford reveals that many kids are being taught the habits of struggling readers. Winner of a Gracie Award and finalist for an EWA Public Service Award. Read more: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readersSupport this show: Donate to APM ReportsDive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit.

Summary

In 'At a Loss for Words: What's Wrong with How Schools Teach Reading', host Emily Hanford examines Molly Woodworth's reading struggles and highlights systemic flaws in reading instruction based on outdated theories. The episode contrasts whole-word and phonics approaches, detailing how reliance on context-based guessing impedes literacy development. Research indicates phonics instruction is more effective for skilled reading. The podcast argues for a critical reevaluation of reading curricula, emphasizing the essential role of phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping in fostering reading skills aligned with scientific understanding.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (At a Loss for Words: What's Wrong with How Schools Teach Reading) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:05 Speaker_18
This is Emily Hanford, host of Soul to Story. We'll have a bonus episode of the Soul to Story podcast coming soon. If you haven't heard Soul to Story yet, please stop here and go back to episode one.

00:00:19 Speaker_18
If you have heard Soul to Story and want more, you're in the right place. Before I started working on the Soul to Story podcast, I made a series of audio documentaries about how kids learn to read. This one is called At a Loss for Words.

00:00:34 Speaker_18
It's about the cueing idea that you heard about in Soul to Story. I made this documentary when I first figured out that cueing was a big part of what's wrong with how many schools teach reading.

00:00:45 Speaker_18
This is At a Loss for Words, first released on August 22, 2019. From American Public Media, this is an APM Reports documentary. Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything. Good grades, in the Gifted and Talented program.

00:01:02 Speaker_18
But she had a secret.

00:01:04 Speaker_14
I fooled everyone. Molly couldn't read very well. I was totally lost. There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me.

00:01:10 Speaker_14
When a teacher would dictate a word and say, tell me how you think you can spell it, I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings. And I thought, how do they, how do they even know where to begin?

00:01:20 Speaker_14
You know, I was totally, it didn't make sense to me.

00:01:23 Speaker_18
Her classmates just seemed to know how to read. But Molly didn't. And she says no one ever taught her. So she did the best she could. I came up with my own way to read. Number one, memorize lots of words.

00:01:41 Speaker_18
So you would read along and there would just be some percentage of the words you just had memorized.

00:01:47 Speaker_14
Yeah, and I didn't know that then, but I have a really, really good memory.

00:01:53 Speaker_18
She says words were like pictures to her. When she came across one she didn't have in her visual memory, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 questions.

00:02:06 Speaker_18
What word could this be? Most of the time, Molly could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever.

00:02:14 Speaker_14
I hated reading because it was taxing. My brain hurt by the end of it. And I'd get through a chapter and it was like, ugh. I was done. I wasn't excited to learn. I didn't want to do any more. It took all of the wind out of my sail to get to that point.

00:02:32 Speaker_18
It was clear to her that other kids could read faster and better, but she had no idea how they did it. If she was called on to read out loud in class, she'd say she had a stomach ache and go to the nurse.

00:02:43 Speaker_18
It all worked well enough to keep her on the honors track through high school. Molly's reading problems didn't really catch up with her until it was time to take college entrance exams.

00:02:53 Speaker_14
I couldn't get through the ACT. Someone in the gifted and talented program couldn't get through the test. And it wasn't because I was not intelligent. It was because I could not get through the reading fast enough. My tools were too slow.

00:03:07 Speaker_18
I'll tell you what happened with Molly in the ACT at the end of this program. But for now, we're going to fast forward about a decade. Molly gets married. She has a little girl. That's Molly's daughter, Claire, playing with my recording equipment.

00:03:25 Speaker_18
Claire's in first grade. Learning to read has been hard for her. So once a week, Molly brings Claire to a reading center. All right.

00:03:33 Speaker_13
Tell me the sounds in clap.

00:03:41 Speaker_18
Claire is working on phonemic awareness. That's the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, or phonemes. Claire first came to this reading center before she started kindergarten.

00:03:59 Speaker_18
Her mom wanted to make sure she got off to a good start in reading.

00:04:02 Speaker_14
I felt really comfortable with where she was at going into kindergarten. She had a good base. There was no alarming signs. She was on track.

00:04:11 Speaker_18
But alarm bells started going off when Molly saw how Claire was being taught to read in school. One day, Molly was volunteering in Claire's classroom.

00:04:21 Speaker_18
The class was reading a book, and the teacher was telling the kids to practice the strategies that good readers use.

00:04:27 Speaker_14
And she said, if you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here. There was a fox and a bear in the picture, and the word was bear. And she said, so look at the first letter. OK, it's a B. What sounds a B? Is it the fox or the bear?

00:04:42 Speaker_14
Molly was stunned. I thought, oh my God, those are my strategies. Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do. And I didn't know what good readers do, but I knew it wasn't that.

00:04:54 Speaker_18
Things didn't get better as kindergarten went on. Claire would get books that had words like sailboat and butterfly, big words she didn't know how to read yet. But there was a picture, and she was supposed to look at the first letter and guess.

00:05:07 Speaker_14
And it just continued, you know, I would see these things that were doing there, my little dirty secrets, and they were being taught, you know, these kids are being taught to look like good readers.

00:05:18 Speaker_14
You know, my survival techniques, that was their bag of tricks.

