While many of the “science of” education reformers on social media were rushing to uncritically embrace yet another media article on Mississippi reading reform—this time, a call to reject the “miracle” metaphor only to embrace the “marathon” metaphor—a rare event had occurred a couple days before: A nuanced and detailed article on phonics instruction, The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics, by Liana Loewus.
Both articles represent an interesting (and frustrating) phenomenon, backtracking, within the “science of reading” movement. But Loewus’s piece is notable for the opening:
Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies reading science, helped persuade the public of the need for science-based instruction—and now he’s among those sounding the alarm on over-instruction. Reading teachers need not aim to teach every single pattern students will encounter in text, he says; they simply need to teach enough that students can achieve “escape velocity,” or the ability to start cracking the code on their own.
“You do teach them about words, about print. You teach them enough simple phonics patterns so they can start sounding out some words. And then there’s supposed to be a light bulb that goes on,” Seidenberg says.
Researchers call this ability to implicitly pick up patterns and apply them the “self-teaching mechanism,” or “statistical learning”—and many say it’s underrecognized within the science-of-reading movement.
Seidenberg has himself been doing a great deal of backtracking since he was featured in Ground Zero of the “science of reading” movement, Emily Hanford’s Hard Words.
Recently, similar to what had already occurred in England, which embraced the “science of reading” starting in 2006, some reformers are starting to acknowledge that the media and then policy have oversold systematic phonics instruction.
And here is where the frustration comes in. Please consider the comments below on phonics by Stephen Krashen, a literacy expert who embraces whole language:
It will help to distinguish three different views of phonics: (1) intensive, or heavy phonics, (2) basic, or light phonics, and (3) zero phonics. Basic phonics appears to have some use, but there are good reasons why intensive phonics is not the way to improve reading.
Intensive Phonics. This position claims that we learn to read by first learning the rules of phonics, and that we read by sounding out what is on the page, either out-loud or to ourselves (decoding to sound). It also asserts that all rules of phonics must be deliberately taught and consciously learned.
Basic Phonics. According to Basic Phonics, we learn to read by actually reading, by understanding what is on the page. Most of our knowledge of phonics is subconsciously acquired from reading (Smith, 2004: 152).
Conscious knowledge of some basic rules, however, can help children learn to read by making texts more comprehensible. Smith (2004) explains how this can happen (p. 152): The child is reading the sentence ‘The man was riding on the h____’ and cannot read the final word. Given the context and recognition of h, the child can make a good guess as to what the final word is: the reader will know that the word is not donkey and mule. This won’t work every time (some readers might think the missing word was ‘Harley’), but some knowledge of phonics can restrict the possibilities of what the unknown words are.
Basic Phonics is the position of the authors of Becoming a Nation of Readers, a book widely considered to provide strong support for phonics instruction: ‘...phonics instruction should aim to teach only the most important and regular of letter-to-sound relationships ... once the basic relationships have been taught, the best way to get children to refine and extend their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences is through repeated opportunities to read. If this position is correct, then much phonics instruction is overly subtle and probably unproductive’ (Anderson et al., 1985: 38).
Zero Phonics. This view claims that direct teaching is not necessary or even helpful. I am unaware of any professional who holds this position.
Despite the story being sold by the media, the two passages above suggest that a cognitive scientist (“You teach them enough simple phonics patterns”) and a whole-language linguist (“Conscious knowledge of some basic rules”) are making strikingly similar claims about the role of phonics in reading acquisition.
Yet, even as some of the most aggressive “science of” reformers seem to be joining the backtracking, they persist in a false story about phonics and caricatures of whole language and balanced literacy (see Krashen above on “zero phonics”):
Decades of no phonics instruction never happened.
In fact, as literacy scholar Elena Aydarova explains, there is no empirical evidence for the multitude of claims made by the “science of reading” movement about reading proficiency or instruction [1]:
To my knowledge, there are no large scale studies that have empirical evidence that show us what is happening with reading instruction across the board in this highly inequitable and diverse system of US schools.
If we can trust Loewus’s article, and I think we mostly can, phonics instruction is not the only thing that has been oversold during the “science of reading” reform movement.
There is growing evidence that the movement itself would be better called the “science of anecdotes and metaphors”—ones that are somehow compelling and mostly false.
Note
[1] Thomas, P.L. (2024, November). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: For all ELA teachers, “the time is always now.” English Journal, 114(2), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114221
Thomas, P.L. (2024, September). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The media continue to misread teaching reading and literacy. English Journal, 114(1), 14-19. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114114
Thomas, P.L. (2024, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516
Thomas, P.L. (2024, March). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The long (and tedious) history of reading crisis. English Journal, 113(4), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113421
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