Earlier this week I attended an open house event for parents at a local school. Due to some performance concerns on standardized tests last year, the school announced a renewed emphasis on reading. It never seemed to me that reading was not being emphasized enough there, considering (for example) that every summer students are assigned, by grade level, a certain book to read over summer break. When school resumes in the fall, they are also required to write an essay about the book. I tend to be somewhat skeptical about standardized tests, but I also can't argue with maintaining or increasing an emphasis on reading. From what I understand, that new approach will emphasize reading in non-English classes including math, PE, and more. This might help, but I'm not convinced that it will have a significant impact.
Encouraging students to read is a valid goal, because effective reading is a gateway knowledge that opens many more educational doors. If you can't read, and read effectively, you will face many struggles in school and beyond. While much of human history allowed people to get by in life fairly easily without reading, this is no longer true.
![[Photo: Girl studying]](/system/files/sw_GirlStudying_ncp0076_s.jpg)
The fundamental nature of reading is (or at least should be) common knowledge. Yet I'm not convinced that school is the best, or even significant, source of motivation for youth to read. I believe it is far more important to motivate youth at home, starting at an early age, by treating reading as a basic life skill like the many others we teach our children in their early years. At least here in the United States, most children begin school at an age where fundamentals of reading can already be grasped by most students. Just as we expect children entering Kindergarten to know how to use the bathroom, and to know they're not supposed to hit other children, and to know the rudiments of getting dressed (even though they may struggle a bit with tying their shoes or zipping their coats), perhaps we should be expecting children to already know how to read, at a basic level, by the time they start Kindergarten.
Right now that is not the case. Apparently here in Washington State we lack state-mandated requirements, so school districts are able to define for themselves what "academic readiness" means for incoming Kindergarten students. Some districts specify, for example, that prospective students should be able to "recognize and name 12-15 alphabet letters and their sounds" (quoted from Bethel School District) while others are satisfied that children demonstrate "a child-initiated (not parent-initiated) interest in numbers, letters and books" (quoted from Northshore School District, emphasis mine). I find that latter example rather disturbing; if the home environment shows no respect for books and reading and instead allows children to self-entertain with non-academic electronics, how can a child be expected to initiate their own interest?
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to expect children to have a basic ability to read before entering Kindergarten. I was reading at a basic level before I started Kindergarten, and I don't think I was exceptional, other than coming from a home where reading (and education in general) was highly valued. Obviously this doesn't involve tackling chapter books or the daily newspaper, and even my book for early readers, Two Boys, Two Planets, might be too advanced to expect students to be able to read at the start of Kindergarten. However, a basic vocabulary of 15 to 20 words should be within the grasp of the average student entering Kindergarten. For example:
Pat sat on the mat. A cat sat on Pat. Pat had a hat. A fat rat sat on the hat. The cat saw the rat. The cat was mad.
It's not Tolstoy, but using fewer than 15 one-syllable words we can paint a picture in the reader's mind and give practice on some basic sounds and constructs. Expecting incoming students to have that basic level of reading would allow the Kindergarten teacher to make much more progress with students' reading, so that perhaps Two Boys, Two Planets would be easily read by them before the school year was over.
This would mean that parents, not schools, would bear primary responsibility for promoting reading, starting at an early-enough age that reading patterns and habits are solid well before students reach middle school or high school. It should be a valid assumption that students would be actively reading over the summer, rather than attempting to "enforce" that by assigning summer reading. I still see value in the summer reading assignment. For example, it gives teachers a common ground on which to start the next year's language studies. But neither it, nor emphasizing reading across the school's curriculum, can ever be as effective as motivating youth at home to find reading that interests them and regularly seek out new materials to read.
Standardized tests are for politicians and big businesses
Governments and educational policy makers use high stake assessments for judging the success of schools. These assessments are standardized norm –referenced or criterion referenced tests for collecting data on school districts. These assessments are used to gauge how well students are learning certain curricula and how school districts compare with other districts throughout the country. High stake decisions concerning the management of school districts are based on results from these tests.
