1. The History of Reading

Response to Chapters 1  & 2

Notes

Chapter 1 Historical Foundations of Reading

(there will be an emphasis on historical, sociological, and theoretical foundations  of reading instruction)

Patterns repeat themselves as they bounce off of each other and are propelled back and forth

BC 20,000 Cave Paintings on Lacaux, France

3600-3,100 BC Record keeping in Summer using cuneiform seals

Mid 1700 BC Hieroglyphic writing

1,000 BC Laws of Ur-Nammu of Ur Mesopotatmia

2000 BC Phoenician alphabet only consonant sounds

850 BC The Iliad and the Odyssey (before the alphabet revision—they were verbal)

750 BC Greeks modify Phoenician alphabet adding vowels  

1100 AD Arabic numbers (maybe before and maybe from India)

600-1400 AD Illuminations

 

1446 AD Gutenburg movable type press 1st Bible to be type set

1600-1900 AD Reading instruction follows the two stage model first stage letter sounds; second stage meaning

1686 Church Law that common children should learn to read in order to ensure their salvation

1700s Hornbooks and schooling revolves around moral, ethical, and religious instruction, first materials were filled with religious ideas (Christian Taliban)

1731 Ben Franklin founds the first public library in colonies

 

1798 Blue Black Spellers http://books.google.com/books/about/The_American_Spelling_Book.html?id=x7EqAAAAMAAJ

1820s National Council of English Teachers founded

1914 First reading assessment William Gray

1920-1960 Reading viewed as a one stage process a de-emphasis on phonics

1941 Dick and James utilized “look and say” method

•             Controlled vocabulary
•             Round robin reading
•             Reading developed defined by oral reading primarily;writing-handwriting
•             Think and do work books
•             Behaviorism philosophy—sticker rewards
•             Teacher centered classroom

1950 National Reading conference founded

Why Johnny Can’t Read and What to do About it published pro

phonics 

IRA founded

1956 International Reading Association (IRA) founded 

1957 College Reading Association founded 

1960 Dick and Jane Readers still in use

 reading  instruction was level oriented, round robin with basal

readers was the norm

Mid to late 1970s Reading is more researched based

Emphasis on diagnosis/remediation medical model –whole language model highly criticized and proposed to be thrown out

1983 Nation at Risk

Late 1980s Reading wars –phonics v whole language  start to suggest balanced approach

1990 Marilyn Jager Adams publishes a book Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print points to necessity of phonological and phonemic awareness needed to read

Late 1990s Balanced approach comes into view and is accepted 

Mid-2000 Focus on individualized, differentiated instruction, meeting AYP, using eclectic, commonsense-balanced approaches to help each child succeed 

Text Notes (Historical, Theoretical. and Sociological Foundations of Reading in the United States --Jeanne B. Cobb & Mary K. Kallus 

Context

Throughout history those who are literate or who can read and write, record events have a higher social status. Civilization itself is defined partially through its ability to record events and items.  

History of Reading and Writing

The Earliest Foundations

Despite reading and writing being a marker for defining civilization it was around in the Paleolithic era

Logographic—a symbol that represents a word and languages change to a sound symbol alphabetic system was the progression or the change that took place as to make the skill of reading and writing more accessible to more people.

  

The Phoenician alphabet comes to us via the Greeks. When disease, invasion, and decline topple the Roman Empire, Western society takes form by focusing on Christianity and rebuilding. Education grew out of monasteries and later universities. Universities evolved and became institutions of scholasticism which use classical works to learn Latin, but upon closer inspection of the classical works first embrace them and after a while find their flaws and set out to make their own discoveries. Education first centered on the elite. Books were costly and labor consuming. With the inventions of the printing press, the rise of Protestantism and its emphasis on literacy reading and writing became more common among all. 

Reading had a religious flavor to it and the practical was also emphasized. Children were taught their gender roles as well as god’s expectations of them while learning to read. Class distinctions could also be found in the teaching of reading as write. Class was dependent upon gender and ethnicity. (remember Frederick Douglass ).

