In Teaching Reading,
Theory Abounds but Practice Falls Short

For some reason that completely baffles me, the question of how reading is taught is a philosophical one in Montgomery County.

To me, the questions regarding reading instruction are purely scientific: How do people learn to read? Is that process different for different people? What teaching methods are most effective for which people?

And, perhaps most important, how can we be confident that our findings are grounded in research as reliable as, say, that required to test a new treatment for pneumonia?

This kind of rigorous approach seems obvious. Yet the resistance to it is extraordinary.

For example, the people who have been studying reading at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development -- NICHD, part of the National Institutes of Health -- have demonstrated to a high degree of scientific confidence that to read well, people must understand which letters and letter combinations represent what sounds. In other words, phonics.

Phonics is certainly not the only thing people need to become good readers. They need to be able to hear the differences between words such as "shark" and "shock," and the similarities between words such as "bring" and "sing." They need sophisticated vocabularies. They need to know the magic and wonder of a good story. In other words, they need lots of reading experiences.

But phonics is one of the things they need. NICHD researchers have demonstrated that some children will never read fluently without instruction that lays out, sound by sound, how the English language looks in print, although some children intuitively learn the letter-sound relationships quickly and need little explicit instruction. In order to provide such instruction to children who do require it, teachers need a thorough understanding of phonics.

So we know these things about phonics with as much certainty as we can know anything about teaching and learning.

Montgomery County's reading program has not fully embraced this research, however. True, the county has incorporated the institute's research on building phonemic awareness -- that is, being able to hear the sounds of English -- into its instruction. And it has invited the chief researcher for NICHD, G. Reid Lyon, to speak to county teachers. It has even distributed the NICHD literature to teachers. But it has not assimilated that literature into instruction, it has not given teachers explicit phonics materials, and it discourages teachers from teaching phonics in a systematic way.

"Philosophically, we have not made a decision to use explicit phonics," said Sophie Kowzun, program supervisor of reading and language arts for the county's elementary schools, who was quick to add, "That does not mean that we don't embrace the teaching of phonics." As Kowzun said, "The controversy really is not whether you teach phonics but whether you teach it in an explicit model or a more embedded model."

By embedded, Kowzun means that teachers are alert to any errors a child might make as he or she is reading and use mini-lessons to fill in gaps. They might, for example, teach children who falter in reading the word "phone" that the letters "p" and "h" together are pronounced "f."

The problem is that there is no evidence that an embedded model of phonics instruction will enable most children to read, whereas there is considerable evidence that explicit phonics instruction does.

For that reason, using an embedded model is essentially a philosophical decision, not a scientific one.

It would be unfair to single out Montgomery County for having made this decision. Many professors, reading specialists and school systems across the country have done the same. And, as a result, we have become inured to the news that huge numbers of our children cannot read well.

We would never let a doctor in a public hospital get away with making a "philosophical" decision to sweat out pneumonia rather than treat it with antibiotics -- particularly after the people he was treating died of pneumonia.

And yet we continue to allow this philosophical decision on reading.

This is not because anyone wants children to fail at reading. Most of the county's reading teachers are working hard, saddened over every student who fails to learn to read. And the teachers are doing some of what constitutes good reading instruction. They read stories aloud, they play rhyming word games, they surround children with words and written material. All that is important.

But it is not enough, which is why more than a third of our children are not learning to read fluently -- as measured by county tests, state tests, national tests or just listening to kids read.

Lyon, chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the National Institutes of Health and one of the most influential people in the country on the issue of reading instruction, estimates that the prevalence of reading failure could be reduced to about 5 percent of children by using current knowledge about teaching methods.

"The issue is not only what to teach but how to teach," he said.

In a February column about reading ("Where We Stand," which can be found at www.aft.org), American Federation of Teachers President Sandra Feldman quoted first lady Laura Bush about her experiences as a second-grade teacher. "I had instruction in teaching reading, of course, but in practice I didn't really know how to teach a classroom of students to read," the first lady was quoted as saying. Feldman added, "As a former first-grade teacher, I know just how she felt."

They were not at fault, any more than current teachers who have not received the training that would let them know how to teach a classroom of students to read. But it is time to move past that period and make sure that teachers have the right training.

Without that expertise, other interventions will fail. This includes such efforts as Montgomery County's Reading Initiative, begun with great fanfare in the last full year of Superintendent Paul L. Vance's tenure and expanded under the current superintendent, Jerry D. Weast.

It was supposed to be the county's answer to reading failure. For 90 minutes a day, students are grouped in classes of about 15 for reading instruction. Teachers are provided with extensive training in how to assess exactly how children are progressing toward reading. But when the county studied the results of the program, it found, in October 2000, "limited evidence of overall improvement in student reading performance since the introduction of the Reading Initiative." (To see the report, go to www.mcps.k12.md.us/departments/dea/pdf/Reading_Yr-2_Study.pdf.)

Again, this is not because the people involved are failing to work hard. Nor does it mean that smaller class sizes are unimportant. It does mean that if teachers don't fully understand the latest research on what is needed to teach reading, smaller class sizes alone will not produce good results.

As one Reading Initiative teacher told me, "It's like saying, 'Teach math' without making sure the teacher knows the difference between adding and subtracting."

This teacher, who asked not to be identified, wrote that at a recent training session, teachers were given a booklet called "Put Reading First: the Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read," published by the National Institute for Literacy, which provides an excellent summary of the scientific research on reading. (To get a copy, phone 800-228-8813 or read it at www.nifl.gov/nifl/partnershipforreading/publications/PFRbooklet.html.)

"Not a single mention was made of this booklet during our training session, however," the teacher wrote. "In fact, several of the suggestions given during the training directly contradicted the research cited in the book. . . . We were instructed not to focus on trying to sound out words at this time, as this would only confuse the children."

Before long, Montgomery County will have to rethink its decision not to use explicit phonics instruction. New federal education legislation endorsed by President Bush and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) requires that jurisdictions demonstrate they are using "explicit and systematic" instruction of phonics in order to qualify for federal money.

In addition, schools that receive Title I money, which is geared to schools that serve poor children, will be able to use only programs proven to improve student achievement. So Montgomery County will have to make changes.

In the meantime, however, parents whose children are having trouble learning to read might want to get the NICHD publication listed above or the book "Straight Talk About Reading: How Parents Can Make a Difference During the Early Years," by Susan L. Hall and Louisa C. Moats with an introduction by G. Reid Lyon (Contemporary Books, 1998).

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