The results from these tests would have a most effective purpose if the curriculum, teaching and the test were all in sync. The likelihood of that happening is very rare due to the test being standardized. The only way for schools to attempt at being aligned with these standardized tests is to teach specific curricula that are anticipated to be on the tests. Such classroom practice is known as teaching to the test.
Teaching to the test raises concerns about limiting the design of curriculum. The material that is expected to be on the test is the main focus of the curriculum. Other content areas are either given less attention or disregarded, thus narrowing the curriculum. The curriculum narrowing, test preparations and the actual tests all cause a loss of instruction time.
There’s not a test available that’s a panacea for assessing each student’s success in learning. Standardized tests are not perfect assessments despite the high stake decisions that are made from their results.
The polarization of literacy instruction
There are arguments of whether using a whole language approach or phonics and skills based approach is best for successful literacy instruction. This debate over literacy instruction is similar to debating whether the chicken or the egg was the first to exist. Does a reader need letter sounds to extrapolate meaning from a series of words? Or can a reader successfully read any words without recognizing letter sounds. Letter sounds don’t have meanings, but words do have meanings.
Adams (1994) mentions phonics being necessary for beginning literacy learners to be able to hear and recognize the sounds of spoken words. Word recognition is paramount for beginning to learn to construct meaning from language. Adams (1994) considers phonics instruction to consist of the minimal understanding of language. A learner has to be able to hear and recognize specific letter patterns and be able to use them in order to write words that convey an intended meaning. This understanding of the need for phonics instruction justifies teaching phonemic awareness and alphabetic principles to beginning learners in Kindergarten and 1st grade. I agree with this argument for phonics instruction. It also makes me interested in learning how deaf children initially learn to use language.
Pearson (2004) describes the whole language as an approach that became the conventional wisdom for literacy instruction in the 1990s. This approach focuses on beginning learners initially hearing and using whole words from stories rather than starting with phonics instruction. It seems to be more of an attitude towards literacy instruction instead of being a specific method to teaching literacy. In whole language, students learn language usage from being immersed in authentic literature. Learners are to acquire the needed skills and components of literacy as they become further immersed into authentic literature. The students are then expected to develop needs for these skills and components of literacy so that they can better enjoy, understand and be able to communicate what they are learning from authentic literature. Pearson (2004) describes how whole language lost it momentum because it only implicitly and not explicitly taught students about grammar, story grammars, rhetorical structures and different text genres. A particular omitted text genre was the informational text. Ignoring informational texts did not afford students to have strengths in routine abilities of systematically deciphering and using pertinent information from informational texts. Whole language also goes against any standardized testing and was not able to compile data to demonstrate its success to the public.
In order for a whole language teacher to be truly successful, he or she has to be most creative in designing the curriculum to coincide with the authentic literature that is being used. I envision whole language being successful if the teacher can select a certain authentic literary piece that has a setting which incorporates an understanding of specific scientific, historical and mathematical information. The teacher would then have to create learning environments that elicits the students’ desires to work on projects that focus on learning and understanding other curricula and content in order to better comprehend the underlining literal meaning of the authentic literature that they are being exposed to.
I feel that a balanced perspective is best for developing pedagogy for literacy instruction. Fitzgerald (1999) mentions how a combination of skills based learning and a whole language approach is best for literacy instruction. Each class is unique and its learners are unique. It is difficult to force all learners to conform to a specific regimen of literacy instruction that either favors whole language or a skills and phonics approach. An epistemological approach of literacy instruction is one that recognizes when to use aspects of both approaches in order to meet the learning needs of students becoming more literate. Successfully borrowing from both pedagogies is a balanced approach for literacy instruction. I feel that accomplished teachers of literacy should be familiar with the research and philosophies of both extremes of literacy pedagogies in order to be able to decide on which style of pedagogy to use in order to teach literacy in a manner that meets the specific learning needs of their students.
References
Adams, M. J. (1994). The progress of the whole-language debate. Educational Psychologist, 29(4), 217-
Fitzgerald, J. (1999). What is this being called balance? The Reading Teacher, 53(2), 100-107.
Pearson, P.D. (2004) The reading wars. Educational policy, 18(1), 216-252.