Ann Cameron's thoughts on literacy
Literacy and libraries
To quote a dear childhood friend of mine, Patricia Arnevik Thompson: "Literacy is so much more than just reading. It's allowing words to convey experiences and form dreams."
If we want really literate children, we need to encourage children to imagine and to write about their dreams and their hopes, their rebellions, their frustrations, and their happiness: to use the written word as a means to express and understand themselves.
If we want to have literate children with good values, in a more peaceful and understanding society, we also need to use and support our public and school libraries. We need to see that good libraries are accessible to everyone, and that book collections continue to grow--and aren't sacrificed to the purchase of computers.
TV and computer games accustom children to violence, to continual action without reflection. The internet is disorganized and unstructured, with as much misinformation as knowledge. But in libraries, the worth of books is evaluated carefully before purchase--and books, unlike computers, don't become obsolete overnight. Books provide action, but teach children also to imagine, to dream, and to think about what people do and why. Good books teach empathy, which, as author Louis Sachar says, is the foundation of moral behavior.
Illiteracy
One out of five adult Americans is functionally illiterate; 40% of minority youth is illiterate; 15% of the work force is functionally illiterate, including 11 percent of professional and managerial workers. The reading ability of American students is average or below the students of other industrialized nations. The U.S. has the largest penal system in the world: more than 2 million people live behind bars, and 60% of them are illiterate. It would seem that teaching everyone to read and investing much more in our schools would save us a lot of money on prisons.
The above statistics are drawn from Marilyn Jager Adams, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print--a book by a leading educational psychologist that reviews studies on methods of teaching reading and discusses what works.
Adams says lots of early reading at home to children is the key factor in their learning to read easily. She says a literature-rich environment in schools is important. She also recommends the explicit teaching of phonics and "phonemic awareness." How, I used to think, could the phonics aspect of her recommendations be wrong? How could it possibly increase illiteracy?
However, many books forcefully argue the limitations of the narrow psychological studies that Adams cites. (One of them, published by the National Council of Teachers of English, is Denny Taylor's Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science: The Political Campaign to Change America's Mind about How Children Learn to Read.)
"Scientific studies," like polls are often designed to "prove" the designer's prejudices. Schools are big business in America, and school boards and politicians are heavily lobbied. Drastic educational measures--for instance, toward universal computer use in the primary grades; on-line home schooling; phonics to be mastered as a subject existing on its own; or the medication of millions of children labeled as "behavior problems"--can bring tremendous financial rewards to those who provide the product. They have powerful motives to be powerfully persuasive.
Since reading that Enron paid consultants, academics and journalists to write articles for the general public supporting its interests, I've become more wary about autmatically agreeing with a chorus of "experts." (See farther on, "What's the Best Way to Teach Reading?" for more about the phonics/whole language controversy.)
How can parents help their children be ready for reading?
Talk to them about the world around them. Ask them questions and answer their questions.
Read aloud to them from very early infancy. Teach them nursery rhymes. Start them on board books, asking them to name animals, colors, everything they see. Show pleasure at their knowledge. Buy a little collection of books for them--like Good Night, Moon; Make Way for Ducklings; Clifford, the Big Red Dog; The Paper-Bag Princess; and poems like Karla Kuskin's The Sky is Always in the Sky. Jim Trelease's The Read-Aloud Handbook abounds in suggestions of favorite children's books children love. When children are two and older, read them their favorite stories, many many times. Repetition is vital to learning to read. Point out individual words to them. Talk to them about the illustrations and the characters. Involve your adult friends in your children's reading. Ask you child, "What was it that happened to Julian in the story we read last night? Tell Aunt Sally about it." It's good for them to know that stories are to be enjoyed, shared and talked about. We talk about the things that are important to us. We talk to the people who are important to us.
At a children's literature conference in the midwest, I asked participants how many had grown up hearing, as I did, "Children should be seen but not heard." Almost half raised their hands. This is very sad. If our children are important to us, we need to show we value them by talking and listening. Children who know they are valued at home have a lot easier time meeting the challenges of school, because they enter school with confidence in themselves.
