Duane Alexander

For years, America’s reading teachers were caught in a battle between two approaches: whole language, which emphasizes reading to children and presenting words in context to help their understanding; and phonics, which emphasizes the sounds and letters that make up words. Now, research supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is altering the field and offering teachers a scientific basis for teaching reading.

“The basic discovery from the program has probably been the concept of phonemic awareness, the concept that words are built of sounds,” said Duane F. Alexander, the institute’s director. “There are about 40 different phonemes in the English language. All words are put together from these sounds. Then comes the concept that these sounds are represented by letters or combinations of letters. The first is phonemic awareness. The second is phonics. They’re not the same.” For example, there are three phonemes in “cat”: kuh, ah, tuh.

Phonemic awareness is a key concept children need to learn before they can read. “Some kids just pick it up automatically,” said Alexander. “Others have to be taught.” The federally supported research has also demonstrated that even those who have difficulty with phonemic awareness can be taught to read if they are identified early and if remedial steps are taken in first and second grade. The research also shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, almost as many girls have difficulty learning to read as boys, but since they don’t act out in class, they often don’t get the remedial help they need.

Alexander, 58, grew up in Annapolis, Md., and enrolled in aeronautical engineering at Pennsylvania State University. “It was the Sputnik era and I was going to send rockets to the moon.” But he quickly learned he wanted more contact with people and switched to premed. At Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his medical degree, he specialized in pediatrics. He had been a camp counselor and enjoyed working with children. A 1968 training program at the National Institutes of Health hooked him on research, and he has worked at NIH since 1971. Alexander served on the staff of a national amniocentesis study and then was the physician on the staff of a national commission on protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research. He became NICHD director in 1986.

While at Penn State, Alexander was active in student government and played the tuba in the university’s Blue Band. He still returns to play with the band at homecoming festivities. He and his wife, Marianne, met at Penn State; she heads a consortium of women’s colleges that encourages students to prepare for careers in public service. The Alexanders have two children: Keith, 29, a doctoral student in history at the University of Maryland, and Kristin, 25, studying for a master’s in environmental education at Mankato State in Minnesota.

*

Question: Why, after all these years of focusing on reading, are so many children still unable to read and understand what they read?

Answer: We have been focusing on reading, but we haven’t necessarily been focusing on the right things. For the last 15 years or so, reading instruction has been dominated by the concept that children don’t need direct instruction to learn to read. They can just absorb it. . . . If you expose them to rich language in a context they can understand, a teacher need only to guide rather than instruct.

This is basically the whole-language approach that took hold in American education as a philosophy without a scientific base. That’s the way that much of the instruction has been delivered in schools these days, as not really instruction but guidance and exposure.

Q: And for some children that works?

A: Yes, some children seem to learn to read on their own. Some learn to read in spite of what we do in teaching them. The problem is that for about 60% of kids this doesn’t work. Reading is a bit of a struggle. For 20% to 30% of kids it’s a real struggle. It’s one of the hardest things they have to do in their whole educational experience, and they really need direct instruction in the basic processes of learning to read. . . .

What we’re starting to discover is that brain patterns are different among kids who learn to read easily and kids who don’t. . . . We’re also looking at those children who require special instruction before they receive the intervention and after to see what kind of changes we’re going to get in brain patterns. . . .

Q: Is there a test to predict who will have difficulty learning to read?

A: There have been tests available for many years that purport to identify reading readiness or predict kids who are going to have difficulty. But they have not been very good at it. Recently, investigators that we’ve supported doing longitudinal studies have developed tests that are able, in kindergarten, to identify with 85% accuracy those children who will read below the 20th percentile at the end of the second grade. So this is the first really accurate, predictive test for identifying these children. The test takes about 15 minutes to administer. It relies primarily on letter-naming skills, on identifying phonemic-awareness capabilities and rapid digit naming.

Through our small-business-innovation research grants program, we have made awards to investigators who have done the validation and commercialization of this test, so it’s available now commercially for schools to use for screening in kindergarten or for parents to buy and use themselves.

Q: Why is it that poor readers usually are identified in third grade?

A: There are several reasons. Again, the trend in education in recent years has been to say that if children are not reading and learning to read as we think they should in first and second grade, it’s because they’re not “developmentally ready” to learn to read, and we do harm by trying to instruct them in the basics of reading. . . . This is a flawed concept, and the research has demonstrated very clearly that that is the case. We lose these kids if we wait too long.