The Industrial Revolution (as well as the American and the French Revolutions) helped change the role and therefore the definition of Literacy. 

(Charity Schools were in place around the time of the American Revolution and were established to enrich the lives of poor children.) 

Education in Post-Civil War emphasized phonics, obedience, reading in wholes, prosody, but not comprehension as comprehension was taken for granted. It was an assembly line that produced a product.

Literacy is one of those processes that is always changing; it is a product/reflection the period it's in.

Chapter 2 Reading in the Twentieth Century by P. David Pearson  

The more I think of the title “The Reading Wars” the more misgivings I have. Wars are such that they are generally unnecessary and there are few winners and sometimes no winners. They are partly about greed and attrition, and they are partly about conserving and defense. It is unfortunate when the leading educators cannot see fit to come up with a plan-method-philosophy that will help educate our children and our future.

Reading instruction of the past century will be examined by breaking it into three periods and comparing the dominant materials used, the dominant pedagogical practices, role of the teacher, the role of the learner, and the underlying philosophy of the nature of reading and learning to read (Pearson, p. 14).

The Reading Scene at Last Turn of the Century 

Researchers/Policy makers Players? of pre-1900s

Horace Mann

Colonel Frances Parker

Noah Webster and his Blue Back Speller

McGuffey’s  Eclectic Readers

Dominant Pedagogical practices relevant to the time

Drill and Practice of isolated sounds and letters was on the way out.

Synthetic phonics –alphabetic approach learning the parts before the whole, initially learning letter names, letter sounds, then syllable blending activities that were taught in a rigid sequence. Once mastered children were then introduced to literature (adult literature) and the drill and practice continued into grammar and rhetoric.

Roles / Expectations:
The teacher was expected to provide the correct drill and practice while the student was expected complete the practices and the drills. 
Comprehension was not a end result of reading it was the expected byproduct of following the drill and practice exercises. The emphasis of this method was to read with fluency and even to read with elegance. Comprehension was thought to be byproduct of that prosody.

Vocabulary
(According to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words. The alphabetic principle is the foundation of any alphabetic writing system, which is one of the more common types of writing systems in use today.
Alphabetic writing systems that use an (in practice) almost perfectly phonemic orthography have a single letter for each individual speech sound and a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them. Such systems are used, for example, in the modern languages Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Hungarian and Turkish. Such languages have a straightforward spelling system, enabling a writer to predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation and similarly enabling a reader to predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Ancient languages with such almost perfectly phonemic writing systems include Avestic, Latin, Tamil, Vedic, and Sanskrit (Devanāgarī/Abugida, see also Vyakarana). On the other hand, French and English have a strong difference between sounds and symbols.
(Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetic_principle,  13-1-2013).

Use of reason and meaning –innovative language experience activities and integrated curriculum were only embraced by the few and practiced in the Lab Schools.

Developments in the First Third of the Century

Time Period 1900-1935

Early Reading Reforms

Words to Letters

Players

Mitford Mathew          (Idea or Curricular Construct: Word to Letters—whole to part with the  letter to sound correspondence or analytic phonics)

Idea: Words to reading—look-say or whole word method which had the child memorize some words and then learn phonics                                           Focused Analysis –did not analyze word to letter but had a group of words that

started with the same letter and noted the similarity between the words

George Farnham                     Meaning based approach  pictures that were matched to a sentence.

Other Influential Developments

Players

William S. Gray in 1914 pioneered Reading Performance tests oral

                                         silent reading was generally measured because (it was easier to do than oral

reading as it could be done as a group, without a teacher individually giving the

student an assessment and stop watch and multiple choice questions were what

was used and this was judged to be scientifically objective even though the test

shaped what was measured

This established testing as the psychometric measurement without acknowledging

its weaknesses and that learning is a process

Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Herbart

Text difficulty and readability—was child centered and had its roots in developmental psychology—its aim was to match children with texts that reflected their interests and their abilities. Readability was established by various and ever changing formulas whose criteria were generally based upon sentence difficulty (sentence length and word frequency).          

