In the spring of 2022, only 67% of third graders were reading at grade level in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to the report. Following the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report, the U.S. sees the biggest reading decline since 1980. Children in underserved communities lose six months of their normal reading comprehension. Loss of learning has become a popular term for an international crisis that has prompted governments to look for ways to accelerate learning.
This context has sparked major considerations regarding educational policy and methods. After all, even before the pandemic, reading scores were unimpressive: according to his NAEP score in 2019, only 34% of students were good at reading. By ‘proficient’, these scores indicate that students can not only pronounce words, but also understand meaning from the text. This low starting point pre-pandemic was real problem. Someone or something must be to blame. According to a recent New York Times article and the widely-heard podcast “Sold a Story,” Columbia University professor Lucy Calkins seems to be descending into that mantle.
It turns out that the reading wars created a false dichotomy between meaning and phonics, producing reading first and later as the primary driving force.
Calkin’s Balanced Reading Curriculum is used in more than a quarter of US schools. We focused on three cues that students must follow to become readers: semantics (do the words make sense?), syntax (do the words fit grammatically?), and writing. (Can you guess the sound from the first letter?). In short, this curriculum is inadequate. As “sold the story”” Apparently, Balanced Reading was a descendant of Mary Clay’s Reading Recovery Program, which was developed in New Zealand and used around the world. Third and fourth graders who used the program lagged behind those who did not use the program. Criminal identified.
In the 50 years since Reading Recovery and the Balanced Curriculum were introduced, the science of reading has come a long way. In fact, this period of scientific discovery can be seen as the end of the so-called reading war between all-word education and phonics. That is, mastering the letter-sound correspondences that enable readers of alphabet systems to translate printed material into language. , whose ‘b’ translates to ‘buh’). Brain research helps determine that phonics wins the reading war Did. This was not the case for those who learned the whole word method.
Today, the brain circuits underlying reading are well understood. His professor Stanislas DeHaene at the University of Paris is one of his leaders in this science. Reading, unlike speech, is a cultural phenomenon that must be learned. Professor Stephen Pinker once said, “Children learn languages like spiders weave their webs.” Reads don’t work this way. Children need to visually recognize letters, combine letters, and relate sounds to the language and semantic systems in their brains. In fact, DeHaene claims that humans have adopted a region of the brain, the visual word-forming region.In other words, if you can have children make a sound Words, they can harness the vast resources of their language to glean meaning from print.
Children are the point necessary Learn phonics and letters and pronounce correspondences. Methods like Clay and Calkins, which are based on the conventional theory of reading the entire language, do not solve this problem. As the podcast “Sold a Story” suggests, Calkin’s method can produce readers who: pretend to read Not someone who can actually read new words when they come across print.
Phonics alone, on the other hand, does not create a strong reader, although it is necessary. A brilliantly written review by Ann Castles and colleagues states that children need to do more than translate letters to sounds: they have a rich knowledge base and a growing language system and We need to make contact. that’s all As for the phonics, there were many children sitting in lines and barking words for a long time. Many of these children experienced a fourth grade slump when their phonics knowledge was not translated into meaningful information. According to Jeanne Chall’s classic 2003 study, 4th grade slump students who have learned how to decipher may not have the rich linguistic underpinnings necessary to understand meaning from spoken words. Children need to learn in a way that is meaningful, fun, positive and engaging.
It turns out that the reading wars created a false dichotomy between meaning and phonics, first as the primary driving force, and later, proficient reading. The scientific answer is more subtle. You need both phonics and meaning to be a strong reader. Phonics is a tool that allows children to break into the alphabet system. To understand that the squiggles on the page relate to vocabulary words. Creating meaning is key to finding the richness of a story and the motivation to read.
U.S. students’ reading comprehension is low and has remained low for decades. The pandemic has exacerbated this serious educational problem. And this prompted a lot of reflection in education and public squares. But this is an area where science is well developed.
When science moves from the laboratory to policy and classroom practice, we tend to oversimplify science. Simplification comes at a price. Even today, policymakers are under pressure to understand that language and literacy are intertwined in all reading curricula. Teach reading in a way that supports the fundamentals of phonics, while connecting with children’s lived experiences to make them fun, motivating and meaningful. Don’t confuse pedagogy with content. Teaching phonics does not require drilling down into children, but can help them learn meaning and engage actively at the same time.
