H was raised in the south and they used sight memorization. I was raised in the northeast and they used phonetics. I am naturally a better speller. I raised my kids with Bob books. Anyone else use these?
Phonics is the way to go and I never bought into whole language. Using phonics, my D was reading very well at the age of 3 and has always loved reading.
We owned the Bob books, but my kids thought they were boring.
I’m skeptical about inferring anything from the approach used by the parents of early readers. Some kids are going to learn to read early no matter what you do; they’re essentially teaching themselves, and it doesn’t matter too much what their parents do as long as they supply plenty of reading material. I’m more interested in the kids who don’t learn early. They’re the ones that need explicit instruction.
My oldest was a sight reader. She is also an excellent speller. She never spelled a word wrong more than once. My other two are dyslexic and traditional phonics nor whole language approach worked for them. They could not see the connection between cat and hat. Both learned to read like @“Cardinal Fang” S with a dedicated private reading tutor who used the Lindamood Bell method. One didn’t learn to read till age 10 1/2 and he still is not a reader. My youngest started the tutoring at 5 1/2 and had great success and became a voracious reader. Both my kids still have great admiration for the woman who taught them to read and let them know they were not stupid. One thing that still stands out is that my S still can’t read Mr or Mrs. he obviously can speak what goes with what and knows the difference but he has a mental block in reading and spelling the words.
I think the best instruction is one that takes into account that one size doesn’t fit all. My S went to resource for reading and writing everyday of the school week for years. He saw little improvement as they used the same method over and over which didn’t work for him.
I remember one first grader my sister had whose goal for the year was to be able to count to three. She gets some tough cases. She gets frustrated about the importance placed on test scores. The school expects her special ed students to score as well as the other kids. It makes no sense. 
https://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2018/10/teacher_prep_programs_reading.html
“According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, only 37 percent of elementary and special education programs appear to be teaching scientifically based reading methods to preservice teachers.”
@“Cardinal Fang” - here’s a link to the study: https://epub.uni-regensburg.de/35639/1/0022219414528540.pdf
Phonemic awareness training is different than phonics instructions – the meta analysis showed that PA effects were fairly robust over time – it was the phonics instruction that faded. (letter/sound correspondence; letter patterns, etc.). You can see the differences in table 3 at page 86 of the PDF. (Don’t worry, the PDF is a copy of a 20 page journal article that starts at page 77).
If you want to dig in the article includes a really good exploration of research limitations – the impact of factors such as publication bias, etc. And as I noted in my post – a meta-analysis is just a different way of looking at data. It is useful to discern patterns, but can’t be used to draw across-the-board conclusions when there are so many differences among the underlying studies. The message I get isn’t that X is good and Y is bad, it’s simply that long-term followup studies are needed. My guess is that 90% or more of educational research is based on pre-test/ post-test models that doesn’t report on followup. (And the vast majority doesn’t even meet basis protocols to draw firm statistical conclusions – which is why you don’t find much support for the notion that phonics-based instruction is particularly effective from the [What Works Clearinghouse](WWC | Find What Works!) reports – they reject dozens of studies for methodological weaknesses for every one that meets their protocols for their intervention reports).
Also, quantitative educational research will typically report results in terms of effect size – and people need to understand what that means, because there is considerable overlap. Good explanation here: https://scientificallysound.org/2017/07/27/cohens-d-how-interpretation/
That’s why these Reading-War pronouncements about which approach is “best” just don’t work – kids are different. What works best for one may be ineffective or unnecessary for others. If you look at the “Cohens d=0.80” diagram (large effect) in the article I linked above, the ONLY group that is clearly benefiting from whatever is used with the study group are the ones in the blue field on the far right of the distribution. The overlap group (purple) are those that are performing the same with or without the program being studied; and you can see that there is a tail end of the blue curve which basically would reflect students who weren’t doing well even with the target program.
The other problem with educational research is that it is giving comparative data between a target group and (hopefully) matched controls, rather than achievement data that can be transferred from one study to another. So you can’t actually look at a study of curriculum A which is shown to have a moderate effect (0.50) vs another (curriculum B) with a small effect (0.20) and say this proves A is better than B – because there may be all sorts of differences between the respective groups.
Which is why I gave the example of my son who learned to read at age 11, and definitely was NOT helped by phonics. That wasn’t his problem and it only created more frustration when the focus was on teaching him what he already knew vs. figuring out where the barriers were and addressing those. If I had been able to give him the strategies at age 8 rather than 11, he would have been able to read earlier. I don’t know how much could have been carried back to age 5 or 6 – he started in Montessori at age 2 so he had very early exposure to alphabet & phonics, but I think there is also an age of developmental readiness that varies. I didn’t do anything differently with my early reader than my late reader, except to pretty much leave the early reader alone – she didn’t start any sort of formalized schooling until kindergarten at age 5.