 

 Readiness—grounded in developmental psychology searched for behavioral precursors to show readiness for acquiring the reading skills. Such behaviors were:                                     

 alphabet knowledge, auditory discrimination, following directions, language

development, and sometimes kinesthetic and motor activities

(the best predictor was knowledge of the alphabet) 

Reading Skills curricular construct of skills taught by teachers and learned by students. Corresponding and related to reading skills is the notion of linear scope and skills that  if taught properly should . Brought about the Basal Reader which only grew and grew and grew. 

Remediation is a medical or psychological construct yet nonetheless has

influenced education. It starts in the late 1800s and peaks in the 1960s (yet is used frequently nowadays) and was our only approach until recently of meeting individual needs. This focus of diagnosis and prescription also fit well with skills, scope, and sequence approach.

Professional Consensus was always hoped for but usually not achieved. During the first third of the century child-centered approaches clashed with a synthetic phonics alphabetic approach; silent reading and comprehension were widely accepted; while reading readiness was debated by maturationist and interventionist, but comparatively speaking it was only the beginning of the reading wars.  

Developments at Mid-Century

1935-1960s saw a development and refinement of the prevailing principles of the 35 years before.

• Reading goals starting from grade one should include comprehension, interpretation, and application as well as word recognition.  
• Instruction begins with meaningful silent reading of short stories that are grounded in children’s lives

• 50-100 sight words should be learned and then analytic phonics instruction should commence which is one of many cueing systems children should use to unlock new words.

• Phonics lessons should be spread out over a few years instead of being concentrated  in the early grades

• Phonics lessons should be contextualized and not taught in isolation

• Early grades readers should be controlled for word frequency

• Children should demonstrate readiness before learning to read

• Children should be instructed in small groups

During this time period reading programs or basal readers are used, as well as teaching skills and worksheets for practice

 

Taking Stock: 2

Methods and Philosophy

Look Say (Sight words) or Whole Word approach or words to reading approach

Silent reading

Focus on comprehension, comprehension being the byproduct of decoding words into oral language and then being processed in the brain.

The Legacy of the Scholarship in the 1960s

Players                                                                        Results

Jeanne Chall (1967) study /book                                            Basal readers were not an effective way to teach reading

                          (Don’t we still use them?) 

Link to old reading texts

http://vcuhvlibrary.uhv.edu/studyguides/basal.htm (From

this I deduce that the Dick and Jane books were look and say basal readers.)

Recommends 5 changes: change method to an early emphasis on phonics, re-examine content and focus on folktales, reevaluate grade levels and challenge readers, develop new tests (for single skill and mastery), and improve reading research Government

Title 1 and National Right to Read

Taking Stock: 3

Little changed to redefine the role of teacher and the role of student the former was still the dispenser of knowledge and the former was the recipient of said knowledge. What did change was the return of phonics to the central focus of reading. 

 

Developments in the Last Third

Reading as the Province of Other scholarly Traditions

Linguistics (: the study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language)

Players                                                                        Results

Charles Fries publishes Linguistics and Reading proposed what reading instruction would look like if taught by a linguist. This perspective believed that some things did not need to be taught explicitly because we would learn some things orally (nabbed, capped, and jaded). 

Noam Chomsky published two treatises Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (1965)

                                                                                    Changes the way psychologists  thought about and studied the process of language comprehension and acquisition. Chomsky thought that humans are born wired to acquire the language that they are born into. Because Chomsky challenged views that were also assumed in reading it challenged long held and common view on reading.   

Psycholinguistics:  The study of the relationships between linguistic behavior and psychological processes, including the process of language acquisition.

Because of Noam Chomsky a field of psycholinguistics evolved.