00:05:22 Speaker_18
Molly went to Claire's teacher and said she was concerned about the way kids were being taught. The teacher said she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.

00:05:36 Speaker_18
From APM Reports, this is At a Loss for Words, What's Wrong with How Schools Teach Reading. I'm Emily Hanford. The way Claire Woodworth was taught to read is rooted in an idea about reading that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists.

00:05:51 Speaker_18
Yet this idea remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials that are commonly used in elementary schools. As a result, in classrooms across the country, children are being taught to read the way that poor readers read.

00:06:07 Speaker_18
In other words, the strategies that people with weak reading skills use to get by are the very strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn to read.

00:06:21 Speaker_18
And children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.

00:06:27 Speaker_18
This can lead to a downward spiral where behavior, vocabulary, knowledge, and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development. A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts.

00:06:42 Speaker_18
In the United States, a third of fourth graders can't read on a basic level. Most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.

00:06:52 Speaker_18
This hour, I'm going to show you how a disproven idea about how people read is part of the problem, and how it is still widespread in curriculum materials that school districts spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money on.

00:07:06 Speaker_18
We're going to begin with the idea itself. For that, we need a little history. People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. There are basically two perspectives.

00:07:19 Speaker_18
One view is that kids need to focus first on sounds and letters. The sounds and letters approach, also known as phonics, was popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey Readers. This is from a McGuffey audiobook I found on YouTube.

00:07:40 Speaker_10
A rat. A cat.

00:07:43 Speaker_18
The other view is that children shouldn't focus on sounds and letters. They should focus instead on whole words.

00:07:50 Speaker_09
This is Dick and Jane reading level two.

00:07:55 Speaker_18
The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the Dick and Jane books that first appeared in the 1930s. This is a guy who grew up with Dick and Jane reading one of the books on YouTube.

00:08:05 Speaker_01
Come here, Dick.

00:08:08 Speaker_18
Come and see Puff. The Dick and Jane books rely on lots of repetition and pictures to support the meaning of the text.

00:08:15 Speaker_06
See Puff play. See Puff jump. See Puff jump and play.

00:08:22 Speaker_18
In the whole word approach, the idea is that learning to read is a visual memory process. See words enough, and you eventually store them in your memory as visual images. With phonics, the idea is that children learn to read words by sounding them out.

00:08:40 Speaker_18
Reading instruction was basically a series of pendulum swings between whole word and phonics until the late 1960s, when a new idea came along.

00:08:49 Speaker_18
The basic theory was first presented in 1967 at the American Educational Research Association conference in New York. There's no audio of the event, but here's what happened.

00:09:01 Speaker_18
An education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper called Reading, a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game. In the paper, Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words.

00:09:18 Speaker_18
Instead, he argued that as people read, they guess the words using various kinds of information or cues. He grouped these cues into three categories. One cue for figuring out a word is what kind of word would work. For example, is it a noun or a verb?

00:09:37 Speaker_18
Goodman called these syntactic cues. The missing word must be a noun. Maybe it's bicycle or motorcycle or horse. Another cue for figuring out a word is to look at the meaning of the sentence. What word would make sense here?

00:09:57 Speaker_18
The cowboy rode his... Ah, a cowboy rides a horse. Or maybe the word is pony. Goodman called these semantic cues. A third cue to figure out a word is to look at the letters. Goodman called those graphic or graphophonemic cues.

00:10:15 Speaker_18
The cowboy rode his... Oh, the word begins with p. It's probably pony. Goodman proposed that as people become better readers, they rely less and less on graphic cues.

00:10:28 Speaker_18
Instead, they use context to predict the words, and just sample from the letters to confirm their predictions. This was a new idea about how people read. It helped form the theoretical basis of an approach to teaching reading known as whole language.

00:10:46 Speaker_18
In whole language, learning to read is not about memorizing words, as in the whole word approach. and it isn't about sounding out words, as in phonics.

00:10:56 Speaker_18
Reading is coming up with words that make sense, using what came to be known among educators as the three-queuing system. For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal is to comprehend text.

00:11:12 Speaker_18
If the sentences are making sense, the reader must be getting the words right. Or right enough. This recording of a boy reading was part of a BBC radio program about Goodman's work produced in 1986. What the boy reads is not exactly what the text says.

00:11:41 Speaker_18
Here's the announcer explaining to the radio audience.

00:11:44 Speaker_00
What the book said was, here are some flower seeds. Plant them in the ground.

00:11:49 Speaker_05
Here is some flower seeds. Plant them in your ground.

00:11:55 Speaker_18
When the boy read is instead of are and your instead of the, he made a couple of miscues. That's what Ken Goodman called them. Here he is in the BBC program.

00:12:06 Speaker_10
And a miscue is very simply someplace where something unexpected happens in oral reading, where what the reader does isn't what we expected the reader to do. That's a miscue. By no means is the goal to produce miscue-free reading.

00:12:22 Speaker_16
That's Ken's wife, Yetta Goodman. They work together. In my teaching, I want to help kids produce more higher-quality miscues.

00:12:31 Speaker_18
A high-quality miscue is one that makes sense. where the meaning of the sentence is preserved, even if the exact words are not read.

00:12:39 Speaker_16
And what we have to let the reader know is it's perfectly all right when you come to words you don't know. We all do that in our reading. And what we do, we have a lot of strategies as adults, legitimate strategies.

