Eaton
While prepping for an upcoming talk about content production tools, I've been digging into the history of early childhood literacy education, with a particular focus on the "Reading Wars" of the 80s and 90s.
Traditional "skills-based" education, dating back to the 1600s (!!!!!!) relied heavily on phonics: teach a kid the sounds that each letter of the alphabet corresponds to, allowing them to "sound out" any written word. Voila! Their existing spoken vocabulary is linked to written words.
Eaton
Starting in the 60s a number of educators (and linguists eager to apply Chomsky's theories about universal languages) started working with different approaches — ones that might work better for kids that didn't "click" well with the skills-based stuff.
"Whole Language Learning" was born, and some of the programs that grew out of it seemed very promising. Particularly the "Reading Recovery" curriculum, designed by a New Zealand teacher who worked with struggling early readers.
Eaton
It treated reading as an exercise in "message-receiving" and "problem-solving" — the goal is to get the jist of the text (a story, some instructions, etc) — and the problem is figuring out new or unfamiliar words encountered while reading.
Students learned techniques like "What words do I know that start this this letter?" and “What do the pictures in the story show?" and “What words would make sense given the parts of the sentence I understand?" and so on. It seemed to work well!
Eaton
One of the biggest perceived benefits was that it skipped over a lot of the rote memorization, drilling, and "grind" work that young students often struggled with — it let them engage quickly with the actual stories and texts that could make reading meaningful and fun.
Reading Recovery blew up, spreading to the UK and the US. It was super influential in the 80s, and many of its proponents argued that phonics was fundamentally flawed in comparison. A relic.
Eaton
By the 90s it was big business — central to a bunch of US education reforms, backed by curriculum publishers and backed by the professional reputations of a bunch of experts. The new approach wasn't just for struggling readers, it was *how reading should be taught*.
But it was based on some huge misunderstandings, and as more and more students taught with those techniques grew up, problems became apparent.
Eaton
As students graduated to more complex subjects and the reading material became more complex, the “hunt for clues" strategy fell apart. No pictures, denser text, a larger lexicon, teachers who didn't have time to help with the “puzzle" of each new word… By middle school and high school, huge numbers of students were suffering.
Eaton
Whole Language advocates had theories (funding, improved word-hunting techniques, better environments…). But subsequent research — particularly new brain imaging techniques — revealed a more fundamental problem.
The “puzzle-solving" approach helped students guess meaning from context. But neglecting the sub-word building blocks from phonics, the basic elements that connected written language to spoken language, left students without tools to *decipher* new words.
Eaton
The puzzle-solving techniques that had worked well for struggling students weren't "a better way to read" — they were coping skills, and turning them into the focus of the curriculum was doomed.
Re-integrating phonics for a blended approach improved outcomes, but it took decades for the new research to really shift things. The funding, the investment in curriculum, the professional reputations… even to this day there's still pushback against “outdated" skill-based phonics approaches.
Eaton
@ksenzee Yyyyyyyup. It's a complex space, and I think the worst outcome is for folks to smugly condemn “academics" for abandoning "the tried and true" when most of this stuff emerged out of earnest attempts to address places where the "tried and true" wasn't working well
Mike Switzer
@eaton
My kid didn't really learn phonics, certainly didn't drill them in school. I don't know how he ever learned to spell anything.
Katherine Senzee
@KidOrnery @eaton A few kids pick up reading naturally, just by being read to. Other kids don't need full-on phonics drilling: they get taught the basic idea that, say, F makes a ffff sound, and they figure out how to apply it. It's the kids who struggle with reading who really need the phonics drills, so it's painfully ironic that those are precisely the kids who get put into Reading Recovery–type programs.
Eaton
@jakob Ah, like, when the written language *theoretically* shares the same lexicon as the spoken language but it's actually a different dialect?
jakob.pxi
@eaton I have a sociolinguistic jargon word at the tip of my tongue that I feel might be relevant in a US context: When learning a writing system requires learning a new standard variety or at the extreme, an L2. I remember examples from standard German (Switzerland) or Arabic.
Is a similar distance to L1-variety a factor (e.g. via AAV and Spanish) and potentially exacerbated through the English spelling conventions (re: ghoti / fish) a US idiosyncracy in literacy?
Eaton
@aintist Exactly. That was the "hitting the wall when the complexity of the material ramped up" problem, everything I've read suggests that was super common
Aileen M
Whole reading probably delayed teachers noticing my kids learning disability.
At 3rd grade she didn’t know the majority of letter sounds but she managed to hit reading levels by memorizing every common word as a sight words.
Nobody realized she didn’t know phonics until she was tested near the end of third grade.
Eaton
@FeralRobots Friends and I always joke that you can always spot someone who was homeschooled (aka, us) by the huge vocabulary and the incomprehensible pronunciation, heh
FeralRobots
@eaton I can see my grandkid being taught using a blended approach. They understand sounding out words, & understand coaching to figure out words from context. (I learned in a blended way, though in retrospect I think that was self-taught - I was so far in advance of my grade level that I was reading a lot of words I never had occasion to pronounce. E.g. I was literally in my 30s when i realized one day that 'misled' was pronounced 'mis-led', not 'meiseled.'
Eaton
…And that's my intro to a talk about how badly visual page builders in CMSs have screwed over content teams
Eaton
@eatings i’ve got a *queue* of shitposts waiting, lol
david
@eaton Next, do one about the divine right of kings and how executives who like to play Supreme Creative Director have shaped decades of trends in the CMS industry
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