The A, B, C's of Reading Instruction
"Reading is a very complicated process," says Linnea Ehri, distinguished professor in the Ph.D. Program in Educational Psychology, who recently served on the National Reading Panel. "You have to teach a lot of things to help kids become skilled readers."
From the moment when a child puts together the letters C-A-T to identify the furry animal, several complex cognitive, linguistic, and learning processes--involving symbol, sound, and meaning--are at work. The course of learning to read is over-simplified or misunderstood in the debates over what teaching methods to employ, according to Ehri, who has spent more than 20 years studying how children become proficient readers and the stumbling blocks that cause difficulty for some children.
These days, when the topic is the subject of presidential catch-phrases ("No Child Left Behind"), when educational publishers and teachers clash over the most effective methods, and concerned parents begin reading to their children in the womb, one thing tends to get overlooked: the reader. "Often the processes developing in the learner are slighted," says Ehri. "Instruction is created and implemented without considering what the learner goes through in acquiring reading skill."
What does the learner go through? According to Ehri, the beginner needs to learn the alphabet, how to write sounds to spell words, how to sound out letters and blend them into words, and how to use knowledge of the alphabet to build a sight vocabulary. These skills need to be practiced when they read and write. As readers mature, they become able to read words automatically, and their fluency improves. They acquire comprehension strategies such as the ability to grasp main ideas in passages, to figure out the meanings of new words, and to "repair" reading when they get off track. "There are various reasons why children have difficulty reading, and it differs at different points in their development," she says.
Alternative instructional methods--such as phonics-based programs, or the "whole language" approach--have their strengths and weaknesses in addressing different aspects of development. The important question is, what does the evidence show about the effectiveness of one or another method? According to Ehri, in the past, this question has not necessarily been considered. Educational fads and fashions have swept the nation. Argument and persuasion have been used to convince educators of the need for change rather than research findings. "We've had pendulum swings from phonics to whole language and back."
In 1998, the fourteen-member National Reading Panel was formed by the U.S. Congress and charged with the task of reviewing existing research to determine the most effective methods of teaching children to read. The panel included members who were trained as researchers as well as school teachers, parents, a principal, and a university chancellor/physicist who was chair. Ehri led the Alphabetics Subcommittee, which reviewed experimental studies on the effectiveness of systematic phonics instruction and "phonemic awareness" instruction (i.e., helping children to manipulate sounds in words). Other subcommittees examined research on fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary, technology, and teacher education. The process was one of sifting through and summarizing the results of scores of studies, comparing them statistically, and throwing out research that was not rigorously designed.
"Being on the panel gave me the opportunity to conduct meta-analyses of research findings across many studies," says Ehri. "This type of analysis gives a more objective rendering of the facts than can be provided by a narrative review which may be driven by opinion as well as fact."
The panel's findings, published in 2000, showed that early reading instruction was significantly more effective when teachers taught systematic phonics and phonemic awareness, as opposed to no phonics or casual, as-needed phonics, in which the teacher decides what letter-sound correspondences to teach and when to teach them.
Ehri was well qualified to lead the alphabetics reviews because she has studied these processes in her own research. Her findings indicate that the biggest hurdle in the early years is mastery of the alphabetic system--not only the letters, but understanding how letters represent sounds. "Children must learn how to connect the squiggles on the page to their own spoken language," says Ehri. "For example, if you ask, 'Are these two words the same or different? Beak, peak.' Children can do that easily. But if you ask them to tell you the first sound in 'peak,' or to break 'peak' into its component sounds, children who haven't yet learned to read have a problem with that. This skill, called phonemic awareness, is one of the best predictors of how well children will learn to read, along with their letter knowledge," she says.
She is currently working with third-grade struggling readers in the New York City Public Schools, studying how to improve their ability to read and understand text using the method of repeated reading (in which students read and re-read passages to improve fluency). She is often asked to speak to educational groups about the National Reading Panel report, which has made a huge impact, from influencing President Bush's policies, to creating criteria for allocating government grants to states for improving their reading instruction. In October she testified on "Emergent Literary Instruction" before the Education Committee of the New York City Council.
Regarding the controversy over phonics vs. whole language approaches to beginning reading instruction, Ehri doesn't come down on one side. "I don't think it's productive to persist with this debate," she says. "I think what we have to do is say, 'We need comprehensive reading instruction.'"