00:12:50 Speaker_16
We can skip it, we can read back, we can keep reading.

00:12:53 Speaker_18
But Goodman's traveled all over the world in the 1970s and 80s talking to educators about their theory of how people read. One person they met was a developmental psychologist from New Zealand. My name is Mari Clay.

00:13:07 Speaker_18
Mari Clay created a reading intervention program for struggling first graders called Reading Recovery. It became one of the most widely used reading intervention programs in the world.

00:13:19 Speaker_18
This interview is from a video tribute to Clay, produced after she died.

00:13:23 Speaker_03
The work that I do is not just practical work. The work that I do is founded on pretty strong theory.

00:13:31 Speaker_18
Clay's theory also relied on cueing. Her cues became widely known among teachers as MSV. M for using meaning to figure out what a word is, S for using sentence structure, and V for using visual information, that is, the letters in the word.

00:13:48 Speaker_18
In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks, does it look right? Does it sound right?

00:14:01 Speaker_18
If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading. Mari Clay and Kenon Yedigoodman were trying to understand what goes on in people's minds as they read.

00:14:18 Speaker_18
They couldn't actually get inside anyone's head, so they observed people as they read out loud. The theories they developed were good guesses based on what it seems like people are doing when they read.

00:14:30 Speaker_18
But it turns out skilled reading doesn't quite work the way they thought. Laboratory for the Neurodevelopment of Reading and Language. That's your lab?

00:14:40 Speaker_11
Yes.

00:14:40 Speaker_18
Okay. Hi. I'm at the University of Maryland to visit a reading lab. I don't know quite what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. There's no fancy equipment, no lab techs working on experiments,

00:14:53 Speaker_18
It's just an office with a couple of desks, an old couch, and a graduate student's bike up against the wall. That's Donald Bolger, also known as DJ. He studies how reading works in the brain.

00:15:08 Speaker_18
We're going upstairs in a bit to watch a demonstration of one of DJ's experiments. But first, I want to give you some background.

00:15:19 Speaker_18
Over the past 50 years or so, scientists in labs and classrooms all over the world have done thousands of studies about how skilled reading works and how people learn to do it.

00:15:30 Speaker_18
Something they were especially interested in early on is whether skilled readers use context to read words, or whether they rely on the letters in the words.

00:15:40 Speaker_18
A couple of graduate students at the University of Michigan thought the context idea made sense.

00:15:45 Speaker_18
It seemed likely that as people get better at reading, they would rely more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to recognize words and wouldn't need to pay as much attention to the letters.

00:15:57 Speaker_18
In 1975, graduate students Keith Stanovich and Richard West set out to see if this was the case in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. What they discovered surprised them.

00:16:13 Speaker_18
It was the less-skilled readers who were more dependent on context for word recognition. The skilled readers were able to recognize words without relying on context at all.

00:16:25 Speaker_18
Other researchers have done similar experiments, and it turns out the ability to read words in isolation instantly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader.

00:16:37 Speaker_18
This is now one of the most well-replicated findings in all of reading research. In addition, experiments show skilled readers do not read words as visual images. Instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters.

00:16:53 Speaker_18
That's how a reader knows the difference between house and horse, for example. To better understand how all this works, we're going back to the reading lab at the University of Maryland.

00:17:03 Speaker_18
We're heading up to one of the testing rooms Professor DJ Bolger mentioned earlier to see a demonstration of an experiment he first did when he was a graduate student.

00:17:13 Speaker_18
Two of DJ's students have volunteered to be the guinea pigs for today's demonstration. We climb to the top floor of the building and enter a small room with low ceilings and no windows. There are two cubicles set up with computers.

00:17:27 Speaker_18
It feels like a tiny call center in an attic. Student Alyssa Cole runs through the experiment first.

00:17:33 Speaker_12
Alyssa, you can start and hit number one.

00:17:36 Speaker_18
Alyssa is going to learn how to read some English words that are spelled using Korean letters. These are simple words like bud and duck. But Alyssa doesn't know how to read words spelled with Korean letters.

00:17:48 Speaker_18
So she's kind of like a typical kindergartner. She knows the meaning and pronunciation of these words, but she doesn't know how to read them.

00:17:57 Speaker_18
She's going to be taught using an approach that calls her attention to how the sounds in each word are represented by letters.

00:18:10 Speaker_18
As each sound in the word is articulated, the Korean letter that represents that sound is highlighted on the computer screen. Alyssa is learning in what DJ Bolger called the phonics condition.

00:18:22 Speaker_18
The other student, Hannah Wiseman, is learning the same words in a different way. DJ called it the holistic condition. Hannah is seeing the whole word as it's read.

00:18:38 Speaker_18
There's no sounding out, no highlights on the screen that help Hannah understand how each sound is represented by letters. This is the whole word method, the Dick and Jane approach. That was so hard. Oh my god.

00:18:52 Speaker_18
When DJ first did this experiment in the early 2000s, there was already lots of research that showed phonics is more effective than a whole word for teaching people to read. What DJ wanted to know is, why?

00:19:09 Speaker_18
In the real experiment, college students were trained and tested four times over four days. The students who were taught whole word did better than the phonics students at first. They were able to memorize some of the words and do better on the tests.

