#whole language method

It's really wierd. "Whole word"/"whole language"/"three-cueing" functions as a kind of ideology and worldview. It's not based on anything demonstrably true about how people learn to read, and adherents cling to it with resolute faith.

It seems to comprise part of a larger philosophy that teachers actually teaching, and students actually learning, useful skills like the alphabet, how to read, how to add and multiply, is oppressive, limiting and "rote learning." And we should instead open up the world to kids to just let them absorb all this stuff and figure it out for themselves. Just show them how fulfilling, how great reading is, and they'll pick it up on their own. It feels nice to these people. Which, of course, is the most important thing. Not working with kids through the hard process of building a life skill that could make or break their future.

Two thirds of American Ed School professors teach the homeopathy of "Whole Word," aka "Three-Cueing" to their classes of future teachers. And I say "homeopathy" deliberately, in that "whole word" crusaders believe kids magically absorb reading in the same way homeopaths believe water magically absorbs the properties of other chemicals.

This is like two thirds of geography teachers teaching that the Earth is flat, or two thirds of chemistry teachers teaching about how you should stay away from "chemicals."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading#Whole_language

In his 2009 book, Reading in the Brain, cognitive neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, said "cognitive psychology directly refutes any notion of teaching via a 'global' or 'whole language' method". He goes on to talk about "the myth of whole-word reading", saying it has been refuted by recent experiments. "We do not recognize a printed word through a holistic grasping of its contours, because our brain breaks it down into letters and graphemes". In addition, cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg, in his 2017 book Language at the Speed of Sight, refers to whole language as a "theoretical zombie" because it persists in spite of a lack of supporting evidence.

This is from the US government's Nation's Report Card website.

[ Note: This is part of a larger infographic; I trimmed it down to include just reading and writing. You can see the whole thing at the original website. ]

It's minority and underprivileged kids who suffer from this reading woo because they may not have as many books at home, may not have as stable a home life, might not have family members who can take the time to spend on the alphabet or reading practice if, for example, it's a single-parent household with a parent holding down two jobs to make ends meet. Or didn't learn to read properly themselves. These are kinds of considerations that grifters like Kendi and DiAngelo never factor into their sweeping narratives of systemic this and that. And cast you as a bigot for even suggesting.

How about, before implementing the toxic poison of the tenets of Critical Race Theory, you actually teach the kids to read? How about before implementing divisive oppressor-vs-oppressed programs of unsubstantiated postmodern philosophy in Kindergarten, you teach the alphabet and then see what sort of life success your students get.

As Roland Fryer remarked:

"I've been in fifth grade classrooms in which they're still learning the clock, and how to tell time, in fifth grade. I told the principal, if they can't tell time, at this point, they'll have no place to be on time for."

What's further difficult to stomach is that this has been known for over 60 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Johnny_Can%27t_Read

Why Johnny Can't Read—And What You Can Do About It is a 1955 book-length exposé on American reading education by Rudolf Flesch. It was an immediate bestseller for 37 weeks and became an educational cause célèbre. In this book, the author concluded that the whole-word (look-say) method was ineffective because it lacked phonics training. In addition, Flesch was critical of the simple stories and limited text and vocabulary in the Dick and Jane style readers that taught students to read through word memorization. Flesch also believed that the look-say method did not properly prepare students to read more complex materials in the upper grade levels.

Just think about that. For over sixty years, many kids have been taught to read using known substandard, ineffective methods, and any success they had was in spite of that teaching, not because of it.

Think of how many kids dropped out of school or did poorly because they were frustrated by not being able to fully participate, or concluded that school wasn't for them because they couldn't "get it." Who watched more advantaged kids streak ahead of them, thinking that there was something wrong with them. And if you can't read, how well can you possibly write?

Think of how many underprivileged kids perpetuated a cycle of dropping out of school, possibly early or single parenthood, low income prospects or even crime, and eventually unable to help their own kids learn to read properly, because the school will not. On the basis of an unevidenced ideology that asserts that "learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language#State_of_the_debate

One neuroscientist, Mark Seidenberg, says "[Whole-language quack Ken] Goodman's guessing game theory was grievously wrong" and "the impact was enormous and continues to be felt". When it come to evidence supporting the whole-language theory, he emphatically states "There wasn't any".