The second factor that’s been operating is with kids who actually have learning disabilities, and many manifest that disability with problems in learning to read. The problem is that . . . learning disability is diagnosed by a discrepancy between how well they should read based on their IQ and how well they’re actually reading. At grades one and two, these tests are not very good. They become much more precise and predictive by grade three.

Our studies that follow people over a long period of time demonstrate that failing to pick up these kids early is costly. The children we pick up early and offer intervention to were able to overcome the reading difficulties in most cases. If we don’t pick them up until third grade, 75% as young adults are going to have significant reading problems.

Q: Do you have any sense of why California’s fourth-graders had such a disastrous slide on their reading assessment tests a few years ago, and how significant is it that the state has now changed its approach?

A: A combination of factors may account for what happened with California’s reading scores. Clearly, California reduced its spending in education from the ‘80s to the ‘90s. There was a large influx of children into the schools for which English was not their primary language. So those both had some effect. But that cannot account for the size of the effect that we saw because, for example, 59% of fourth-graders showed little or no mastery of the skills that they should have in reading by that time. And this was the same across ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Forty-nine percent of kids in fourth grade who didn’t make the grade for reading were children whose parents had graduated from college. So that couldn’t account for it.

What did happen in California, above and beyond the other changes that I mentioned, was the change in education practices. California in 1987 adopted statewide a framework for reading instruction that emphasized literature-based methods only, whole-language methods, to the exclusion of a phonics-based or a decoding- and word-recognition-based system. These other approaches were not just frowned upon but literally banned from the schools. This was again based on a hypothesis without scientific testing or validation. This is in stark contrast to what we now know from our research, from the scientific data.

In the recent change, California’s framework for language-arts instruction has been modified so that it now incorporates the major concepts that have been learned through research in the last 10 to 15 years. At least in terms of its written policy, California is now emphasizing instructional procedures that focus on decoding or phonics approach, word recognition and fluency and comprehension instruction rather than just passive assimilation.

What happened here unfortunately doesn’t apply just to California but to many states: We got caught up in this battle between the either-or, either whole language or phonics, without giving real attention to what the key question is: For which children are which teaching approaches most beneficial at which stage in reading? Both concepts have something to offer; neither is sufficient in itself. Hopefully we can get to a point where we stop the wars, recognize the basic ways kids do learn and what they need to learn. Each approach has something to offer but has to be tailored to where a child is at a particular time.

Q: Why is difficulty learning to read a public-health problem?

A: We get asked that a lot, including by Congress. What’s NIH doing studying reading? Success in reading is a key to success in academics and a key to success in life. So much of what we do--all the rest of what we do in subject-matter areas, not just literature but in history, math, science--depends on our ability to read and comprehend what we read. If children do not gain that skill . . ., their academic future is handicapped, their future prospects for employment, for college, are limited. Our society is becoming more dependent on good reading skills as we become more technologically dependent, less a labor-oriented society and more a language-oriented society.

Beyond that, kids with reading difficulties are twice as likely to drop out of school as their normal-reading companions. Children who get into difficulty with the law, 50% to 70% have reading problems. The same goes for children who are into substance abuse: 50% to 70% can’t read. So it has an impact on the life course of kids in terms of their whole life achievement as well as their difficulties with the law and their whole achievement and performance in society. So it’s a much broader question than just academics, and one that has an impact on well-being of people.

Q: What has your research shown about preparing teachers to teach reading?

A: Teachers want very much to know how to teach reading effectively to their pupils in school. However, they feel unprepared in most cases as a result of the courses and training they’ve gotten. Much of this is a consequence of the recent movement of teachers as guides rather than instructors to reading. Our educational institutions have not done a good job of preparing teachers to be instructors in the classroom. . . .

We have taken the basic science of how children learn to read and created instructional materials for use in the classroom--games to play, materials to read for teaching single words and moving beyond that to sentences and stories.

We have had teachers who come to us after they’ve been through one of our instructional programs of in-service training that we’ve developed for teaching phonemic awareness and other concepts--teachers who’ve had 15 or 20 years in the classroom--come to us with tears in their eyes and say, “All these years I’ve been teaching, I haven’t known this. To think of all the kids I could have helped learn to read if I had just known this.” So the teachers are eager for the information. It has just not been made available to them. Now, we think we’re on the verge of having sound instructional materials, sound basis for curriculum for teaching teachers in our colleges as well as in-service training for teachers already in the classroom.