I am not one who listens to podcasts. Unless it is a podcast about the Brady Bunch or The Facts of Life, I probably will not listen to it (I am being 100% honest). HOWEVER, recently on his blog, Eric Richards wrote up a post about the podcast "Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read?" Published in 2018 and produced by educational reporter/journalist Emily Hanford, this audio documentary details and questions the "whole language/cueing system approach" for teaching students how to read (instead of a phonics approach). As I said, I normally do not listen to educational podcasts, but THIS PODCAST WAS EYE-OPENING to me! I had heard of this particular reading method, but I had NO IDEA what it entailed or that it was not based on any scientific research. Yet, over these years I have noticed a decline in students' reading ability and literacy - I just chalked it up to students not reading as much, COVID years, etc. Now I was learning essentially it was due to how students were being taught to read.
Due to such an overwhelming public reaction to her radio documentary. Hanford followed up with a podcast series called "Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong," and I have voraciously binge-listened to this over and over again in the past two weeks. Recently I asked my high school Language Arts colleagues about what they have witnessed over these years regarding student reading abilities, and many of them said the same thing: Many students today possess a false literacy. A large number are not actually reading the words at all but are just either good/bad guessers.
With Eric's permission, I am reprinting his blog post here, because not only do I think that it is that good, but he asks SO MANY good questions about how all of this applies to the world language classroom.
I invite you to listen to the podcast "Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read?" - Eric posts a link to it on his blog. Then I ask you to continue with the podcast series "Sold a Story," because it goes into much more depth. I feel a bit of a connection to the information presented in "Sold a Story," because my district Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) is mentioned in Episode 5 as one of biggest customers of the Heinemann publishing company (we are the 11th largest district in the nation), and Missy Purcell, a former balanced literacy trainer who became disillusioned with the cueing system of reading due to seeing it not addressing her own son's dyslexia and reading problems and is now a leading advocate against Reading Recovery, was a former teacher in GCPS. My district has now dropped the Reading Recovery program and has embraced the science of reading curriculum.
I am not naïve or trying to oversimplify the solution that the teaching of phonics will solve student literacy or that we should spend all of our time on phonics instruction. We know that poverty plays a HUGE role in literacy. Yet, these reading issues were showing up just as much in upper-class, white districts, but students were able to afford to pay for reading tutors who then explicitly taught phonics to address their deficiencies (Listen to episodes 11, 12, and 13 about Steubenville and how the Success for All program transformed this high poverty district's entire school environment into becoming one of the top-scoring reading programs in Ohio). As schools, we also need to greatly increase students' background knowledge of words so that their brains can make mental connections with words which they read and to give them plenty of level-appropriate, compelling material to read at an early age. However, we need to realize that we are not giving most students a chance if they cannot read words first.
Below is Eric's original post - if you have any comments related to Eric's post below, please post on his blog so that he can respond:
Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read? – A Podcast
I wanted to share one of the more impactful podcasts that I listened to recently: “Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?”
The podcast can be found on many podcast platforms, including: Apple, Spotify and many more; simply do a search wherever you listen to podcasts and you’ll most likely find it.
Here is the link to the website, which includes the transcript, graphs, and pictures:
“Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?”
Although the podcast does not directly address L2 language acquisition and reading, I feel that it has implications for world language education.
Here are some takeaways from the podcast, which ultimately highlights how ineffective reading instruction (in the L1) affects student literacy in the U.S.
- Many American schools use ineffective reading instruction that hinders literacy development.
- According to decades of research, phonics-based instruction is crucial for teaching reading.
- Popular cueing systems, which encourage guessing words, lack scientific backing.
- Explicit teaching of sound-letter relationships is needed, because reading is not a natural process.
- Teacher preparation programs often neglect evidence-based reading strategies.
- Resistance to phonics stems from entrenched beliefs in the educational system & insufficient training.
- Scientific approaches benefit both native and additional language learners.
- Efforts are growing to realign reading instruction with cognitive science findings.
As I stated earlier, this was an impactful podcast for me. Not only because I see the reading struggles in my own classroom, but also because I want to know what the implications are for world language education.
In short, I have questions:
- What are the overall implications for world language education, especially reading and acquisition?
- If students struggle to read in their L1, how does it (specifically) affect their L2 literacy and acquisition?
- Will reading in their L2 help with literacy in their L1?
- Important: If reading is not an innate skill and explicit teaching of sound-letter connections is necessary, does this imply that we also need to explicitly teach reading/phonics in the L2?
- What implications does this have for FVR/SSR? If students struggle to read in their L1, what are they getting out of FVR/SSR?
- How does this information change/shape future world language teacher preparation and training?
- Will there be resistance to any changes?
I had the chance to bounce some of my questions off language educators. (Our conversations have been great!) Now I would like to invite you to listen to the podcast and share your thoughts!
Please share any thoughts, feelings, experiences, and/or expertise that you have relating to this and world language education!
And if you can help answer any of my questions, it would be much appreciated!
I look forward to the conversation!
I've gone through a similar process as a Latin teacher who also teaches high school English. As I've come to realize the importance of reading fluency in English class, and have spent more time practicing it, I've realized that it's also crucial in Latin class as well. Having students read practice reading Latin out loud is so crucial.
ReplyDeleteBut the more I think about it, the more I realize this is just common sense, and not primarily ivory tower research. I remember reading Virgil in college. I would always read a line or sentence out loud several times before even bothering with the meaning - somehow I intuitively knew that the one was crucial for the other.
In the past I've been shy about having students who aren't strong readers read Latin out loud. But now I realize that making the class a safe place for that is simply a classroom management issue that it's my job to figure out, because it is those readers who need the most practice reading out loud. This year a dyslexic student who fortunately has very little academic anxiety asked me, "can we spend more time on pronunciation?" I was a little bit taken aback, since no one had ever made that request before, but then I realized what a good suggestion that was, and that more practice with pronunciation was exactly what he needed.
Quam maximas gratias for sharing this. I can also attest to the steep drop-off in student reading ability, no matter the background. The biggest thing that I've noticed is the fact that students just "lose the plot", as it were, after the first 2-3 letters of a word. Whole syllables disappear, or they'll leave letters out, or they just straight up struggle with similar consonant sounds (b/p, d/t, etc...). Choral reading in class has suffered the most, and I've been using it less and less in class as it's become more and more common for whole groups of students to get hopelessly tangled up in mispronunciation. I've thought about upping my use of dictatio in the future, especially earlier in Latin I, to compensate, as well as asking students to do more reading out loud at home and record on Padlet or such.
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