Why the Trout Aren't Biting

Pennsylvania is perhaps a surprising place for the titular father of the Science of Reading to have been born. Although a small group of folks in the field set the date much later—sometime in the 1980s with the publication of the “Simple View of Reading” by Philip Gough et al.—history is unlikely to take up this modern date and forsake Edmund Huey.

In the 1900s, Edmund Huey, long acknowledged as the father of reading research, was actively and scientifically pondering the meaning of this machine labeled ‘text’ and how it mysteriously opens up portals to inner worlds of knowledge and experience. He’d become fascinated with the psychology of William James, who argued for a functional approach to thinking about the human mind, less philosophical, less grandiose. He’d done time teaching high school and needed to understand more about how minds function to teach stragglers and strugglers to read Latin.

In one or another of his prolific writings, probably around the turn of the 21st century during a natural period of reflection and stock-taking, David Pearson, often acknowledged as the senior statesman of modern reading research, tips his hat to Huey and tries to send good vibrations to him through the universe. He wished to let Huey know about the astounding progress the human animal made across the last century in demystifying the phenomenon of reading. David, if you’re reading, send me the citation for the paper I’m remembering. I’d love to quote it. When I first read it, I felt the vibrations, too.

This sort of mystical connection with Edmund Huey is a feature, not a bug, of the true Science of Reading, which has flourished in its wide-ranging task of grasping the nature of this exclusively human power to read with comprehension, from its earliest stirrings in early childhood to its mature form in graduate school and beyond. In the 57th yearbook of the National Reading Conference published in 2008, Douglas Hartman at Michigan State and David Davis, the great-great nephew of Edmund Huey, published a keynote address they wrote from the point of view of Huey resurrected delivered at a meeting of the National Reading Conference enacted by Dr. Hartman embodying Edmund Huey in the modern world. Huey speaks to us through Douglas Hartman.

***

I’ve selected three quotes from Hartman and Davis (2008) to foreground for a moment. Hartman was fresh from involvement in writing a biography of Huey, primed to become a body inhabited by the spirit of Huey. If you have a chance, the paper linked above is a joy to read.

Modern scientific researchers owe a debt to Huey not only for his research, but for his research spirit. If his life had not been cut short, so the authors remind us, he could have looked forward to a prolific career perhaps into the 1950s and 1960s and discovered untold secrets about reading, the human super power. “Instead,” wrote his great-great nephew, “the first snow of the winter of 1914 covered his headstone which bears the inscription”…

"Not my will, but Thine, be done" (Luke 22:42, KJV)

***

Huey's headstone speaks to the Ages about his humility and dedication to service, setting the tone for those of us who followed in his footsteps and apprenticed to become reading scientists. It's particularly poignant given his early death at age 43. Regardless of one’s religion or beliefs about the First Cause of the Universe, the sentiment of service resonates with the spiritual calling researchers in reading and literacy writ large often carry within their bodies.

On this day in the early 21st century when David Davis and Douglas Hartford resurrected Huey to deliver an oration, Huey speaks of 1984—not the year of Orwell, but the year of hope. In that year the first Handbook of Reading Research, a compilation of topics, themes, and issues that knitted together diverse lines of thinking and anchored them in a community of research, was published.

“To put things into perspective,” [says Douglas Hartman embodying Edmund Huey], my book on The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading was really the first Handbook of Reading Research. It wasn't until 75 years later—in 1984—that David Pearson. Michael Kamil, Peter Mosenthal, and Becky Barr…edited the second Handbook of Reading Research, with the third and fourth volumes to follow. To your credit as a field, you followed my lead. About every decade you’ve taken stock of your research efforts by producing another handbook.”

***

It’s difficult to overstate the profound importance of the societal infrastructure and framework for collaborative research in reading constructed between, say, 1970 at the beginning of psycholinguistics and the cognitive revolution and 2000 at the beginning of No Child Left, which brought with it a national fixation on phonics.

