Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and endings. He is usually portrayed with a face looking backward and another gazing forward. It’s easy to see why the first month of the year is named after him; we all tend to look back on the previous year and peer ahead to what the new year might bring every January.
I’d like to start by looking back at my last column of 2022. I mentioned I hadn’t read a lot of books that were published in the last year in naming my book of the year. As I sent in that column, I finally got a copy of Fairy Tale, the new Stephen King novel. This is not really a horror book, especially by King standards, outside of some glowing zombie skeletons. It is exactly what its title says: a fairy tale. And it’s marvelous! Had I read it by the time I wrote that column, it would have easily leapfrogged up to #1 for new books.
Books and reading have been on my mind a lot lately, maybe more so than usual. A colleague suggested a new podcast for me. It is called “Sold a Story” and is six episodes long. The podcast focuses on research into the reading crisis we have here in America.
Didn’t know we have a reading crisis? Yes, and it’s been building for decades. My youngest sister, entering elementary school in the 1990s, was taught a very different style of reading instruction than the previous three Domeier children had received. Many of you remember phonics from your early years. You were taught how to sound out words and how the various combinations of letters made different sounds. It was a proven and effective method of teaching youngsters how to read.
But when Mandy got to school, a shift had occurred. At that point, whole language instruction became all the rage. This was a method of reading that taught children to guess what the word meant based on the other words around it, along with clues from pictures. While Mandy reads just fine, she struggled much more than the rest of us and admits that she is very unlikely to pick up a book for pleasure since it was so tough for her from the outset.
Many children experienced this. Whole language instruction had no research to support it, according to “Sold a Story.” Yet school districts grasped it as a new and trendy thing and have spent millions of dollars in the succeeding years on this form of teaching. The most well-known version and offshoot of this is from Fountas and Pinnell with their reading levels system, a program that intensive research has shown is, at best, a 50-50 shot at actually identifying a student’s reading ability.
So why did schools go away from phonics back then? The simple answer that has been reported through this research is that the new methods were more exciting. Phonics was too boring and kids didn’t like it as much. Whole language programs provided all kinds of books for kids to read in the classroom and was very
exciting compared to the worksheet method of phonics.
By that rationale, we should just chuck math right out the door. Goodbye, social studies. Neither of you is very exciting to most kids. Maybe if you had more pictures!
Seriously, this flabbergasts me. Educators had a system that was proven to work for many, many years. But something new and flashy, even if it wasn’t proven, was purchased to use in classrooms all over. Just stop and think about the logic here for a minute. If part of figuring out a new word is looking at pictures associated with the text, what will you do when pictures are no longer part of your reading? Right there should have been the first question.
Guessing at words? Sure, we all do that, but if you can sound out a word, you are much more likely to guess correctly. I point this out to my students all the time when I present the Word of the Day in my classroom. If they can recognize a part of the word, it helps in defining this one as long as you can sound out part of it. Recently, I used bibliopole and bibliophobe on consecutive days. Once they recognized that bibliohas something to do with books, they could learn the second word more easily since they could sound out the end part.
If you’ve read the news reports recently, all the national tests are showing that our students read at a lower level than ever before. Part of that has been produced by the pandemic, but these scores were decreasing even in 2019. Many schools have returned to phonics, but a lot of them still incorporate some form of reading levels without going all in on phonics, the one form of reading instruction that is proven to work.
So what does this have to do with looking forward? This is the time of year that schools should start looking at what the 2023-2024 school year might bring. Any school looking for new textbooks or programs starts the process in January; this gives adequate time to look over samples and determine what is best for the students. Sometimes you might even try some out on the current crop of kids. Back when we were searching for a new vocabulary program, I tried out a few different versions on my students; their feedback was important too.
I hope schools all over are looking closely at their reading programs and making sure they are using the research-based phonics programs to their fullest extent. Reading is the foundation for everything else we do in education; without good reading ability, there are struggles in so many other areas.
How do I know all this? As the old ad said, “Hooked on phonics worked for me!”
Word of the Week: This week’s word is bibliophobe, which means a person with an aversion to books, as in, “Due to not being taught phonics, my sister became a bibliophobe later in life.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!