I live in Guatemala where parents usually have a skill we Americans often lack: they teach the children not just their importance as individual egos, but their importance as part of a family. Children as young as two help with jobs around the house and with the care of younger brothers and sisters. Ideally, everybody makes sacrifices for the good of the family and gets a sense of worth from helping the whole family. This kind of early learning is far more important than teaching children to read. The boys who massacred fellow students at Columbine High School could read well. They had never have let their school down by failing a multiple choice test. They had those supposedly educationally essential personal computers and even their own website. Unfortunately, they lacked any sense that other people had worth, and that part of their own worth came from contributing to the lives of those others. In the United States, we pay a high price for over-teaching competition and individual fulfillment and under-teaching cooperation.
How can teachers enable their students to become good readers?
By talking and listening.
They need to be a real with their students and get to know their students as individuals Some books that will inspire personal teaching are Educating Esme by Esme Raji Codell, Teacher by Sylvia Ashton-Warner; and two books by Sydney Gurewitz Clemens: Pay Attention to the Children: Lessons for Teachers and Parents from Sylvia Ashton-Warner; and The Sun's Not Broken, a Cloud's Just in the Way: On Child-Centered Learning.
A New York professor of education specializing in reading told me that she had classes of kindergartners who came to her almost completely silent. They had almost no experience in talking at home. She organized neighborhood field trips with them, and their excitement at the things they saw and learned led them to talking, and on to drawing and writing about their experiences. By the end of the school year, they could all read.
By example.
Students become readers when they see and share their teachers' curiosity about life and teachers' love of learning. When teachers repress student curiosity and questions, they're repressing the drive to learn..
Some teachers use signs and posters on the walls to encourage children to read with slogans like "Robertson School Readers are the best!"
Ed Kmitt, a second grade teacher in Shaker Heights, Ohio, promotes reading in a way that's much more meaningful. Ed is an artist as well as a teacher, and his teaching reflects that. In his marvelous classroom everything makes clear that art and life and one, that reading and life are one.
The most striking feature of his classroom are large mounted dinosaur heads: Ed makes the armatures and during the course of a school year. his students complete the sculpture using papier-maché.
All around his classroom, sitting on shelves and window ledges, are figurines-- small sculptures of people reading--some of people reading alone, most of children and adults sitting together with books. Children can touch the figurines and hold them. Without a word, the figurines teach that love and reading go together. Ed found the figurines in second-hand stores and at garage sales. He says none of them cost him more than eight dollars and most were cheaper.. Even more than the dinosaurs, they establish the atmosphere of his classroom and teach that learning is about life and part of it--not a frightening obligation imposed on children by distant authorities.
He told me he began to pay attention to how students model themselves on him when he noticed that they were all saying "Terrific!" at every opportunity--and he realized the habit was his own. To help them expand their vocabularies he gave up "Terrific!" and turned (if I remember right) to "Splendid!" "Magnificent!" "Excellent!" and "Stupendous," and other vocabulary-expanding words.
Through good school libraries.
Classrooms need reading nooks where children can read for pleasure from a changing collection of books drawn from a well-stocked school library. A committee of teachers and the librarian need to choose new titles every year for the collection. The school librarian needs assistants for the librarian so she has time to do book talks and stories with children and still manage the circulation of books within the school and for at-home borrowing. Unfortunately, all around the country, schools are cutting back on books and libraries to spend on computers, endless new standardized tests, and now, expensive phonics programs.
What about stimulating reading through praise and encouragement?
That was part of my recipe in an earlier version of this website. "Students need lots of praise and encouragement, plus the gentle insistence that they learn to spell and pronounce word correctly."