00:19:24 Speaker_18
But by day four, the students who learned in the phonics condition were doing better. Not only were they better at reading the words they'd been taught, they were better at reading words they'd never seen before.

00:19:37 Speaker_18
The big news of the experiment came when DJ and his colleagues got a peek inside the brains of their subjects using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or FMRI.

00:19:47 Speaker_12
We wanted to kind of get an inside glimpse of what these brains would look like in these two different learning methods.

00:19:54 Speaker_12
And I was expecting that those with holistic learning method would look almost like you're run-of-the-mill dyslexic, in that many children with dyslexia learn to memorize lots of whole words, but they actually don't tend to activate the areas of the brain that are associated with phonology and pronunciation.

00:20:14 Speaker_18
And this is exactly what he found. His experiment and other studies show that people who are taught phonics learn better because focusing on letters and sounds increases activity in the area of the brain that is best wired for reading.

00:20:28 Speaker_18
So if you teach people through whole-word method, you're teaching them to read like a dyslexic reads?

00:20:33 Speaker_12
That is correct.

00:20:34 Speaker_18
However, just because a student is taught to read with the whole-word method doesn't mean he'll end up stuck reading words that way. In DJ's study, about half the students in the whole word group were able to get beyond memorizing words.

00:20:48 Speaker_18
They figured out the relationships between the sounds and the letters. But half the students in the whole word group weren't able to teach themselves to read. That's in contrast to the phonics group, where everyone learned to read.

00:21:01 Speaker_12
Phonics worked for everybody. For all of the participants in the phonics group, they were uniformly doing well.

00:21:07 Speaker_18
What does all of this have to do with the idea of using context to read? After all, in DJ's study, the students were reading isolated words. Wouldn't putting those words in the context of a sentence help? Well, think about it.

00:21:21 Speaker_18
If you're a beginning reader and you don't know any of the words in a sentence, context isn't going to help you much. If you already know how to read a lot of words, it's a different story. Even expert readers need context in some cases.

00:21:35 Speaker_18
Take a word like match.

00:21:37 Speaker_01
We can't even know what match means unless it's in context because it can mean a competition, it could mean something you light a fire with, you know, it could mean two things that look alike or the same.

00:21:46 Speaker_18
This is David Kilpatrick. He's a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland in upstate New York and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties.

00:21:55 Speaker_01
We need context for comprehension, for understanding. Nobody questions that. But the confusion is that when you see the word match, the word match jumps out at you. You don't need context to figure out that that's the word match.

00:22:06 Speaker_01
You need context to figure out the meaning.

00:22:08 Speaker_18
If you're a skilled reader, you know the word match instantly, whether that word is by itself or in a sentence. In fact, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word match faster than you process a picture of a match.

00:22:25 Speaker_18
You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that? It happens through a process called orthographic mapping.

00:22:40 Speaker_18
Orthographic mapping occurs when you attend to the letters in a written word and link the word's pronunciation with its sequence of letters.

00:22:49 Speaker_18
Orthographic mapping requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. In other words, you gotta have phonics skills. Here's David Kilpatrick.

00:23:02 Speaker_01
It's really sequential. First, you develop a mastery of the code, and then that allows you to become better at the orthographic mapping process. So, once you are good at phonics, you teach yourself new words that get anchored in your long-term memory.

00:23:19 Speaker_18
By the time a typically developing reader gets to about second grade, he needs just a few exposures to a word through both its pronunciation and its spelling. And bam, the word is orthographically mapped to his memory.

00:23:34 Speaker_18
He doesn't recognize that word because he's memorized it as a visual image. He recognizes it because at some point he successfully sounded it out.

00:23:44 Speaker_18
The more words he maps to his memory like this, the more he can focus on the meaning of what he's reading. He's not using his brainpower to identify words. He's using his brainpower to comprehend what he's reading. That child is a skilled reader.

00:24:01 Speaker_18
What's the process for people who are not skilled readers?

00:24:04 Speaker_01
They only sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out, and they use context.

00:24:09 Speaker_18
This is David Kilpatrick again.

00:24:11 Speaker_01
So the three-queuing system is the way poor readers read.

00:24:15 Speaker_18
And if teachers use the 3Qing system to teach reading, they're not just teaching kids the habits of poor readers. David Kilpatrick says they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process.

00:24:28 Speaker_01
So the minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to either read the word or to remember the word.

00:24:46 Speaker_18
Some kids realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. They don't necessarily need to be taught this. They figure it out. Those kids tend to have good phonological skills.

00:25:00 Speaker_18
It's not difficult for them to understand the ways that sounds and letters work. But if this doesn't come easily to you, say you're Molly Woodworth, who we met at the beginning of the program.

00:25:10 Speaker_18
If you're Molly and the sounds and letters thing just doesn't make sense and no one teaches it to you, you're going to come up with a bunch of other strategies to try to get by. Reading for you is kind of like being a detective.

00:25:24 Speaker_18
You're hunting everywhere for clues. Now consider a kid who's in the middle. Okay, phonological skills, not great. Maybe he could eventually figure out reading on his own.

00:25:36 Speaker_18
But then along comes his teacher who tells him, being a good reader is like being a detective. You need to search for clues and develop a bunch of strategies to solve all those tricky words.