@CTTC - the source of the quote you cited is an advocacy group – the concept of “scientifically based reading methods” is an aspiration, not a consensus determination. (It’s not like global warming where you can get 95% of scientists to agree). Overall, the educational research is pretty messy – partly because of huge ethical, practical and financial barriers to setting up good research – and pretty much for every “expert” you can find to espouse one point of view you could easily find another “expert” to argue just the opposite.
The interviews posted at the Children of the Code website at https://childrenofthecode.org/ are a good resource if you want to really dig in and get a sense of the breadth and diversity of opinion.
I’d analogize it to asking what’s a scientifically-proven diet for weight loss. It’s not that there isn’t any science – it’s that there are all sorts of different studies with different findings and outcomes. You add a healthy dose of cognitive bias into the mix and everyone ends up cherry-picking the studies they like and finding fault with the ones that they don’t.
If there is anything that could be termed a consensus, it would tend to be in favor of “balanced literacy”.
Totally agree that there is no one size fits all approach. Different kids learn to read at different speeds and in different ways. Some do not even need to be taught. FWIW, I doubt early reading to children makes a difference in the end.
Just thinking out loud: reading is such an unnatural process compared with speaking and listening. We’ve had millions of years to evolve mental structures to communicate by voice, but only a few hundred years (at most) for the bulk of people to develop any real facility with the printed word. What were literacy rates throughout the world even a few hundred years ago? I guess it is no surprise that there is no scientific consensus on the best way to approach how to teach it.
Over fifty years ago the military sent me to DLI to learn German. I could only spell English words through brute memorization which did not come easily to me. All my elementary school teachers “sounding hints” never made sense as there were so many exceptions to the rules. Never had any spelling problems in German and learned that Germans do not even teach spelling. If you speak the correct “high German,” you can spell it. We forget that English evolved from Saxon (a German tribe), but was heavily influenced by Greek, Latin and French. et al. It is no wonder that it does not follow a uniform set of rules.
There’s also a thing in English called “the great vowel shift” which took place between 1350 and the 1700’s. Basically, a lot of spellings are based on a system of pronunciation that hasn’t been used in hundreds of years. This website gives a nice little history of English spelling: http://spellingsociety.org/history#/page/1
I taught my son to read before he started kindergarten because I was so frustrated with even the phonics program my D had. It was based on phonics to some degree but was a very structured list of how to introduce word sounds. One of the first rules was to NOT teach the ABCs. Because (for example). The letter “F”. Is pronounced “EF” (with the E sound preceding the F. Rather than the actual sound that is in “F-rog”.
15 min tops per day (another rule).
And don’t start the program until a game played by guessing words you said SUPER slow was easy for your kid.
We never made it through the whole book because he was reading that quick. I can’t remember the program name because I gave all the materials to his kindergarten teacher.
My daughter (the self-taught reader) actually learned to read with old style Dick-and-Jane books. I had a set at my house that my MIL (a former teacher) had given me, as sort of a collector’s item – and when my daughter was pestering me about wanting to learn to read, I gave her the books and told her to figure things out on her own. It took her about 45 minutes to work through the whole set, and from then on she was a reader. That was right around the time of her 4th birthday. I also learned to read from the same books, though not on my own – I started first grade at age 5 and those were the exact same books that had been used in my classroom, in 1959.
@calmom #27: excellent post. I do have one quibble:
That is not at all how to interpret that graph. That graph is consistent with every single person doing .8 SDs better with the intervention. To see why, consider the following example:
Suppose we take a population and measured their heights. We draw the distribution; it’s a bell curve, just like the left bell curve of the Cohen’s d=.80 diagram in the paper you cited. Then we give every single one of them a pair of shoes that increases their height .8 of a standard deviation (shoes with three inch heels). Now we measure their height again, make the bell curve again, and superimpose the two bell curves. We’ll get something that looks exactly like the Cohen’s d=.80 diagram you cited, but notice that everyone in the entire group is benefiting from the high heeled shoes; every single person is three inches taller. Nobody, not one person, is performing the same with or without the shoe intervention being studied. They’re all taller with the high heels.
To be sure, we could also get the effect if we gave some people 5-, 6-, 8- or 9-inch heels and chopped some other people’s feet off. Or we could give the shortest people very very tall heels and do nothing for anyone else. But it’s wrong to look at the diagram and conclude there is anyone at all who is doing the same with or without the intervention. There might be, but maybe not.
There is a difference between “consistent with” and “proof.” Every person in the study group could also be represented by little dots on a scattergram – and in the area of overlap, it is equally “consistent” that NONE of the intervention group benefited, and that they scored exactly the same as they would have with no intervention at all. You don’t know.
And the point is that in classrooms, teachers have individual children with different needs. And “effect size” definitely does NOT prove that all children will do better with whatever program had that effect size. The studies are based on raw data from individual pre/post test scores – the first step to determine an effect size is to calculate the mean scores for each group (control vs. intervention). And obviously in the real world you are going to have values all over the map contributing to the mean – students doing better than average, students doing worse.
So my post was focused on what can you be certain of from the research – not what you can extrapolate out as best-case scenario.