Now I think I was wrong. Sure, there's nothing wrong with
praise and encouragement, but the real motive for learning is
the inherent satisfaction of knowing things that are interesting
and useful. Adults praise a child who is learning to walk, but
the biggest help the adult gives is in being a model of how to
walk, in concretely showing what walking is and the farther reach
and power in the world it provides. The child's motivation comes
from inside, and his satisfaction in his new powers give him
the desire to learn more. Help is fine, but "Gentle insistence"--often
none too gentle-- and "lots" of praise come into play
when a child is forced to pursue an activity that has no intrinsic
rewards.
But then, what about Method?
In a previous version of this website, I advised--following Marilyn Adams, the educational psychologist--that "phonemic awareness"--attention to sounds and syllables-- be taught in kindergarten. This advice ignores the obvious--that children who have learned to talk already have phonemic awareness.
Again following Marilyn Adams, I said: "Every sound and every letter is processed by good readers. So to teach reading, it's best to go slow, with short texts that are full of meaning to be discussed, as well as phonemes to be sounded and spellings to be learned."
Now, I'm not so sure. "Texts full of meaning" are good, of course. But how much time can be devoted to talking about meaning, relationships, "funny parts" and "exciting parts" and "favorite parts" in books, if every syllable and phoneme must be pored over? Does all this "processing" have to be made conscious for children to become good readers? Must they have to have special textbooks to learn the "processing? They certainly didn't need conscious awareness of every muscle and nerve to do the "processing" necessary to learn to walk. If they did, we'd all still be on the floor!
Isn't forcing young children to consciousness of their phonemes, outside the context of reading--actually driving them back to an earlier learning stage--analagous to stopping walkers from walking in order to give them explicit advice on how to crawl?
Like many people, over the past few years--starting in my case from some article I read in Time Magazine--I got the impression that "whole language" teachers didn't use phonics--and that's why "our children aren't learning to read." I also thought "whole language" teachers encourage children to be careless-- to guess at words, rather than to really be sure what they're reading. Maybe some do. But I've become convinced, in a dialogue with Ruby Clayton, a kindergarten-first grade teacher in Indianapolis, that excessive phonics is more than a mistake, it's a disaster.
Ruby is a member of the very valuable organization TAWL--Teachers Applying Whole Language--which has an Internet "listserve" for sharing teaching ideas--a site that could be very useful for parents, too. You can find and read these ideas and thoughts at http://listserv.arizona.edu/archives/tawl.htm. You don't have to join to read.
Here, with Ruby's permission are excerpts from her e-mails
about how she teaches--and about what's really going on with
phonics in the classroom. The three whole language "cueing
systems" for "getting a word" that she refers
to are: 1) sounding it out; 2) trying to arrive at the word from
thinking about the meaning of the sentence as a whole; 3) looking
at the book's illustration to see if a clue to the word lies
there. The idea isn't to encourage wild guessing; it's to encourage
thinking.
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My first graders, 100% African American and poor, are all readers.
They fight over books and want to read. When they get to a word
they don't know, they have three ways of figuring it out. Systematic
and explicit phonics programs deny children the use of the other
two cueing systems until they have learned the code to fluency.
This type learning does not teach thinking, just following rules.
WL teachers let children learn the code as they are learning
to read wonderful books.
What I have found is that children who are taught to rely on
breaking the code first often become "word callers,"
and comprehension is nowhere in sight. Many times when kids sound
out words, the resulting word is so distorted that it doesn't
sound like any word they've ever heard before. If the child has
no other cueing system to depend on, he keeps right on reading
as if nothing is wrong. Self-correction or re-reading doesn't
occur. No thinking occurs. They go right on reading as if authors
would write things that don't make sense.
The article [advocating phonics in the March, 2002 Scientific
American] is based on the small sample of studies (about
43) reviewed by the NICHD reading committee. The committee threw
out any studies from the 100,000 they could have reviewed, that
were not quantitative. This meant that all the research of folk
like Ken and Yetta Goodman, Vygotsy, Piaget and others could
not be looked at. Emergent readers are to go from the abstract
(letters, sounds, and phonemes) to the concrete (reading and
comprehending).