Roger Brown rule-governed basis of language learning

Brown and his colleagues found that contrary to earlier beliefs children did not imitate written language, but were members of a language community and they created rules of how language worked. They conclude that children are ACTIVE LEARNERS who inferred rules and tested them out.

Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith

From the linguist and psycholinguistics thinking reading educators developed parallel thinking along the lines of nativist framework that proposed that children can learn to read and write naturally because they are part of a community that values reading and writing as a means of communication. What if we assumed that learning to read and write were having genuine reasons for communicating, and having so many that the mere exposure would teach them to read and write.   

Miscues are opportunities to view inner workings of mind and comprehension process

Goodman laid out what he thought were reading/meaning cueing systems: Syntactic (grammatical relationships in a sentence and their functions); semantic (general sense or meaning); and Grapho-phonemic the relationships between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (written symbols in language).

Language is self-correcting if one is aware of these cues. The awareness and the use promote self-sufficiency and independence.

Reading was not something that one was taught but that one learned to do (Smith, Understanding Reading, 1971). He felt that reading did not need to be taught but was the consequence or living in a literate society and making sense of one type of information. One learned to read from reading. Teacher’s role was not so much to teach but to help children read. He Felt that learning was a constructive process and one learned by connecting it with what they already know.  He even thought that perception was a decision making, predictive process based on what one already knew.

(We look for what is familiar. If we are creatures of consistency and wish to have stability the above statement makes sense. We look for what confirms our worldview. )

Smith felt that reading was incidentally visual, but that it relied upon cueing systems. These cueing systems reflected Goodman’s in syntactic, semantic, and visual but Smith added orthographic (pertaining to the use and nature of symbols in written language). In fact he felt that the over reliance on visual would slow down and could hinder the reader. The other three cues were part of the readers prior knowledge and were relied upon more when it came to making meaning.

Psycholinguistics influenced reading by valuing making meaning, valuing and paying attention to beginning reading texts, and their stressing of natural speech patterns.  Errors were viewed as miscues and were windows into the readers mind and how they make meaning, and lastly they gave us a constructionist model and a means decoding student’s thinking.  Reading as language rather than perception and behavior.

Most importantly psycholinguist helped shift teaching views. What needed to be taught and the relation between teaching and learning were major shifts as well as viewing teaching as helping the child to learn not making the child learn.    

Helped professionals to reexamine their assumptions about language learning and understanding by placing a greater emphasis on the active, intentional role of language users.

Cognitive psychology--a branch of psychology concerned with mental processes (as perception, thinking, learning, and memory) especially with respect to the internal events occurring between sensory stimulation and the overt expression of behavior—compare behaviorism http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/cognitive%20psychology

Cognitive psychology extended the constructs of human purpose, intention, motivation, including perception, attention, comprehension, learning, memory, and an executive control of all cognitive processes. This is a DRAMATIC switch from only observable behavior (behaviorism) to studying the how and why internal processes of how we learn. There was tension between the two camps (dialectical antagonists ).

Psychologist studied reading with abandon. One focus was on text comprehension and how readers comprehend stories and from that came story grammar, expository texts, but these were incomplete and from this hole in understanding comprehension came schema theory.

Schema Theory—is the theory about knowledge as it is represented in memory. It is how we group and categorize things in our memory, grouping things that are the same together. It is constructionist in nature and uses the reader’s views of the world along with their experiences to make meaning with the text.

It raised the intriguing question of where meaning resides, in the text, with the author, or with the reader. 

Players                                                                                    Results

Piaget schema theory is linked to accommodation and assimilation 

Frederic Bartlett explained the culturally driven interpretations of folk stories using schema theory (Because readers actively construct meaning of texts with prior or background knowledge their cultures provide background to relate and to construct meaning with.) 

Sociolinguistics-- Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics developed in conjunction with psycholinguistics. It redefined dialects not as crude variations of a pure language, but of a well-developed linguistic system in its own right. It did not represent a linguistic deficit but a linguistic difference. Teachers should not rid the student of their dialect but give accommodations.