So that’s the reason why the one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t really work. Because all the real world, real life kids are different. What works for one doesn’t work for another, and everyone also knows that there is significant research-to-practice fall off as well. That is, in the studies the teachers are carefully trained in the curriculum and the researchers monitor to make sure they are complying with it and its being taught properly — that’s pretty much a requirement for good research. But in real life you end up with teachers often getting minimal information or training in a new curriculum, and having all sorts of variations in their ability levels and teaching styles, plus about a zillion other demands on their time – and even if a program is highly scripted they might not adhere to it. Plus the teachers are all dealing with classrooms filled with kids who are demographically different than the kids in the research study – so it’s not necessarily a difference tied to the ability of the teachers to implement the curriculum. It’s just that the results from a study done with one demographic may not transfer at all to a different demographic. And again, there just aren’t that many studies.
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@CTTC - the source of the quote you cited is an advocacy group – the concept of “scientifically based reading methods” is an aspiration, not a consensus determination. (It’s not like global warming where you can get 95% of scientists to agree). Overall, the educational research is pretty messy – partly because of huge ethical, practical and financial barriers to setting up good research – and pretty much for every “expert” you can find to espouse one point of view you could easily find another “expert” to argue just the opposite.
Well, if an education advocacy group doesn’t know what’s going on, there is isn’t much hope!
There are lots of supposed experts in education, and the educational industrial complex in the U.S. loves them. A new method, new training, new materials means lots of money spent by school systems. Wait another few years, another education fad will come down the pike, and the cycle starts again.
As far as the “balanced” approach to reading instruction, why isn’t this working? Teachers aren’t knowledgeable in all methods – jack of all trades, master of none? Even the reading “specialists” aren’t using programs like Lindamood-Bell, Orton-Gillingham, Wilson in the public schools. Schools can’t seem to understand or teach to dyslexia.
Different groups espouse different philosophies. This is not a neutral issue – within the world of educational policy, there is considerable debate and disagreement. It’s like religion or politics – they are going to push for the agenda they want to promote.
I think the phonics people are better at p.r. But they certainly don’t have more evidence to support their position - quite the contrary, based on the What Works Clearinghouse database, there seems to be a lot more evidence to support different approaches.
Here is what the research is for the programs you mentioned:
Lindamood Bell LiPS – 2 studies meeting protocols for Beginning Reading out of 8 reviewed, small positive effects for reading comprehension, mixed effects for alphabetics (phonics). (“Mixed” means that in one study the results were negative, with the intervention group doing worse than the control group). These were studies of a combined sample size of 97 first graders, See: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/280
Orton-Gillingham – no studies found meeting research protocols; therefore no research-based conclusions can be drawn about its effectiveness: See
https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/528
Wilson: 1 study found meeting protocols for Beginning Reading. Finding: “positive effects on alphabetics and no discernible effects on fluency and comprehension.” The effect size of the single study was small. The study was done of struggling readers in grades 3-5, so findings would not necessarily transfer to typical beginning readers in grades K-3. Total sample size was 71 (See https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/546 )
On the other hand, there is a study of a popular whole language, leveled literacy approach that shows “positive effects on general reading achievement, potentially positive effects on reading fluency, and no discernible effects on alphabetics” based on two research studies, encompassing 747 K-2 students. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/EvidenceSnapshot/679
So if I’m a school administrator deciding on a school curriculum to teach reading at the primary level, which am I going to choose? I’d think objectively – looking at the evidence from the government agency in charge of assembling and reporting the data – that whole language program looks like the way to go. It’s based on a sample size that is more than 7 times larger than the LMB program, covers a lot more ground (LMB is phonemic awareness only), and is a self-contained system that can be purchased without requiring additional training of teachers.
So sure – you can disagree – and maybe somebody’s sister who is a teacher doesn’t like the whole language stuff – but that school administrator who selected the whole language program has made a choice that not only is supported by research, but by objectively better research than whatever the phonics proponents are advocating.
As to your question – why isn’t balanced literacy working? The answer is that it works for some and not for others. My question would be, why didn’t the Reading First initiative - enacted along with No Child Left Behind, work:
From First Impact Study Final Report, https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094038/summ_c.asp
Again, I think the problem is with the failure to recognize that different children – and different groups of children – have different needs.
Our district has settled on an approach that includes a combination of basic phonics, sight memorization, and dedicated time every day for both being read to (right through middle school) and reading. The school day was actually lengthened to do this. So many kids came to school with no letter recognition and/or book experience. K and 1st graders are assigned a 5th grade reading buddy (also cuts down on bullying). 3/4th students do partner reading. A shocking number of parents don’t read to their kids, ever. Poorer families are working three jobs, richer families put their kids in 14 activities and are always in a car. We ran a winter program specifically designed to reward parents reading and omg you would have thought we’d asked for the moon.
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Seems kind of tough to be thorough about getting matching of pronunciation and spelling through to those learning to read, though. Food for thought?