This 30 year period amplified the research curiosity and vision of Huey. One key historical disappointment in recent times to those of us who subscribe to the original vision has been the narrowing of the aperture of the research field from an observatory lookout keeping track of all of the robust areas of knowledge growth inside reading as literacy to a tiny sliver of the mystery—sounding out words.

The frenzy of a small band of naysayers have demonized the three-cuing system, a key insight into reading pedagogy created in the intersection of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. This small band was made up of cognitive neuroscientists and disgruntled researchers believing that they had been overlooked in their focus on “sounding it out” to the exclusion of everything else.

By 2017 a journalist was making points—and publicity—by convincing laypeople looking for a silver bullet that Huey’s legacy had “sold them a story.” Personally, I grieve for excommunication of Marie Clay’s work. While busily tearing down Reading Recovery, they lobbied politicians to force teachers to adopt scripted phonics lessons.

***

Huey earned a teaching credential at a Normal School in Indiana and went on to teach Latin at the Harry Hillman Academy in Wilks-Barre, Pennsylvania, a coal mining community. Harry Hillman had been established in 1890 by a local business man and provided a classical curriculum with challenging work in mathematics, the sciences, literature and the language arts. Hartman (aka Edmund Huey) tells the following story:

“It was here, in 1896, that a turning point took place. As you can imagine, teaching adolescent boys to read a dead language like Latin was no small task for a teacher. Doing so challenged me to think in new ways….Struggling readers have a way of doing that to teachers, as you know. In my search, I crossed paths with the books of two scholars who were part of the emerging new field of psychology.”

How many of us who went on to become researchers in the field of reading were motivated by such experiences? The relationship between a teacher and a struggling reader becomes highly empathic, sensitive to emotional curves, attentive and responsive to patterns of the reader’s attention and thinking. When you work with a child for six months, or a year, or two years—one on one—and you feel the drive they have to learn to read, you sometimes feel helpless. That helplessness drives you into Huey’s research arms. There is no silver bullet, only productive responsive teaching, only hard effort—the result of teaching as a reading scientist in every lesson.

In my own case, I began tutoring struggling readers in 1978 at a private reading clinic armed only with some graduate courses in English literature and linguistics. As I say to all who care to listen, there is no more humbling experience than working with a youngster who has real trouble reading. For almost three years I tutored struggling readers full-time, becoming completely absorbed in the challenge, drawing on every scrap of linguistic knowledge I had.

I started reading Reading Research Quarterly around 1980. I quickly learned to skip the statistical analysis, which meant nothing to me, and cut to the chase. I read the theoretical framework and review of the literature, then hightailed it to the discussion and implications. I renewed my subscription every year thereafter and kept on trying to learn something.

By the mid-1980s I was teaching struggling community college students in a remedial reading lab. I was also enrolled in a reading specialist program at UC Davis. For the first time I read seminal studies from the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois with instruction from Carl Spring, a strong quantitative researcher in reading, who spent hours in his office with me helping me decipher the research designs and the meaning of the numbers.

It wasn’t until the course sequence in statistics I took as part of my doctoral program that I learned to really read the data collection and analysis sections. It isn’t until you see something of the guts of statistics that you come to appreciate this tool set. I have a suspicion that Huey became as absorbed with eyeballs and vision as I became with probability and causation.

***

Huey was a fisherman. Once, students at the University of Pittsburgh putting together a yearbook, sketched a cartoon of their professor at one with his fishing pole, throwing out a line in a stream. In his pocket are books which, on close inspection, are seen to be authored by William James, who taught the younger Huey to seek a functional understanding of reading. Huey, speaking through Douglas Hartman, has this to say:

“Fishing is like that: to find where the trout lie in a stream, you have to evaluate the consequences of different possibilities. Here in the shade to hide from their prey, or over there, at the end of a run, where the food funnels down into a channel. The consequences of your cast tells you everything about trout.”

Transform the stream into a text, the act of casting into the act of reading, the elusive trout as meaning, and the fisher person as the strategist, and you have it: At least a two cueing system, more like three or more. Readers fish for meaning in the most likely spots and change their strategy based on the consequences of their first cast.

