‘Breaking the Code’ Is Key to Reading, Experts Contend

Nora Newcombe’s son was in first grade, and she was in a state.

Andrew was a bright kid, but he just couldn’t read. A few months into the school year, he’d scored in the 24th percentile on a standardized reading test. His teacher said he needed to be in a class for children with learning disabilities. Andrew was getting frustrated and upset.

“He was like, ‘I’m stupid. I can’t do what the other kids do,’ ” Newcombe said.

As a parent, she was concerned. But as a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, she also had a little perspective on the situation.

First, she gave Andrew an IQ test. No problems there. Then she went to her son’s school and started asking questions: What exactly didn’t he understand? What was going on in class? How was Andrew learning to read?

It turned out Andrew was being taught whole language, a reading-instruction method that became popular in the 1980s and is widely used in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain.

Although proponents tout it as the best way by far to teach kids how to read, nearly a decade of scientific research and sad experience have shown it can be a miserable failure.

“It’s just been a real mess,” said Mark Seidenberg, a neuroscientist at USC, who calls whole language “a massive experiment.”

The whole language method has been blamed for educational disasters around the English-speaking world.

In California, where a recent backlash against the method led the state to revise its English language arts curriculum, opponents blame whole language for pulling the state’s reading scores to the bottom of the national barrel. In a recent national education assessment, California tied with Louisiana for last place in reading.

Whole language advocates and state officials say that the teaching method isn’t all bad, and that it was used as a scapegoat in California when budget cuts and bureaucratic mistakes were really to blame. But even if they’re right, the aftermath of California’s curriculum change and the recent popularity of whole language just about everywhere has led to a national cry for phonics, a return to the basic drills and Dick-and-Jane readers that most adults grew up with.

In Wisconsin, a candidate for state school superintendent recently made phonics part of his platform, calling it “the bedrock.” In North Carolina, the Legislature has appointed a committee to develop a more phonics-based curriculum. And in Tennessee, the conservative Eagle Forum is pushing a bill that would require phonics instruction in all classrooms.

Phonics is no silver bullet, however. Advocates note it almost always wins in head-to-head tests against other instructional methods, but they usually fail to mention that about one in four kids has trouble understanding it.

Meanwhile, as the partisans in the century-old debate bicker over the best way to teach reading, a combination of scientific results from widely different fields is showing how most kids learn to read and why many have trouble picking it up.

Most significantly, the research offers a reading instruction method based on evidence rather than ideology, politics or assumptions about learning and language.

If only somebody would listen.

“It really is a huge scientific eureka,” said Marilyn Adams, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We’ve been able to learn why reading is difficult for so many kids and how to make it learnable, but because of this stupid phonics-whole language debate, we can’t get it through to anybody.”

The secret isn’t exactly old-fashioned phonics, it isn’t whole language, and it isn’t quite a combination of the two: By teaching kids to “break the code” of reading, as if it were a skill such as playing the piano or swimming, educators hope they can teach reading a lot more effectively.

Phonics teaches kids to read by sounding out each letter in a written word. Thus “bag” becomes “buh, ah, guh,” and then “bag.”

That makes sense to somebody who already knows how to read. And eventually it makes sense to most kids too. But when researchers began trying to program computers to generate speech about a decade ago, they discovered something that seems obvious once you think about it: The word “bag” isn’t three sounds, it’s one.

“If you think you can hear the three letters in the word ‘bag,’ you’re wrong,” Adams said. “It’s one big ballistic utterance--bag.”

Advocates of the whole language approach address that problem with a little logic. They start by noting that kids learn spoken language spontaneously, just by being immersed in an environment where people are talking. So if you give them books to read, signs to look at and plenty of encouragement, they ought to learn reading the same way.

“When people learn to talk, nobody sits down with the baby and says, ‘Say ‘th,’ say ‘a,’ say ‘t,’ ” said Sharon Murphy, an education professor at York University in Canada and president of the group Whole Language Umbrella. “It seems that this is something that happens quite naturally.”

But linguists have known since the 1950s that spoken and written language are very different. Spoken language is an ancient trait evolutionally hard-wired into the brain, whereas written communication is a relatively recent cultural development.

For example, every human culture has a spoken language, but many never developed writing. And even in modern America, where the written word is unavoidable, 20 million adults can’t read.

“If the whole language movement is teaching that learning to read is natural, that’s bull,” said David Pesetsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When it became apparent in the late 1980s that large numbers of American children were having trouble reading, Congress commissioned a study of the problem. It fell to Adams, then a senior researcher at the University of Illinois Center for the Study of Reading, to write the report.

The result, “Beginning to Read,” summarizes the current knowledge about teaching children to read. Its basic message is that reading is a skill that must be learned through practice.

“Beginning reading behaves very much like an athletic activity or a physical skill, like walking or ice skating or swimming, where some kids just act like mermaids right when they jump in the pool,” Adams said.

But in reading, just as in swimming or ice skating or playing piano, most kids need systematic instruction that should foster something reading experts call phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is one of those skills that feels natural to people who have mastered it, such as riding a bicycle or getting on an escalator, but really isn’t. It’s the understanding that spoken language can be broken down into component sounds that then can be represented by strings of letters.

But in addition to phonemic awareness, kids also have to learn there’s a system to how words are spelled. Before they can read effectively, they must realize sounds can be represented in ways that don’t follow phonic rules, such as “ight” standing for the “ite” sound in most cases.

Cognitive neuroscientists, who model aspects of the human brain with computers, have gotten so good at their craft that they actually can design phonemically aware computer programs that learn how to read.

Reading experts estimate 20% to 40% of kids have problems taking that step. Imaging studies that show which parts of the brain are active during reading indicate some kids--the same ones who have trouble learning to read--really are wired differently.

“There are smart children who have this problem and there are fairly average or below-average students who do not have this problem,” said John Silber, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education.

But studies show that if they are recognized early and taught phonemic awareness, children who initially have trouble reading can learn the skill nearly as quickly as their peers.

That’s what happened for Andrew, whose mother began drilling him with a set of 130 words from the experimental Benchmark School in Media, Pa.

Andrew hated it, of course, because it was hard for him. But after he’d learned to sound out those carefully selected words, he was on the road to reading. By the end of the second grade, his reading scores had risen to the 84th percentile.