Expanding upon the podcast Sold A Story, writer Kendra Hurley tells her personal story in Slate of trying to compensate for the lack of phonics instruction in public schools:
I began reading the research on how kids learn to read and versed myself in the various evidence-based reading interventions. I searched for tutors trained to deliver those interventions (usually starting at about $100 a session). Once we found a tutor, my husband and I took turns overseeing my son’s reading homework, assigned by the tutor, after his regular homework—a routine that often led to full-on meltdowns. When it became clear that my daughter was also among the roughly half of all kids who will not read fluidly without explicit phonics instruction, I left my job, in part to help. I also embarked on a doomed crusade to persuade our school’s administration that—never mind what their graduate education programs had told them—they needed to start teaching phonics in the early grades, and now.
The city, I soon discovered, was crawling with parents like me, who were knee-deep in trying to learn how kids read and teach their children to do it. On the playground, we swapped emails of tutors like baseball cards and marveled at the fact that many of our children’s peers—the ones in the other half—had somehow started reading without all this effort. Some parents paid for tutoring by taking out loans. Others dipped into savings. To have time and energy for the lessons, many of us cut out extras, like music lessons or sports, or never began them in the first place.
Hurley ends her piece with, “RIP Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. You helped turn learning to read into a rich family’s game.”
Public libraries, of course, have always provided programs that lay a strong foundation for early literacy. Should they now explicitly provide phonics instruction to fill the gap in student learning? School Library Journal debated this idea in 2020, with one public librarian stating:
“We’re not classroom teachers,” says Alea Perez, Kids Library head at the Elmhurst Public Library (EPL) in Illinois. “That’s something a lot of librarians can forget. The nature of librarians is to be everything to everyone. We can take it a bit too far.”
The article also included this viewpoint:
For many librarians, storytime is the closest they come to teaching reading. Marti Valasek, a library associate at EPL, says her main goal during storytimes is to reinforce the love of reading. But she was a teacher for 13 years and admits that it’s natural to point out rhyming patterns, ask her audience what the first letter of the word is, or encourage them to shout out words that repeat on every page.
Valasek also has children use visual clues to guess at a word’s meaning when that is appropriate. “I call it balanced literacy,” she says of freely mixing phonics and whole language techniques.
After decades in public libraries I can certainly attest to the issue of trying to be all things to all people, so perhaps a middle ground approach of beefing up collections of phonics books is the answer. Or perhaps it is time to drop some other activities to focus on bringing children back up to speed with reading.
Children’s librarians, please weigh in!
Top image: Jolly-Phonics-Reading.jpg/ Wikimedia Commons
I haven't kept up at all about the whole language vs. phonics debate in reading instruction in recent years, but my distinct impression is that many more people (experts and non-experts alike) are returning to phonics instruction. One of my experts on anything language-related is John McWhorter because of his linguistics expertise. Here's an article he wrote on his personal experience several years ago:
Many faddish reading instruction methods are due to ideas within Colleges of Education, of course, and they need to be questioned.
Relatedly, another scholar who's been derided in the past is E.D. Hirsch who wrote the "Cultural Literacy" book years ago. But his ideas about the necessity of background knowledge as students get a bit older, for their reading facility. His Core Knowledge Project is resonating now with more schools, curriculum designers, and parents and many are using it.
More analysis from the Hechinger Report on the Core Knowledge Project suggests some caveats from a recent major study in Colorado schools. Phonics makes a big difference, almost certainly, and so does concentrating on core knowledge--but only through third grade (no significant reading gains identified later). Not unexpected at all that the Report suggests more research is needed!.
Nice McWhorter piece! Another option public libraries could consider is holding programs for parents on teaching their children to read (as opposed to libraries taking up the instruction).
I'd also point out that the challenges for students in reading multiply over time, from early years to college, and this directly effects librarians' abilities to teach IL, conduct research consultations and advisories, and hold reference interviews. The problems with deep reading, of academic texts, are expertly addressed by Margy MacMillan and others, including in this paper given at the ACRL 2015 conference:
As useful as I think Caulfield and Wineberg's SIFT method for locating and evaluating web-based information, I think the the problem remains with deeper reading and contextualizing of resources found , and the connections among them (and I readily acknowledge the SIFT method aims to create better fact-checking and validation through less time spent on distractions on the web). Still, the issue with deeper reading as fundamental to understanding, remains. This is a developmental problem that comes later but whose roots may lie in early reading problems caused by faddish reading instruction techniques. Hence my previous comment, below, about The Core Knowledge Project of E.D. Hirsch.
All good points. Thanks for the links and the additional info on this topic. I was actually hoping someone else would write about it here since I am less well-versed but I thought the Slate piece was a nice illustration of the frustration of parents who are going through this.
Thank goodness these parents engage in a little DYOR 🤷 Nothing like a nearly 50% failure rate to justify skepticism in the 'experts'!
I haven't kept up at all about the whole language vs. phonics debate in reading instruction in recent years, but my distinct impression is that many more people (experts and non-experts alike) are returning to phonics instruction. One of my experts on anything language-related is John McWhorter because of his linguistics expertise. Here's an article he wrote on his personal experience several years ago:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-not-whole-word-best-teaching-reading/591127/
Many faddish reading instruction methods are due to ideas within Colleges of Education, of course, and they need to be questioned.
Relatedly, another scholar who's been derided in the past is E.D. Hirsch who wrote the "Cultural Literacy" book years ago. But his ideas about the necessity of background knowledge as students get a bit older, for their reading facility. His Core Knowledge Project is resonating now with more schools, curriculum designers, and parents and many are using it.
https://www.coreknowledge.org/about-us/e-d-hirsch-jr/
And it's strongly evidence-based:
https://www.coreknowledge.org/about-us/e-d-hirsch-jr/
More analysis from the Hechinger Report on the Core Knowledge Project suggests some caveats from a recent major study in Colorado schools. Phonics makes a big difference, almost certainly, and so does concentrating on core knowledge--but only through third grade (no significant reading gains identified later). Not unexpected at all that the Report suggests more research is needed!.
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-inside-the-latest-reading-study-that-everyone-is-talking-about/
Nice McWhorter piece! Another option public libraries could consider is holding programs for parents on teaching their children to read (as opposed to libraries taking up the instruction).
I'd also point out that the challenges for students in reading multiply over time, from early years to college, and this directly effects librarians' abilities to teach IL, conduct research consultations and advisories, and hold reference interviews. The problems with deep reading, of academic texts, are expertly addressed by Margy MacMillan and others, including in this paper given at the ACRL 2015 conference:
https://mru.arcabc.ca/islandora/object/mru%3A239/datastream/PDF/view
As useful as I think Caulfield and Wineberg's SIFT method for locating and evaluating web-based information, I think the the problem remains with deeper reading and contextualizing of resources found , and the connections among them (and I readily acknowledge the SIFT method aims to create better fact-checking and validation through less time spent on distractions on the web). Still, the issue with deeper reading as fundamental to understanding, remains. This is a developmental problem that comes later but whose roots may lie in early reading problems caused by faddish reading instruction techniques. Hence my previous comment, below, about The Core Knowledge Project of E.D. Hirsch.
All good points. Thanks for the links and the additional info on this topic. I was actually hoping someone else would write about it here since I am less well-versed but I thought the Slate piece was a nice illustration of the frustration of parents who are going through this.