00:25:48 Speaker_18
In the United States today, this is how many children are being taught to read. According to David Kilpatrick, the three-queuing system is ubiquitous in American schools.

00:26:03 Speaker_18
Coming up after the break, we're going to find out what 3Qing looks like in the classroom, why schools are still teaching it, and how it harms children. You're listening to At a Loss for Words from APM Reports.

00:26:17 Speaker_18
There's more at our website, apmreports.org. You can find an annotated version of this story with links to articles about the cognitive science research. Support for APM Reports comes from the Spencer Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

00:26:31 Speaker_18
Back in a moment, this is APM American Public Media. Welcome back. I'm Emily Hanford, and this is At a Loss for Words, a documentary from APM Reports. We're going to Manhattan now to meet Erika Meltzer. Until a few years ago, she was an SAT tutor.

00:26:50 Speaker_18
This was $400 an hour tutoring. Kids who went to schools considered among the best in New York City. Erika was startled by the way some of her students read.

00:27:00 Speaker_02
They would get to an unfamiliar word. They would look at the beginning of the word and then they would just sort of guess for the rest of it. They wouldn't even try to sound it out.

00:27:11 Speaker_02
They would just plug in a word that looked like the word that was there, and it wouldn't occur to them that they were misreading the word.

00:27:21 Speaker_18
These were not students with diagnosed learning disabilities. She says it was hard to raise their test scores. And I was like, what is this? Erica started searching online and came across an article about the 3Qing system.

00:27:34 Speaker_18
It was written by a cognitive psychologist named Marilyn Adams. The article describes how the 3Qing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. How Marilyn came to write this article has an interesting backstory.

00:27:49 Speaker_18
In 1991, Marilyn had written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read. One big takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires knowledge of sound spelling correspondences.

00:28:03 Speaker_18
Another big takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in school. Soon after the book was published, Marilyn was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California.

00:28:17 Speaker_18
She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room.

00:28:21 Speaker_19
And I just stopped and said, what is it that I'm missing? What is it that we need to talk about? A woman raised her hand and asked, what does this have to do with the 3Qing system? Marilyn didn't know what the 3Qing system was.

00:28:36 Speaker_19
I think I blew all of their fuses that I did not since this was so fundamental to being an elementary reading teacher.

00:28:42 Speaker_18
The teachers explained the three-queuing system to her. They said readers use meaning, sentence structure, and visual cues to read. Marilyn thought this made perfect sense. We absolutely use all of those things to comprehend what we're reading.

00:28:58 Speaker_18
But Marilyn soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues as the way readers identify words.

00:29:07 Speaker_19
In their minds, it was a reason not to do much phonics instruction. Most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text. And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them.

00:29:24 Speaker_18
She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about sound spelling correspondence is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading. But she got tons of pushback.

00:29:37 Speaker_18
They didn't want to teach phonics. They told her phonics instruction kills the joy of reading. In the 1990s, there was a big national fight going on about how kids should be taught to read. On one side, phonics.

00:29:54 Speaker_18
On the other side, the whole-language approach rooted in the cueing theory. Marilyn Adams wrote her article about encountering the three-cueing system in 1998. She hoped the article would help put the idea to rest.

00:30:07 Speaker_18
The scientific research on reading was gaining traction at this point. A national reading panel report commissioned by Congress came out in 2000.

00:30:15 Speaker_18
It documented overwhelming evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning to read. Many whole language supporters eventually accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction.

00:30:30 Speaker_18
They started adding phonics and renamed their approach balanced literacy. But they didn't get rid of the three-queuing system. It's not hard to find classrooms where children are taught queuing.

00:30:44 Speaker_04
The power that we are going to learn today, it's called picture power. Can we say picture power?

00:30:51 Speaker_06
Picture power!

00:30:53 Speaker_18
This is a video posted on a website for teachers. It's a kindergarten class in Oakland, California. The lesson is part of the Units of Study for Teaching reading series, more commonly known as Reader's Workshop.

00:31:06 Speaker_18
Here's the teacher describing the goal of the lesson.

00:31:08 Speaker_04
The learning goal would be that the children were able to use a picture to figure out an unknown word, or that they would be able to use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book. In the garden.

00:31:23 Speaker_18
That's the book the class is reading. On each page, there's a picture of something you might find in a garden. The sentence on every page is the same, except for the last word.

00:31:32 Speaker_03
Look at The caterpillar.

00:31:39 Speaker_18
The kids have been taught to memorize the words look, at, and the. The challenge is getting the last word in the sentence. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note.

00:31:51 Speaker_18
The wiggly kindergartners come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word.

00:32:07 Speaker_03
Look at that. It starts with the b, b, b. So let's read it together. Look at the butterfly.

00:32:19 Speaker_18
As you can hear, this lesson includes some attention to sounds and letters. In fact, the lesson plan says this lesson teaches phonics. But the students were not taught to sound out words in this lesson. They were taught the cueing system.

00:32:36 Speaker_18
The author of the lesson, Lucy Calkins, refers often to cueing in her published work. Cueing is foundational to another approach to teaching reading known as Fountas and Pinnell literacy.

00:32:47 Speaker_18
Irene Fountas and Gesu Pinel are education professors who have written many books for teachers, including a bestseller called Guided Reading. They also sell a reading assessment system to schools that uses what are called leveled books.

