Hello All,
A former student recently sent this link to me, asking about my thoughts on the article:
http://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading. It is a lengthy, award-winning journalistic piece reporting on the teaching of
beginning reading, where schools and certain curriculum materials might
go wrong, etc... I found the reporting to be quite in-depth and the
piece to be an excellent read. It calls into question that most durable
of school hallway "folk theories," the 3 Cueing Systems. I particularly
appreciate the way that the author fastidiously clarifies terms and holds views
accountable for the "necessary consequences" that issue from them. This is not easy to do! I
will be fascinated to see if this argument gains further traction in the
public domain in the coming years.
We discussed this article in my Elementary Literacy Research and Instruction grad class this term. One student asked a very pertinent question: "I do not understand how teaching (both) cueing systems and phonics does not work. How does one negate the other?" To me, this really gets at the heart of things, as it would be shocking for a teacher today to utterly ignore phonics, even if they were committed to the cueing system model. Here was my response:
I think that there are "degrees of danger" associated with the cueing
system. The highest degree would be teaching contextual cueing to the
total exclusion of phonics. I don't think that anyone these days would
do that. The next degree would be teaching context strategies in a way
that displaces a fair amount of phonics/decoding instruction at a
critical time when many students need all of the later they can get. I
often say that many students need not only the right stuff, but they
also need it at the right intensity. To me, this kind of "displacement" is a real
danger, as I have heard teachers talk about their instruction in a way
that does indicate that it is a reality. The next degree would be that
instruction in the cueing system doesn't take away much at all from
phonics instruction but that it does, to some degree, push kids
away from engaging in at least some of the hard decoding work that we
know is critical to becoming competent early readers. This might not
hinder many students, but it may indeed be an obstacle for some. These
days, I would say that this (lower) level of "danger" is probably the
most common.
Now, overall, I think that the question of "Does one negate
the other?" is right at the heart of the matter. In the end, I always
want students to have an "experience" with a given word that enables
them to read that word "better" or more easily the next time they see
it. To my mind - and I think that research overwhelmingly supports this -
the key ingredient in such an experience is thorough analysis of the
grapheme-phoneme relationships in that word. And, the best, easiest pathway
for kids to engage in this analysis is to "decode," to use knowledge of
phonics patterns - whether sequential (i.e., cvc) or hierarchical
(i.e., vce, etc...) to carefully read a word. When they do this, it sets
them on the road to creating lasting bonds in memory between the word's
spelling and pronunciation. Reading a word through use of context
might impact the degree to which kids experience this in two ways.
First, they might get in the habit of using something like a picture cue
to "read" the word and then not go back and carefully analyze the
actual printed word. This habit would slow down their "automatizing" of
whatever words that they do this with. Second, they may not form the
habit of doing the hard work of trying to analyze/decode unfamiliar
words and instead develop the habit of looking for other pathways to
guess and move on.
Significantly, there was a research study that
demonstrated that a group of first graders who made more "non-word errors" - i.e.,
tried like the dickens to sound out an unfamiliar word and ended up with
a non-word approximation - ended up better readers late in the year
than kids who substituted meaningful words for such unfamiliar words.
So, in other words - mindset and habits matter. Kids who develop the
mindset and habit that they are going to try very hard to use their
phonics knowledge and thoroughly analyze unfamiliar words are better off
in the long run than those who slip off into the practice of making
context-facilitated guesses. To me, this does suggest that an emphasis
on the cueing system can, at times, "negate" the benefits of phonics
instruction by pushing kids away from the mindset and habit of doing the
hard work of word analysis.
If you have the time, check out
the article and share your comments or questions here!
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