Education

Why Most Beginning Readers Are Taught To Guess At Words—And How That Holds Them Back


Many educators now accept the overwhelming evidence behind phonics instruction. But they often don’t realize that by simultaneously teaching children to guess at words, they may be doing damage that’s hard to reverse.

Last year, journalist Emily Hanford delved into the widespread misunderstanding in the education world about the best way to teach reading. Her radio documentary, Hard Words, revealed that schools of education were failing to equip teachers to use the method that cognitive scientists have found is most effective: systematic instruction in phonemic awareness (hearing the sounds that make up words) and phonics (matching those sounds to letters). The documentary sparked a surge of interest, along with expressions of frustration from teachers about the inadequacy of their training.

Now Hanford is back with an equally troubling new documentary called At a Loss for Words—released today—that shows the picture is even more complex. It’s not that teachers aren’t teaching phonics, she says. Given the overwhelming evidence, most have accepted the need. “You’d be hard pressed to find a school today that doesn’t do some kind of phonics instruction,” Hanford says in the documentary. “The question is, what else do schools teach?”

That “what else” amounts to teaching children to guess at words they don’t know. The typical approach is called “three-cueing.” It encourages children to use various clues to figure out words rather than to sound them out—to become, in effect, miniature versions of Sherlock Holmes. The theory, Hanford explains, is that instead of sounding out words, good readers rely on three basic strategies. They ask themselves whether the word is a noun, verb, or some other part of speech—a syntactic cue. Or they ask what word would make sense in context—a semantic cue. Or they look at what letter the word begins with—a grapho-phonemic cue. Three-cueing has teachers instruct beginning readers in some version of all three of these strategies.

The typical approach is to provide young children with picture books that include a lot of repetition—something like the classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Children can memorize the phrases that repeat and look at pictures for clues to words they don’t know. They may have learned some principles of phonics, but they don’t need to use them to figure out the words. In fact, many of the words in these “predictable” books don’t match up with the phonics rules that have already been taught, so kids basically have to guess.

Teachers may not see any problem in combining the three-cueing system with phonics. But, as one educator who used to combine the approaches says she eventually realized, “one negates the other.” Children who learn they should guess at words develop the habit of doing so. After all, it’s easier than sounding them out.

“I did lasting damage to these kids,” says another educator who used three-cueing but ultimately turned against it. “It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be, it was so hard to get them to slow down and sound a word out. Because they had had this experience of reading as being easy.”

Guessing may be easy in the short-term, but when kids try to tackle more sophisticated books—books that lack pictures and repetition—they’ll be at a serious disadvantage. Hanford interviews a woman who was never taught to sound out words but managed to get by in school, essentially by guessing. She was even admitted to a gifted and talented program. But when it came time to apply to college, she couldn’t read the passages on the college entrance exam within the allotted time. Now the mother of a first-grader, the woman was horrified to see that her daughter was being taught that “good readers” look at the first letter of a word and guess.

“Oh my God,” she thought, “those are my strategies.” She knew that wasn’t what good readers did. But the teachers at her daughter’s school said they were simply following the prescribed curriculum.

The theory behind the three-cueing system is that as readers become more skilled, they rely more on cues from context and less on sounding them out, or they simply recognize lots of words as though they were pictures. But thousands of studies have shown that the opposite is true: it’s less skilled readers who rely more on context. Skilled readers aren’t generally sounding words out as they read. But, as Hanford explains, that’s only because they’ve sounded out so many words repeatedly in the past.

Skilled readers can decode tens of thousands of words instantly thanks to a process called orthographic mapping. Essentially, that means that at some point they used phonics to decode the words and, after several repetitions, the words became “mapped” onto their memories, making it unnecessary to sound them out. But if you aren’t able to sound out words in the first place, you won’t experience that instantaneous recognition. Reading will become such a chore that you won’t have much brainpower left to focus on the meaning of a text. And you won’t be able to read with the fluency that enables comprehension. The three-cueing system, according to reading researcher David Kilpatrick, actually impedes the orthographic mapping process by drawing children’s attention away from what they need to do to trigger it.

It’s true that some children learn to decode well when taught with the three-cueing system—perhaps 40%, according to experts. But that’s not because the system is working. Essentially, Kilpatrick tells Hanford, those children are learning to read in spite of how they’re being taught.

Three-cueing is “ubiquitous in American schools,” Kilpatrick says, and getting rid of it won’t be easy. Schools of education don’t provide enough training in phonics to ensure that teachers feel comfortable using that approach; three-cueing looks less intimidating. And school districts across the country have sunk millions of dollars into curricula that incorporate three-cueing, despite the lack of evidence behind them.

“It feels like everyone’s trusting someone else to do their due diligence,” one frustrated educator tells Hanford. Teachers are trusting that the materials mandated by school districts will work. And district administrators are trusting that those materials wouldn’t be on the market if they didn’t work. It all suggests that we need something like the Food and Drug Administration to ensure that instructional materials are safe and effective.

In fact, we did have something like that, about fifteen years ago: a program called Reading First, which made some $4 billion in federal education grants conditional on the adoption of reading programs that had solid evidence behind them. It seemed to work, especially among the disadvantaged populations that have a disproportionate share of struggling readers. In Alabama, African-American 4th graders at Reading First schools made more than twice as much progress on a standardized reading test as African-American students at other schools, and some other states saw similar results.

But the program encountered fierce opposition, and it was terminated after a few years. Perhaps Hanford’s documentaries can spark a renewed and widespread recognition of the importance of systematic instruction in phonics—along with a recognition of the damage caused by teaching beginning readers to guess at words.

Phonics alone isn’t enough to turn children into skilled readers—to understand what they read, they also need to acquire broad knowledge and vocabulary. But if we don’t start providing all children with the skills to decode words, we’ll probably remain stuck in a situation where, as Hanford notes, most American high school graduates are still not proficient readers.



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.