00:33:02 Speaker_18
Children start with predictable books, like In the Garden, and they move up levels as they're able to read the words. But many of the words in those books—butterfly, caterpillar—those are words beginning readers haven't been taught to sound out yet.

00:33:18 Speaker_18
One purpose of the books is to teach kids that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out. Teacher Margaret Goldberg remembers a moment when she realized what a problem this was.

00:33:31 Speaker_18
A first grader named Rodney came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone. The text said, My little dog likes to eat with me. But Rodney said, My dog likes to lick his bone.

00:33:44 Speaker_15
Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page. And that's one of the things that I started noticing with the students is that when they were given text that they couldn't read, they would just make it up.

00:33:56 Speaker_15
And a lot of times the making it up looked close enough to the book that a teacher could think, oh, they had just miscued on a word.

00:34:04 Speaker_18
Margaret Goldberg is a literacy coach in Oakland, California. She was hired a few years ago to teach something called LLI. That stands for Leveled Literacy Intervention.

00:34:13 Speaker_18
It's a Fountas and Pinnell approach to help struggling readers, and it teaches cueing. Around the same time, Margaret went to a training in a program that uses a different approach.

00:34:23 Speaker_18
The program is called Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words, otherwise known as SIPs.

00:34:30 Speaker_15
And so I started teaching some groups with systematic instruction, and some groups I was still doing LLI because I felt like I had been hired to do it. It was my responsibility to provide the instruction I was hired to give.

00:34:43 Speaker_15
She began to notice differences in her two groups of students. Not just in their abilities to read, but in the way that they approach their reading.

00:34:53 Speaker_18
Margaret and a colleague recorded students talking about reading. This is Margaret's colleague interviewing two first graders. What makes you good readers? Here's Mia, who was in Margaret's SIPS group learning phonics.

00:35:06 Speaker_06
Looking at the words and Sounding them out.

00:35:10 Speaker_18
Mia's friend Jabria was taught some phonics. She was also taught cueing. What makes Jabria a good reader?

00:35:17 Speaker_05
I look at the pictures and then read it.

00:35:25 Speaker_18
There is a pre-reading stage where children identify words based on visual features and context. A child who knows the word stop on a stop sign, for example.

00:35:36 Speaker_18
But the cognitive science shows that teachers need to be moving kids away from relying on context. Margaret Goldberg didn't know this yet.

00:35:44 Speaker_18
What she knew is that the kids in her Sips Phonics group were being taught that when you get to a word you don't know, you sound it out.

00:35:52 Speaker_18
The kids in her LLI group were being taught that when you get to a word you don't know, you have lots of strategies. You can sound it out.

00:35:59 Speaker_18
You can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense, and make a good guess. It was clear to Margaret after just a few months that her SIPS phonics students were doing better.

00:36:11 Speaker_18
So she stopped teaching LLI and the cueing that goes with it. Just couldn't do it anymore.

00:36:17 Speaker_15
And I think one of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt. It was a few months that I did it and I did lasting damage to these kids. So the kids that I had in LLI,

00:36:29 Speaker_15
It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of reading as being easy.

00:36:42 Speaker_15
They had had the experience of knowing that you predict what you're going to read before you read it. Learning to read is not easy for many kids.

00:36:56 Speaker_18
That's one of the big takeaways from decades of scientific research. We're not born wired to read. But through connecting the pronunciation and meaning of words with their spelling, we rewire our brains a bit.

00:37:10 Speaker_18
Margaret Goldberg soon discovered this cognitive science research. She hadn't learned about this research in her teacher preparation or on the job. Once she knew about it, she wanted her colleagues to know about it too.

00:37:27 Speaker_18
For the past two years, Margaret and another literacy coach, Lonnie Mednick, have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in Oakland. Nearly half the district's third graders are below grade level in reading.

00:37:42 Speaker_18
Margaret and Lonnie want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being taught to read. They meet every couple of weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot project. Today, the coaches watch a video.

00:37:54 Speaker_04
The power that we are going to learn today, it's called picture power. Can we say picture power?

00:38:02 Speaker_18
It's the video you heard of the kindergarten class. Lani Bendek says the point of watching this video is not to criticize the teacher.

00:38:09 Speaker_11
So this teacher meant well and it seemed like she believed that this was a lesson that would ensure her students would be on the road towards reading.

00:38:21 Speaker_18
Lonnie wants the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like Picture Power. The coaches see right away that the lesson was designed to get kids to use context.

00:38:33 Speaker_18
But coach Soraya Sojus-Brooks says until this pilot, she thought cueing was fine as long as kids were also getting some phonics instruction.

00:38:42 Speaker_13
At first, I didn't see the problem if you were teaching phonics, right? And I thought it would be okay. And then I realized that one negates the other.

00:38:52 Speaker_18
In other words, cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. They can use other strategies instead. But the scientific research is clear.

00:39:02 Speaker_18
Developing good sound spelling knowledge is critical for figuring out unknown words and eventually storing them in your memory. Now that the coaches in the Oakland Pilot Project know about this research, they're in an uncomfortable position.

00:39:16 Speaker_18
Their jobs include observing and giving feedback to teachers who deliver the picture power lesson. Margaret Goldberg lays out the situation they're in.

00:39:24 Speaker_15
This is a district adopted curriculum. She was teaching a lesson that she was told to teach. So she has in writing something that is telling her that this is the right thing to do.