***

In an article published in 1900¹ in the Journal of Psychology, Huey laid out the parameters of the quest for unity, coherence, and free flowing inquiry into a robust understanding of reading in the first published piece to demand an opening of the aperture on reading activity. This article is a testament to the notion that the Handbook of Reading Research meant the achievement of Huey’s objective. Ironically, those who date the birth of the science of reading circa 1980 with the simple view of reading completely rebuff Huey. From the 1900 article by Edmund Huey:

“Until very recently no general attempt has been made to analyze and describe the psycho-physiological processes involved in reading. Isolated studies on the perception of letters, partial investigations of the movements of the eye in reading, etc., have furnished material, and especially, suggestions, valuable for the general study; but neither a synthesis of these partial studies nor any other attempt to tell just what readers do when they read, was to be found.”

Two profoundly discrepant events in the early 1980s occurred that fragmented Huey’s vision of a perspective on reading research viewing reading as perhaps the most amazing and powerful accomplishment of human beings. One was the first publication of the Handbook of Reading Research in 1984. The other was the Simple View. Diametrically opposing perspectives. The following displays how constricted the purview of reading has become since 2017 with a legislated Simple View Science of Reading rather than a peer-reviewed, collaborative Science of Reading:

***

Huey went to graduate school at Clark University, a perfect match for his burgeoning sense of wonder about how humans function during the act of reading. Returning to his interest in learning how to catch a trout from observing the consequences of throwing out a line. he was brimming over with questions. Clark was just what the Doctor ordered. The following excerpt comes from Hartman and Davis (2008). Louis Terman from the early work on intelligence made the following comment in 1930:

So what questions did Huey want to study? He published an article in 1898 that included a handful of smaller studies, each attempting to nibble around the edges of the reading phenomenon by beginning with the role of the eyes. From his 1898 paper:

“It would seem that in reading matter printed in sufficiently narrow columns the eye's lateral movement might be eliminated or nearly so, and the reading be done with one downward sweep of the eye.”

Just click on the URL and U will learn what Huey learned after running some tests on readers reading texts in small horizontal sweeps vs readers reading texts in one downward sweep. Tantalizing, isn’t it? Not quite the simple view.

***

In 1946, Bertha Handlan, who was teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote a conceptual piece² reflecting on what had been learned specifically about the role of vocabulary in reading in the decades since the Huey and the founders of the Science of Reading.

Handlan presented a paper at the Pennsylvania State College Reading Conference, August, 1946, titled “Vocabulary Development.” As if reporting to Huey, Handlan occupied a non-simple stance, that is, we simply have to teach decoding and then everything falls into place. She is feisty like Huey, like many of the vibrant scientists who value the Handbooks of Reading Research. Here Handlan addressed a new frontier which would be rigorously studied in the coming years:

Not a simple and easy drill process. Who would of thunk it.

***

As the years flew by 1984 came and went. In this current year of the re-election of Donald Trump, reading scientists have two core challenges. First, they have to bring back the troops who have been part of the withdrawal from a national, sanctioned, comprehensive, overarching quest to understand reading in sociocultural contexts. The recent NAEP hijack over the role of prior knowledge is a canary in the coal mine. Future researchers will not have access to data on prior knowledge and reading performance from NAEP that could open the aperture on better instruction. What’s worse, even asking the question is now officially discouraged.

Second, the emergence of AI brings with it dangerous risks as well as incredible potential learning affordances for readers. Yet educators in schools, entrenched in a Common Core mentality and surrounded by legal mandates to conform to prescribed instruction, are not engaged in a research agenda. Indeed, they often fear it and seek to ban it.

Time is flying by, and still the field of reading—unless I’m missing something—is taking a wait-and-see attitude toward AI. If Huey were with us today, just as his fascination with the eye and its intimate link to the mind of the reader led him to action as a researcher, he would understand the importance of learning empirically from readers what the effects of AI might be. Please—if I’m missing a whole research agenda out there, bring me up to speed.

1. https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2347471/component/file_2347469/content

2. The Elementary English Review, Vol. 23, No. 8 (DECEMBER 1946), pp. 350-357