Sociolinguists expanded the meaning of context from the words surrounding a particular word on a page to a social and cultural construction. That “right” was a reflection of our own perspective and it was relative. Sociolinguists showed that reading was immersed in many levels of context. The contexts were not just social and cultural, but are what teachers expect in school and how students interact with each other.



 



 

Players                                                                        Results

William Labov                                    The changing perspective of dialects being their own   language system

Joan Baratz                                         the changing perspective of dialects should be accommodated

Roger Shuy                                         It changed underlying attitudes of what is acceptable

Literary theory perspective 

Louise Rosenblatt                                           Reader response theory—reading is created through a transaction between the reader and the text 

 

The Pedagogical Correlates of New Perspectives

Comprehension on center stage

Literature based reading

A few things converge allowing this to happen. First Rosenblatt’s reader response theory reappears and is combined with constructivism which was emphasized by sociolinguists and cognitive psycholinguists. Next a study, Becoming a Nation of Readers (Center for the study of Reading, 1985) that stresses the importance of just reading was published which also coincided with the appearance of a never before seen number of children’s books, and lastly Nancy Atwell’s book In the Middle ().

1988 the California Reading Framework policy was enacted which caused reading levels to become more challenging, mandated genuine literature be used, replaced comprehension questions with interpretive and impressionistic authentic responses to literature. This was done to help motivate students to learn to read and again to provide them with a more authentic experience that was student lead.

Integrated instruction

Reading was integrated into other curriculum, to varying degrees, and was integrated into the Language Arts curriculum (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). Here writing was big and helping students to read like a writer was the ticket.

Player

Donald Holdaway

Whole Language

By far, whole language is the most far reaching of comprehension, literature-based reading, process writing, and integrated instruction. Philosophically it leans toward the radical constructivist epistemology and is child centered and curricularly it works with authentic activity and integrates language arts with other subjects. Its implementation was to be on a classroom level, was anti basal, and was brief. Skills, such as phonics was placed on the back burner.
 

Taking Stock

Whole Language teachers are the facilitators not the talking head. They observe children and then decide what they (the children) need. Children are decision makers too deciding what to read and write. Assignments are authentic and support the learning needs of the student, materials are those of life—magazines, books, nowadays that would mean texts, internet blogs, articles, and the like skills and strategies, when taught are in “mini-lessons.” Reading is viewed as a meaning making process not a perceptual process. The reader is an active participant.

The Demise of Whole Language

Unintended curricular consequences because many moderate instructors didn’t support the changes and without support it was doomed to failure.

The de-emphasis of skills instruction, strategy instruction, an emphasis on text structure and reading in the content areas, questionable application,

 Skills were never thought to be not worth the learning, but were to be taught on the fly and on a needs based basis. This put in questions if the skill, strategies and such were taught at all. The question of beginning reading would be answered by the use of empirical studies instead of rhetoric

Growing dissatisfaction with extreme positions

Changing research ideology (quantitative v qualitative)

Politicization of the reading research and policy agenda

Producing measurable results 
 
 

         

(Aside)   The irony here overwhelming. If an effective teacher is the greatest indicator of successful learning then having a highly scripted teaching program seems to contradict this.

 

Looking Ahead: Will we Benefit from the Lessons of History?

I hope that we do benefit. That as educators we find common ground and recognize the teacher in each other. The time of demonization should be over. Teachers need to recognize the good in each other and tolerate each other’s differences. With this united front there is a possibility then to learn and put the lessons of the swinging pendulum in place keeping an open mind. 

(Aside) Throughout the last approximately 130 years reading education has swung between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Both are needed and necessary for today's workers, but as for today's individuals intrinsic motivation to read multiple texts, be a life long learner, and a participant in today's world is the more important. During the Renaissance learning the classics was thought to make you a better person. Let us hope to apply that same belief to reading education today.  To awaken the meaning maker within each learner and give them a sense of agency are two of the lessons I take from the first two chapters of our text.