Sometimes the axon highways seem to lay themselves out. My daughter Laura suddenly started reading the summer before kindergarten. (“It’s hard to believe that “knock” starts with a “k,” she said, continuing to read her a bedtime story about Amanda Pyg.) But even she didn’t become a complete reader in her own right. All children need to learn the relationship between letters and meaningful sounds. For some this is more difficult than for others. “Maybe instead of four stripes you have two,” Gaab said, “or instead of a smooth surface you have a bumpy surface.” Caroline had a large vocabulary and was read to just as often as Laura, both at home and at school, and had just as many colorful plastic alphabet magnets stuck to the refrigerator in her kitchen. But she needed teachers who understood that literacy doesn't come naturally, especially for children with dyslexia.
Ten years ago, Emily Hanford, a senior correspondent for American Public Media, researched a story about college-level remedial reading courses. She became interested in dyslexia and then literacy in general, and in 2022 released the hugely influential podcast series “Sold a Story” about teaching reading in American schools. The main argument is that teachers across the country are using teaching methods and materials that have long been proven not only ineffective, but also counterproductive. Such methods, Hanford showed, are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how children learn to read. They encourage beginning readers to look for clues in the illustrations and make inferences based on context, word length, plot, and other clues, relying only incidentally on the sounds represented by the letters. The idea is that as children gain deduction skills, the mechanical side will essentially take care of itself.
Proficient reading involves many elements. A popular metaphor is the “reading rope”, created by psychologist Hollis Scarborough in 2001. It depicts eight “strands” that readers weave together as they gain skill. These areas include not only understanding the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations, but also elements of language understanding such as vocabulary, grammar, reasoning, and basic knowledge. All strands are needed. According to Hanford, issues related to word recognition, including phonological awareness and decoding, are often neglected. This is detrimental to many students and is disastrous for children with dyslexia.
Antipathy to phonetic spelling is sometimes associated with the 19th-century American educator Horace Mann, who described the letters of the alphabet as “skeletal, bloodless, ghostly phantoms” and advocated teaching children to recognize words as individual units. A later, more powerful influence was Marie Clay, a New Zealand teacher and researcher who studied schoolchildren learning to read and concluded in the 1960s that understanding the relationships between letters and sounds was not necessary. Hanford, in the second episode of The Sold Story, says, “Her core idea was that good readers are good problem solvers. They are like detectives looking for clues.” The best clues, according to Clay, are things like context and sentence structure. Frank Smith, a British psycholinguist, came to the same conclusion. He argued that to a good reader the printed word is like an ideogram. “The worst readers are those who try to pronounce unfamiliar words according to the rules of phonetics,” he wrote in 1992.
There were always voices against it. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published the article “Why Johnny Can't Read,” a brutal indictment of whole-word methods. “If they had their way, our teachers never Tell children that there are letters and that each letter represents a sound,” Flesch writes. To illustrate the problem, he recounts a story told by a literacy researcher about a boy who could read the word “children” on a card but not in the book. (The boy explained that he recognized the card because someone had stained it.) Flesch's book spent months on the best-seller lists, but teaching methods like the ones he apparently destroyed were still widely used.
The two most popular reading programs today are Units of Study, whose primary author is Lucy Calkins, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, authored by Irene Fountas and Gay Soo Pinnell. Both books harken back to the work of people like Clay and Smith, and both are sold by the same educational publisher. They remain ingrained in school systems, even though scientific research has shown that their theoretical underpinnings are flawed. Technology that allows researchers to track people's eye movements as they read has demonstrated, for example, that good readers actually decipher words by carefully, albeit quickly, looking at letters and letter combinations. Dehaene writes that “eight” and “EIGHT“, which consist of different visual features, are initially encoded by different neurons in the primary visual area, but are gradually recoded until they become virtually indistinguishable.” If fluent readers are able to read familiar words in a way that appears to recognize ideograms, it is because they have analyzed them phonetically during previous encounters, prompting their brains to create persistent neural pathways linking spelling, sound, and meaning.