At any rate, I can see why politics and big business want systematic
explicit phonics instruction, particulaly for African American
and poor children, but not necessarily for middle and upper class.
And it's because the way in which the instruction is given must
be by implanting fear and control, which gives them power.
Whole Language is based on love and trust. On the belief that
children are not stupid, and can come to many generalizations
themselves, given a listening and attentive adult to guide them.
They learn to decode, but they learn to make meaning first and
foremost.
You might want to read Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors
of Science: The Political Campaign to Change America's Mind about
How Children Learn to Read. I find it fascinating! In the
book, Denny Taylor reviews the "scientific research"
that is being used to change the way America teaches reading.
I think you might be surprised at what passed for "scientific,"
or what passed for good research. Much of what is being quoted
from the Scientific American article is from the work of Stanovich
and Foorman. And after reading about those studies... [from]
which national laws are being passed., I am incensed. Incensed
because the children that will be hurt by this are African American.
The only thing they will learn in these schools will be how to
follow orders, keep their mouth shut and not ask questions. And
their teachers will be cautioned not to think for themselves
but to follow the script. After all, they know nothing, and some
expert who has done "scientific research" knows it
all.
Tell ya what. Let's see what the results are in five years. Let's
see how those poor and minority children are faring. Let's see
if the achievement gap is widening or narrowing.
Think that will count for scientific research?
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With the new education bill "No Child Left Behind,"
whole language ways of teaching phonics within the context of
good reading are being challenged, and in some cases eradicated
because supposedly whole language teaching is not supported by
the "scientific research" studies that the NICHD looked
at.
Whole states are mandating scripted phonics based reading programs
like Success for All, DISTAR, Open Court and Reading Mastery.
These programs believe children should learn to break the [phonics]
code before they are given great things to read.
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When my oldest was in kindergarten, he was reading something
for me that sounded like " Th-uh buh-oy is guh-o-ing to
ruh-i-duh his buh-i-k." I said, "Why are you sounding
out that word (boy)?
You already know what that is." He said, "Oh."
And then read the sentence perfectly. It was as if he thought
reading was sounding out, and had nothing to do with making meaning.
Kids begun on decodable texts with sentences like "The fat
cat can zap the rat," don't think reading is suppose to
make much sense. It's a game of getting the words right. The
text has to be artificial because there are only so many words
one can use when the only letters they have learned are r,f,c,a,t,n,p
and z.
There is so much more to whole language teaching than just starting
kids in wonderful books. Phonics and phonemic awareness is taught
through reading, writing, listening and speaking. Phonics skills
are applied as students use the sounds they hear in words to
write meaningful texts, beginning in kindergarten. Writing their
own stories is where phonics is most appropriate. Instead of
filling in workbook pages with "b" for book or bat,
my students write whatever sounds they are phonemically aware
of, in the
words and sentences they write for authentic purposes. As their
awareness of letters and sounds improves, so does their ability
to put meaning down on paper. They are allowed to approximate
the spelliings of words, are conferred with on how to hear more
of the sounds (phonemic awareness), and given another go. Their
reading and writing improves daily with the help of a knowledgeable
adult, just as their speaking ability approved daily when they
first said the word ba-ba and Mom said, "You want your bottle!"
The more they heard it said correctly, the better their speech
became. And the
more the kids read, to, and with adults, they improve.
John Holt said in his book Learning All the Time, that
it only takes about 30 good sessions with an attentive adult
for a kid to learn to read. And I know that much is true. But
the adult must be sure the child is trying to make meaning, is
thinking instead of saying mindless utterances, and must give
the child wait time, before rushing to correct or giving the
right word. I can't count the times I heard a kid read a page,
miss several words, go back and reread, and then fix his own
mistakes. Adults do it all the time. Whenever we are reading
something and run across a word that doesn't make
sense in the context of what we are reading, we stop ourselves,
reread, and often find that we misread a word, not because we
didn't know the word, but because we thought the text was going
to say something else. And mostly because we were thinking about
the meaning of the text in the first place. Kids not taught to
make meaning first, will sound out and keep on going. And then
their teachers wonder why these great little word callers can't
comprehend when they get to fourth grade.
