Learning to Read

Early Reading Instruction for a Lifetime of Literacy

The popular history of reading instruction in this country has a distinctly American twist to it—it has been controversial and partisan.

Arthur Heilman, author of the classic text Phonics in Proper Perspective, wrote in his 1968 edition that ours is a “chronicle of frustration which stems in part from our predilection to make beginning reading consist exclusively of letter-sound analysis” or to ignore such analysis completely and teach words one at a time by sight.

Tell that to Dean. Would that it were so either-or, so simple.

Children must learn to match printed words to auditory images of spoken words to read, images which become known by sight. Print matches sound and images of spellings that sparks episodic memory. Information available in letters and spelling patterns linking visual cues to oral language are crucial for achieving understanding.

Information processing (IP) models of reading emerging from cognitive psychology in the 1970s included this facet of development under the heading ‘phonological processing.’ As we will see on July 15, IP modeling became very useful as a theoretical lever.

In the late 1960s Harvard professor Jeann Chall published The Great Debate to provide a research perspective on the question: Phonics or sight words? Early decoding instruction produces better word recognition and spelling. Still, the reading wars continued. The Simple View of Reading was in the offing.

Chall also published a book about reading development across the lifetime of a reader, shifting from a narrow—if significant—slice of the learning trajectory at the very beginning stage to a wide spectrum of growth.

I invite you to examine your assumptions about reading and its emergence as a deeply valued capacity as you have a look at the core of Chall’s book Stages of Reading Development below. See if you can locate any of my students you’ve met in my posts on this chart. It would be great to see comments.

Questions: What memories do you have of reading in middle school?