A Lifetime of Lessons
Connie Juel, a leading researcher in the field of early literacy, knows firsthand the pain of having a learning disability--and the euphoria of bursting through it to join the ranks of readers.
Identified as dyslexic, Juel had her own “A-ha!” moment in a second-grade special education class in San Diego when she realized that she could finally discern the link between letters and sounds in words.
While working on her bachelor’s degree in Spanish at Stanford University, she taught elementary school in Redwood City for three years. After getting a master’s and a doctorate at Stanford, she launched research into literacy instruction.
Last summer she became a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education after 21 years as a researcher and professor at the University of Texas and the University of Virginia. This fall, she will take over as director of the Harvard Literacy Laboratory.
In her book-jammed office at Harvard, Juel, 50, chatted recently about some of her key findings.
Question: What did your research demonstrate?
Answer: [There was] a view of reading that the reader uses contextual information to predict upcoming words rather than the letters in words to identify them. That model, the “psycholinguistic guessing game,” was very prominent in the 1970s and ‘80s. [The theory was] you have some idea what you’re reading about and sample from the text only as you need to. What you would do is predict every word and look at maybe only the first letter to check that your prediction is correct. That model of predicting upcoming words was one of the forces behind the “whole language” movement.
However, we know that’s not how skilled readers read. . . . We know that skilled readers look at almost every word and, in fact, look at the letters within the words.
Q. How do children learn to read?
A. All kids use context and pictures, and that’s good at the very beginning. Once they actually know some letters and sounds, they look at a word more deeply and begin sounding it out. Children seek patterns within words and then start to know what some of those patterns are. After sounding out a word a couple of times, they don’t have to do that anymore.
Children start with consonants, the most dependable letter-sounds. Consonants are felt in the mouth. Kids often recognize words by consonants and begin to write with consonants. It turns out writing is an excellent way for teaching letter-sound relationships.
Children go through predictable stages in spelling words and in their writing. They might spell “grade” as “grd,” and the vowels come later. A kindergartner might write “mi” for “my.” The good thing is, it represents the word as having two sounds, and that’s the understanding we want.
Q. You had success working with college athletes as tutors. How did that come about?
A. When I was at the University of Texas at Austin, I was interested . . . in helping adults who were poor readers. I had a graduate student who was tutoring a child in special education at an elementary school. She was also tutoring [in reading] a university basketball player. One time he went with her to the elementary school, and her child bonded so with him that he became the tutor. It was magic.
Some of the athletes came in without sufficient reading skills. Those who were weak in vocabulary and reading comprehension were put in a yearlong reading skills course. It wasn’t as successful as they had hoped.
Our proposal was to try an experiment where the poorest of the poor in reading ability would tutor a 6-year-old child twice a week for 45 minutes in reading. They would tutor one-on-one at an all-minority elementary school in a crime-ridden, poor area. That, by the way, was also the background of most of the athletes. They would meet with me in an evening class once a week for two to three hours. The athletic department also bought a ton of books based on their interests and reading levels, and they would have to do four hours of outside reading a week. They kept a journal for me once a week.
The main activity that seemed to help their writing was to publish books for the children they were tutoring. The books usually starred their children as the heroes. Many of the athletes said it was the first time in their lives they had enjoyed writing.
Athletic department tests showed that the athletes in the program gained a lot more than the control group in vocabulary and reading comprehension.
Q. Were the athletes grateful?
A. They loved it. They loved helping the children. They also identified with them. I was working with them on story structure, asking questions such as: “Who are the characters? What’s the problem in the story?”
I came up with a book I thought they’d all know, “The Three Little Pigs.” Now, I asked my graduate class, “What’s the problem in this book?” They all said things like “to stay alive” or “to not get eaten.” But when I asked this group of student athletes, they immediately said, “to get food.” They identified with the wolf and with the problem of hunger! The children they were tutoring had the same reaction as the athletes. That was such an awakening to me.
Q. What was your own experience as a reader?
A. I was a particularly poor reader. I think that’s why I got interested in the subject. I grew up in San Diego in the era of Dick and Jane readers, and I had a heck of a time learning to read in school. . . . I was extremely embarrassed. They wanted to retain me at the end of first grade, but my father said: “No way. She’s smart.” So instead they put me in special ed for a short time. All of a sudden--I remember the day--I made the connection between letters and sounds, thanks to a teacher.
Q. You can literally remember the moment?
A. Yes. If you learned to read at a young age, you probably don’t remember it. If you had problems, you’re more likely to remember, which is why older poor readers can sometimes be very good teachers. They have a lot of empathy and patience.
Q. You have been studying the literacy development of 200 young children from a low-income area in the Southeast. What are your findings so far?
A. Oral language in preschool is very predictive of reading ability later on. It’s very predictive of phonemic awareness [the ability to break apart the overlapping sounds in a spoken word] in kindergarten, and phonemic awareness, as we know, is a predictor of learning to read in first grade.
We’re also seeing what a difference a kindergarten teacher can make . . . by constantly using vocabulary, by reading expository text, by comparing and contrasting. One teacher I observed, whose pupils had particularly strong gains in vocabulary in kindergarten, was reading a book that described different types of houses around the world. She said igloos were used by hunters in northern Canada. She showed Canada on a map. She also pointed to China, where other types of houses were. I was wondering whether the children were getting into this when a 5-year-old said: “Canada is a lot closer to the United States than China is.”
Q. In a study of first-graders, you’ve shown the value of instruction in word recognition for beginning readers. What have you seen?
A. When a child is having difficulty recognizing a word, how the teacher handles the problem can be very significant. The teacher who encourages the child to look beyond the initial consonant and to use the letter-sounds he knows is starting that child on the first step to pattern recognition of words. . . . If you don’t start looking into the word and noticing letters individually, you don’t keep them in memory. If you do, then you can begin to notice patterns and, after a few times, you’ll start to recognize them automatically.
Kids who went into first grade not knowing all the letters of the alphabet really depended on the teacher and a letter-by-letter decoding of phonics strategy. Children who came in with more skills benefited more from a “whole language” structure. The wide reading of rich texts and extensive development of knowledge and vocabulary is really where we want all our kids. You don’t want to drill kids after they already know it [phonics].
Q. What is a key lesson for educators?
A. Don’t treat all children the same. . . . To meet the different needs of individual children really requires a huge amount of knowledge from a teacher. There’s no way a teacher manual can supply all that. The teacher is the critical link.
“All of a sudden--I remember the day--I made the connection between letters and sounds, thanks to a teacher.”
“To meet the different needs of individual children really requires a huge amount of knowledge from a teacher.”