I think it was the CIERA website that sponsored a teacher conference
titled: Now That They Can Read the Words, How Do We Get Them
to Comprehend?
WL teachers seek comprehension always, from the first day of
learning. And you just can't comprehend much from Zip and Zap
type text.
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I remember when my oldest was two. I had put all the magnetized
letters on the refrigerator. One day he said, "What's this?"
That's an M. "What's that?" he said. That's a W. About
an hour later as he was running into the kitchen I heard him
say, "I'm going to get my M and my W." And he knew
which was which, because for some reason those letters were important
to him. He went to school reading some books well, but was met
by a strict Open Court philosophy. From then on it was sound
out first!
He was not in a public school, but an elite independent school.
His kindergarten Metropolitan standardized test scores were at
the 96th percentile over all, with a perfect score on the math.
He went to first grade, still Open Court, and suddenly he just
couldn't seem to "get" the reading. By second grade
they were demanding outside testing and saying he was Dyslexic.
I was told that St. Richards was not the school for him, and
was told to take him out in February of 2nd grade. I refused
since they weren't going to refund my tuition. He spent 3rd and
4th grade in a school for dyslexic children. Also private. He
learned nothing much. Fifth grade,
I put him in my public school. He's now 20, graduated from Cleveland
Ohio Tech in Autobody, and is home now and working. He's a great
kid. And I hate how I let a phonics first school mess him up.
But I was ignorant then . . .
Enter my daughter, my child prodigy. She was reading books
like Are You My Mother before she went to kindergarten
with NO phonics lessons. She attended my school and continues
to do well in all of the many activities she's in. A tenth grader.
Her phonics lessons came in the form of answering her questions
about letters and sounds in the context of real reading.
My nine year old was at a private Montessori school from preschool
through first grade. In first grade, they began using Modern
Curriculum Press's reading program. By the time he came along,
I wasn't doing as much with him as I had been able to do with
the other two, but I could tell he was very bright. Still, it
was a surprise to me that he was having reading problems. I talked
with his teacher and found out that he was still working on short
/e/ words (this was the fifth month of school!).
Then he would get to go through short i, o, and u. I asked
his teacher what kinds of books he was reading. She said when
he finished the short vowel words and long vowel words he would
be able to read books. I died inside. I began letting him read
wonderful books for me at home. When he came to words he didn't
know, he only knew to sound them out. I said to try rereading,
think of what makes sense, look at the pictures, and then see
if the word you think it should be matches the letters. His words,
"MY TEACHER SAYS I HAVE TO SOUND OUT!" Part of me died
again. And I was mad that he hadn't gotten in to my public school
because it's a magnet program and we take kids by lottery. Luckily,
his number came up for second grade, so he's with me now, and
amazingly is reading quite well.
Parents should know that children learn from the concrete to
the abstract. Letters and sounds are abstract. They carry no
meaning. Words are concrete. Tiny children can learn to read
without any phonics or letter knowlege first, because words have
meaning. I bet your grandson knew his name at a very early age.
He probably had quite a bank of words he recognized instantly.
Once children have some words and books under their belt that
they can read, it is easy to teach them.
My kindergartners learn to read from the first day of school.
I put up "I can read. I can read. I can read!" They
take that home the first day as proof that they are readers.
Each day I teach them one letter and corresponding sound and
we find that letter in the text we are reading for the day. We
listen to hear the letter sound in words found in the texts.
We do shared readings of big books and listen to lots of stories.
They start writing in any way they can. With individual conferring,
I get to know my students well, what they are struggling with,
and teach them what they need to move forward. They read independently,
with partners, in small groups and
with me. I keep my kids two years, so I get to see wonderful
progress.
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