00:39:34 Speaker_15
And that makes this conversation a little bit more tricky because it's not like we're asking a teacher to stop teaching something that she pulled off of Pinterest. We're having a conversation about the core curriculum adopted by our district.

00:39:46 Speaker_15
So what do we do?

00:39:47 Speaker_18
No one in the room has a good answer to this question. What they're doing instead is trying to show the district there's a better way to teach reading.

00:39:55 Speaker_18
Schools in the pilot project use grant money to buy new materials that steer clear of the three-queuing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to move their schools away from queuing.

00:40:08 Speaker_18
Here's what it looks like in one first-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Achieve Academy.

00:40:14 Speaker_07
Here we go. Ready? Isaac, ready?

00:40:16 Speaker_18
Three students are sitting at a kidney-shaped table with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz. This lesson is from the SIPS phonics program you heard Margaret Goldberg talking about earlier. Explicit phonics is one part of the reading instruction.

00:40:39 Speaker_18
There are also vocabulary lessons.

00:40:41 Speaker_08
Let's think about what chameleons pray are.

00:40:47 Speaker_18
The first graders are now gathered on a rug at the front of the classroom, talking about a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was prey. P-R-E-Y.

00:40:57 Speaker_08
What animals are a chameleon's prey? Or we can also ask, what animals do chameleons hunt for food?

00:41:04 Speaker_18
The kids turn and talk to each other.

00:41:06 Speaker_05
A chameleon's prey are A bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds. That's it.

00:41:19 Speaker_18
Other vocabulary words these first graders have learned are posted on cards around the classroom. They include wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids aren't expected to be able to read those words yet.

00:41:33 Speaker_18
The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean. This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things.

00:41:47 Speaker_18
First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out.

00:41:55 Speaker_18
So, in a first grade classroom that's following the research, you want to see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you want to see kids practicing what they've been taught.

00:42:19 Speaker_18
This is Belinda, and she's reading what's known as a decodable book. Almost all the words in this book contain spelling patterns Belinda has been taught in her phonics lessons.

00:42:29 Speaker_18
There are some common words she's learned to memorize as sight words, because they don't fit the spelling patterns she's been taught. Words like is and have.

00:42:39 Speaker_06
I am a farmer here. A farmer. Farmer here.

00:42:46 Speaker_18
The boy you heard is Steven, another first grader. He's Belinda's reading buddy. His job is to help her if she misses a word or gets stuck. But that doesn't happen much, because Belinda's been taught how to read these words.

00:42:59 Speaker_18
Are you looking at the pictures when you read? No. No, she says. Belinda doesn't need the pictures to read the words. Pictures are great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story.

00:43:14 Speaker_18
Context, including a picture if there is one, helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she is being taught to read the way that poor readers read.

00:43:33 Speaker_18
In the long-running debates about how to teach reading, the fight has mostly been about whether to teach phonics. That fight is pretty much over. You'd be hard-pressed to find a school today that doesn't do some kind of phonics instruction.

00:43:48 Speaker_18
The question is, what else do schools teach? The reading instruction you just heard in Oakland is not distinctive because there is phonics instruction. It's distinctive because there isn't any cueing.

00:44:01 Speaker_08
The only strategy I teach my kids is, is it a sight word, is it a sound out word? This is the first grade teacher you just heard, Andrea Ruiz. And all of these other strategies are teaching them to guess.

00:44:13 Speaker_08
They're not teaching them to look at the entire word.

00:44:16 Speaker_18
This is a big change in Andrea's approach to teaching. When she started, she knew nothing about how kids learn to read.

00:44:23 Speaker_18
It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure, and visual cues to figure out words. Because I came from not having anything, I was like, oh, there's a way we should teach this.

00:44:36 Speaker_18
I heard this from other educators.

00:44:38 Speaker_17
Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do. When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it.

00:44:48 Speaker_18
Stacey Cherney is a former teacher who's now principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well.

00:45:01 Speaker_18
Phonics can be intimidating.

00:45:03 Speaker_17
3Q-ing isn't. So a lot of times, I think that these practices have popped up because teachers don't have the background knowledge. And it's, oh yeah, I can do that. That's easy. I'll implement that.

00:45:17 Speaker_18
Another reason Q-ing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids, maybe around 40%, who will learn to read no matter how they're taught.

00:45:30 Speaker_18
Kids who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it. That's according to David Kilpatrick, the author of the book about preventing reading difficulties. We heard from him in the first part of the program.

00:45:43 Speaker_01
We have to get rid of ideas about reading that are faulty because those ideas result in practices that make it harder for children to learn to read.

00:45:53 Speaker_18
Margaret Goldberg, who's working on the pilot project in Oakland, thinks it's time for all schools to take a close look at everything they use to teach reading.

00:46:01 Speaker_15
We should look through the materials and search for evidence of cueing, and if it's there, don't touch it. Don't let it get near our kids. Don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers.

00:46:14 Speaker_18
Margaret wants the Oakland schools to get rid of all instructional materials that include cueing. I reached out to the superintendent's office to ask about this.

00:46:23 Speaker_18
A spokesperson said in a statement that there's not yet enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district. The district remains committed to the curriculum materials it has invested in.

00:46:37 Speaker_18
Oakland's situation is no different from many other school districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include 3-Qing. Here's Margaret Goldberg again.