Dr. Lyell Asher goes into this in a segment of his larger series. Part 12 is specifically about "The Reading Debacle," but Part 11, "The Knowledge Gap," gives some important background that explains the criticality of literacy.

Other people like Emily Hanford and Belinda Luscombe have been writing about this as well.

By: Emily Hanford

Published: Oct 26, 2018

Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn.

It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.

How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read — if they’re taught with approaches that use what scientists have discovered about how the brain does the work of reading. But many teachers don’t know this science.

What have scientists figured out? First of all, while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.

But talk to teachers and many will tell you they learned something different about how children learn to read in their teacher preparation programs. Jennifer Rigney-Carroll, who completed a master’s degree in special education in 2016, told me she was taught that children “read naturally if they have access to books.” Jessica Root, an intervention specialist in Ohio, said she learned “you want to get” children “excited about what they’re reading, find books that they’re interested in, and just read, read, read.” Kathy Bast, an elementary school principal in Pennsylvania, learned the same thing. “It was just: Put literature in front of the kids, teach the story, and the children will learn how to read through exposure,” she said.

These ideas are rooted in beliefs about reading that were once commonly called “whole language” and that gained a lot of traction in the 1980s. Whole-language proponents dismissed the need for phonics. Reading is “the most natural activity in the world,” Frank Smith, one of the intellectual leaders of the whole-language movement, wrote. It “is only through reading that children learn to read. Trying to teach children to read by teaching them the sounds of letters is literally a meaningless activity.”

These ideas had been debunked by the early 2000s. It may seem as if kids are learning to read when they’re exposed to books, and some kids do pick up sound-letter correspondences quickly and easily. But the science shows clearly that to become a good reader, you must learn to decode words. Many whole-language proponents added some phonics to their approach and rebranded it “balanced literacy.”

But they did not give up their core belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when parents and teachers expose children to good books. So, while you’re likely to find some phonics lessons in a balanced-literacy classroom, you’re also likely to find a lot of other practices rooted in the idea that children learn to read by reading rather than by direct instruction in the relationship between sounds and letters. For example, teachers will give young children books that contain words with letter patterns the children haven’t yet been taught. You’ll see alphabetical “word walls” that rest on the idea that learning to read is a visual memory process rather than a process of understanding how letters represent sounds. You’ll hear teachers telling kids to guess at words they don’t know based on context and pictures rather than systematically teaching children how to decode.

Many teachers learn these approaches in their teacher preparation programs. Publishers perpetuate these ideas, and school districts buy in. But colleges of education — which should be at the forefront of pushing the best research — have largely ignored the scientific evidence on reading.

The National Council on Teacher Quality reviewed the syllabuses of teacher preparation programs nationwide and found that fewer than four in 10 taught the components of effective reading instruction identified by research. A study of early-literacy instruction in teacher preparation programs across the University of North Carolina system found that instructional strategies based on research were mentioned “in a cursory way, if at all, on most syllabuses.” (Some instructors required students to write their “personal philosophies” about how to teach reading.) Kelly Butler of the Barksdale Reading Institute in Mississippi interviewed more than 100 deans and faculty members of schools of education as part of a study of teacher preparation programs in the state and found that most of them could not explain basic scientific principles about how children learn to read.

It’s not just ignorance. There’s active resistance to the science, too. I interviewed a professor of literacy in Mississippi who told me she was “philosophically opposed” to phonics instruction. One of her colleagues told me she didn’t agree with the findings of reading scientists because “it’s their science.”

There is no excuse for this. Colleges of education have to start requiring that their faculties teach the science of reading. Children’s futures depend on it.

Emily Hanford (@ehanford) is a senior education correspondent for APM Reports and the producer of the audio documentary “Hard Words: Why Aren’t Kids Being Taught to Read?” This article is based on her reporting for that project.

[ Via: https://archive.ph/MIgPZ ]

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[ “Three-cueing” is the “whole word”/”whole language” method. ]