00:46:48 Speaker_15
It feels like everyone's trusting somebody else to have done their due diligence.

00:46:54 Speaker_15
So classroom teachers are trusting that the materials that they're being handed will work, and the people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market that they will work. So we're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken.

00:47:08 Speaker_18
I wanted to talk to the authors of the curriculum materials I mentioned in this story, Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gesu Penel.

00:47:17 Speaker_18
I wanted to know what they make of the cognitive science, and I wanted to give them a chance to explain the ideas behind their work. I wrote to them and asked for interviews, but they all declined.

00:47:28 Speaker_18
Their publisher, Heinemann, said in a statement that every product Heinemann sells is informed by extensive research.

00:47:36 Speaker_18
I also asked for an interview with Ken Goodman, the education professor who laid out the three-queuing theory in that guessing game paper more than 50 years ago. He said yes. Good morning. Hi.

00:47:49 Speaker_18
I visited Ken and his wife, Yetta, at their home in Tucson, Arizona. Nice to meet you. Ken is 91, but he's still working. Just finished a new edition of one of his books. I wanted to know what he makes of the cognitive science research.

00:48:03 Speaker_18
He told me he thinks cognitive scientists focus too much on word recognition.

00:48:08 Speaker_09
Word recognition is a preoccupation. I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that.

00:48:21 Speaker_18
He brings up the example of a child who comes to the word horse and says pony instead.

00:48:25 Speaker_09
Well, that is a beautiful example of the fact that it's not the word that's important. It's the meaning.

00:48:34 Speaker_18
He says a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept. I press him on this. Can I just stop you on pony and horse because they're not exactly the same thing, though.

00:48:46 Speaker_18
A pony isn't quite the same thing as a horse.

00:48:47 Speaker_16
But in a kid's story, they could be.

00:48:51 Speaker_18
That's Yetta Goodman. But don't you want to make sure that a child, as they're learning how to read, understands P-O-N-E, that that says pony and something else says horse?

00:49:00 Speaker_09
The purpose is not to learn words. The purpose is to make sense.

00:49:04 Speaker_18
As far as I know, no one in the scientific community disputes the idea that the purpose of reading is to make sense of text. The question is, how does a little kid get there?

00:49:19 Speaker_18
I ended up talking with the Goodmans for nearly four hours, and we could never quite agree on the terms of the debate. They rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers.

00:49:31 Speaker_18
They don't like the value judgment that implies. They said dyslexia does not exist, despite lots of evidence that it does. And they said the three-cuing theory is based on years of observational research. In their view, three-cuing isn't invalid.

00:49:48 Speaker_18
It's drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

00:49:53 Speaker_09
My science is different.

00:49:55 Speaker_18
In case you missed it, he said, my science is different.

00:50:03 Speaker_18
The idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read.

00:50:14 Speaker_18
It's important for educators to understand that 3Qing is based on theory and observational research. It's not based on controlled scientific experiments or fMRI brain scanning.

00:50:27 Speaker_18
The cognitive science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read. But on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists have amassed a huge body of evidence. Many educators remain unaware of this evidence.

00:50:45 Speaker_18
Alright, are you ready? Okay, remember, we're playing for the Guessing Monster sticker. We're back at the tutoring center with first grader Claire Woodworth.

00:50:52 Speaker_18
Guessing words is such a problem among the kids who come here for reading help that they earn stickers if they sound out all the words they don't know.

00:51:01 Speaker_05
Polly flew over the houses.

00:51:06 Speaker_18
She saw a Claire's mom, Molly, came to this same tutoring center when she was in high school and couldn't get through the ACT.

00:51:18 Speaker_18
She learned some basic things about how to sound out words, and she was able to raise her score enough to be eligible for a college honors program. Molly says she's still not a very good reader. She tears up when she talks about it.

00:51:32 Speaker_18
She's grateful her daughter, Claire, is learning a different way. What's in your pocket? Claire earned her sticker today. She takes it out of her pocket and reads what it says. Claire's sticker says she slayed the guessing monster.

00:51:58 Speaker_18
You've been listening to an APM Reports documentary, At a Loss for Words. It was produced by me, Emily Hanford, and edited by Catherine Winter. Research and production assistance from John Hernandez. Our associate producer is Alex Baumhart.

00:52:12 Speaker_18
Web editors are Dave Mann and Andy Cruz. The final mix was by Chris Juhlin and Craig Thorson. Fact-checking by Betsy Towner Levine.

00:52:21 Speaker_18
The APM Reports team includes Sasha Aslanian, Shelley Langford, Executive Editor Stephen Smith, and Editor-in-Chief Chris Worthington.

00:52:30 Speaker_18
If you go to our website, APMreports.org, you can find an annotated version of this story with links to research and further reading. You can also find our podcast, Educate, where we have more documentaries about how children learn to read.

00:52:44 Speaker_18
Support for APM Reports comes from the Spencer Foundation and Lumina Foundation. This is APM American Public Media. You've been listening to At a Loss for Words from 2019. This is Emily again.

00:53:02 Speaker_18
We'll have a bonus episode of Sold a Story coming soon, so keep this podcast in your feeds. If you want to find out more about the Sold a Story podcast and all of our reporting on reading, you can go to our website. It's soldastory.org.